DECATUR - Randy Steidl said his life will never be the same after spending 17 years in prison - 12 of those on death row - for a murder he did not commit.
He struggles to find full-time employment, to catch up with all the technological advances he missed and to make up for watching his children "grow up in pictures."
But at least he still has a life.
"You can release an innocent man from prison," Steidl said to conclude his talk on the campus of Millikin University. "You cannot release an innocent man from his grave."
Steidl, 59, of Charleston was one of two speakers who appeared Monday evening in Kaeuper Hall of the Perkinson Music Center as part of a tour stop organized by the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and co-sponsored by Macon Citizens Opposed to Capital Punishment.
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Liz Moran, a coalition organizer, urged the more than 100 people in attendance to fill out postcards, make telephone calls, send e-mails and/or participate in rallies Nov. 16 and 29 at the Illinois Capitol urging state leaders to do away with capital punishment.
In introducing Steidl, Moran said he is one of 20 death row exonerees in Illinois and that 15 people are currently serving on death row even though a decade-long moratorium on carrying out death sentences remains in effect.
Steidl was convicted in the July 5, 1986, stabbing deaths of Dyke and Karen Rhoads of Paris but was finally released from Danville Correctional Center in 2004 after two eyewitnesses recanted.
Opponents of capital punishment argue not only that having a death penalty risks executing the innocent but that it also costs millions more than alternatives and fails to meet the needs of murder victims' families.
Gail Rice, 63, of Palos Heights underscored the latter two points and said the expensive appeals process in capital cases consumes resources that could be used to support survivors instead.
"The death penalty hurts rather than helps victims in so many ways," she said. "Survivors enter into an agonizing and lengthy process, reliving the murder over again with each new appeal or court decision."
Not even the shooting death of her younger brother on Nov. 12, 1997, could shake Rice's belief that it's wrong for the government to take a life. Bruce VanderJagt, a 47-year-old Denver police officer, was shot 10 times during an attempted burglary.
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