DURING THE summer of 1998, while George Ryan was still on the campaign trail, Stanley Howard and Aaron Patterson were discussing the Death Row 10. It wasn't easy. Howard and Patterson were prisoners on death row in Pontiac, Ill., spending 23 hours a day in their cramped cells--so yelling down the tiers was the main way to communicate.

The Death Row 10--which eventually numbered 13 when all its members were discovered--are a group of African American men who were tortured by Chicago police into making confessions that were used to send them to death row.

Howard was suffocated with a plastic typewriter cover while he was continuously beaten. Patterson was beaten, suffocated and threatened with a gun. Leroy Orange and Leonard Kidd were electro-shocked with a black box device attached to their genitals. Grayland Johnson was hung halfway out an open window.

The torture chambers, run by Lt. Jon Burge at Area 2 and 3 police headquarters on Chicago's South Side, weren't a secret. The department even forced Burge to resign because of the allegations in 1993--though only after a confidential internal report surfaced, detailing more than 50 cases of "systematic" torture by Burge and the animals that he commanded.

That Burge was kicked out was the result of a long struggle by anti-police brutality activists, begun in the early 1980s by mothers of torture victims. But Burge got to retire on a full police pension in Florida, spending his days on his fishing boat The Vigilante--while his victims remained behind bars. Though the cops' record of torture was an acknowledged fact, not a single one of the Death Row 10 won a new trial or sentencing hearing.

With questions about the death penalty system building, Howard contacted the Campaign to End the Death Penalty to be the voice of the Death Row 10 on the "outside." From death row, the prisoners called the first Death Row 10 rally for September 1998, making a leaflet with a typewriter and headlines cut out of the Campaign's New Abolitionist newsletter and Socialist Worker, among other publications.

Since then, Death Row 10 members have spoken out around the country--via speakerphone at "Live from Death Row" events organized by the Campaign and other organizations. In Chicago, activists organized petitioning and demonstrations to put pressure on the prosecutor, Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine, to look into the torture allegations.

But Devine has been desperate to head off an investigation. And no wonder--he was an assistant prosecutor when Burge's torturers were operating at full steam, and he later worked for a private law firm that defended Burge during the police investigation.

"[Burge] was certainly the ringleader of the torture," says Flint Taylor, a lawyer with the People's Law Office, who led the effort to expose Burge back in the 1980s. "But there were ringleaders of the cover-up, too."

The cases of the Death Row 10 began to gain media attention. But more generally, the torture issue showed how police and prosecutors grease the rails to the death chamber, whether to satisfy their sadism or to build up political reputations.

"The call had been going out for many years, and there was community interest, but there just wasn't a critical mass," Taylor says. But when Ryan declared a moratorium, the torture issue "came together at a time when the momentum was building with regard to the death penalty." Last April, a state appeals court judge appointed a special prosecutor to look into the Burge torture cases and the cover-up that followed.

And the struggle for the Death Row 10 that began with a typewritten leaflet made inside Pontiac prison plainly had a huge impact on Ryan. His pardons for death row prisoners went to four of the Death Row 10, and his speeches explaining his decision returned again and again to the torture chambers at Area 2 and 3 headquarters as an example of what's wrong with the death penalty system.

"Who knows if Governor Ryan would have even known about the Death Row 10 if not for the activism around these cases?" says Alice Kim, an organizer for the Campaign to End the Death Penalty