Corruption of the injustice system

I CONDUCTED the interviews for the well-put-together article "Living in hell for life", written by Marlene Martin.

I totally agree with the letter from Grace Dark Horse ("Thrown away by the system") who wrote about the parole system and how backwardly it operates, as she revealed with the frustrations in her letter.

As a juvenile who was tortured by a Chicago police detective to repeat a confession he told me, about a crime I did not commit, and was then sentenced to natural life without the possibility of parole some 27 years ago, I strongly sympathize with all of those who are victims of injustice at the hands of the police and our current system.

Men and women, families and friends, who are victims of the corruption within the system need to form groups and letter drives to fight the system more adequately. I believe that some parole boards all across this country have strongly exhibited egocentric and insensitive behavior toward many inmates who have done all that is possible to achieve their freedom.

One of the purposes of the article "Living in hell for life" was to draw attention to the fact that many juvenile offenders do not even have a parole opportunity. We need to come together and rally legislators and officials to implement parole boards for juveniles in states that do not have them, and to be impartial and release individuals who have value and have been rehabilitated back into society.

I strongly agree in some cases that parole hearings are a superficial process, in which decisions are made weeks in advance for political reasons.

In a nutshell, a natural life sentence in most cases is a secret death warrant--suffered with stress, strain and a lack of peace for the rest of one's life.