Exonerated:
Darby Tillis

In 1977, two men were murdered at a hot dog stand in the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago, IL. I heard rumors that police were looking for me. I voluntarily went to the police station to inquire about these rumors. A woman named Phyllis Santini had gone to the police with a story implicating Perry Cobb and me. When I got to the police station, I was offered a $5,000 reward to sign a false statement against 2 men that they were holding: Perry Cobb and Earl Grant. I did know anything about the crime, so I refused to sign the statement. When I refused, they threatened me with the death penalty. I was an easy target because I am black and at that time I was a pimp and a hustler. However, I was not a murderer.

It took three trials to convict and sentence my co-defendant and me to death. The first two trials resulted in hung juries. We were convicted and sentenced to death at the third trial by an all-white jury. The Illinois Supreme Court then reversed the case due to error by the trial judge. At this point, Rob Warden, founder of Chicago Lawyer Magazine, wrote an article about my case, citing it as another classic case of wrongful conviction, procured with no evidence and a shady eyewitness.

Darby Tillis
(photograph © Loren Santow)

My co-defendant, Perry Cobb, and I were tried more times than any other defendants in the history of the United States, but Johnny Brown and Phyllis Santini have never been charged.

Judge Maloney, the judge who tried me, is now serving a sentence of 15 years in prison for corruption on the bench.

I spent nine years of my life in prison, four of which were on death row. When you get the death penalty, most of us try to stand up and take it like a man. Then you get to death row. You're hit by the stench of Pinesol, feces, urine, body odor, sick odor. You are in the Death House.

During the years I spent on death row, I began to pray and read the Bible. My perspective on life was changed. My dungeon of hell turned into a prayer palace, where I learned to love and to appreciate life. The only thing that kept me sane was being able to live by the word of God.

After I was released, I slowly walked back into life. I am now 60 years old. I’m very sick. I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But I have learned to funnel my frustration into a productive fight against capital punishment. I became an ordained Protestant minister and established an outreach ministry called Friends to Strangers and an organization called WXOFM (Working with Ex-offenders, Offenders, and Family Members). Death row is a horrible shock, and the horror did not end when I was released. Former convicts come out into a society that doesn't understand us and rejects us. We're set up to return to prison by the state, and we're branded for life. So I formed a group to help former death-row inmates readjust to society.

In my first television interview, I was asked five times if I was angry. I wasn't angry. But now, after 15 years of watching the same thing happen to other men, I'm angry as hell.

Whether a death sentence is carried out in six minutes, six weeks or six years, the person set for death begins to suffer the most cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment. Death row is segregated from the rest of the general inmate prison population. You’re warehoused for death, treated like contaminated meat to be disposed of. You sit there and await death, and the pain you know will come to you one day.

Fourteen years after we were released, petitions brought by the Center on Wrongful Convictions and the MacArthur Justice Center prompted Governor George Ryan to grant my co-defendant and me pardons based on actual innocence.

Return to Death Row Page

Return to Home Page

©2003 Illinois Coalition to Abolish The Death Penalty