Anthony Porter looked around the cinder-block storage room at piles of clothes other inmates at Cook County Jail had left behind.
After spending 15 years and 5 months on Death Row for a double murder he didn’t commit, the 44-year-old Porter chose an inconspicuous black shirt, black jeans, a black Atlanta Falcons cap and white sneakers. A jail guard offered him a Velcro wallet and a couple of CTA tokens.
As TV crews and a news helicopter prepared to record Porter’s release, one of his attorneys volunteered a last bit of advice. “The second you turn that corner,” she said, “your life is going to change.”
The crowd cheered as he approached, a symbol of injustice in the mounting debate over the death penalty in Illinois.
Behind Porter was the world he knew best–cramped cells, scheduled meals, prison jumpsuits and push-ups on a concrete floor. Before him was a world of freedom in which clashing forces of fame, greed, love and politics were about to exact their own price.
Climbing into a black sedan to be whisked down the Dan Ryan Expressway to his mother’s apartment, Porter beamed. “I’m ready for everything,” he said that day in February.
But during the last five months, his hopes have faded. He has already spent a night in jail on a domestic battery charge. Stuck in his old neighborhood, he has no job and little money. Boredom, depression and despair once again shadow his life.
Like 11 other men set free from Death Row in Illinois since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977, he receives no state counseling or monitoring–services mandated for those who are paroled or placed on probation.
For Porter, a handful of ordinary people have stepped in. Some have tried mightily to help him, others have sought to exploit the spectacle of Porter’s odyssey for their own gain, and some have done both. Each has a different vision for his new life. Sign a movie deal. Stay out of trouble. Spread God’s word. Get rich. Get romantic. Get political.
He lives in a prison of a different sort, confined by his lack of education, his dependence on others and his bleak past.
“I am disappointed,” Porter says. “All I wanted was to get home. Then I got to go home. I feel like I’m going through the same thing as before. . . . Everybody keeps coming at me. I just want to get a life.”
Porter is sitting in a car on South Indiana Avenue, eating a Checker’s hamburger. He chews fast, holding his gaze on the food as though it might get away. Porter’s arms are sculpted with muscle from his prison workouts, his hands thick. In the months since he was released, the curve of his belly has begun to press against his shirt.
His friends are gathered around, too, watching other cars cruise by this three-lane, one-way stretch in front of Porter’s apartment. A car with tinted windows screeches up, slams to a stop at the curb. Porter’s friends watch for a moment, wondering if this may mean trouble, but the car speeds off.
Porter is talking about Death Row, how he would see John Wayne Gacy, but steered clear of him. How the guards were racist, and tried to break the inmates, physically and mentally.
“I was behind a big vault. Like a big iron door. Like BOOM! Like that, you know what I’m saying, top to bottom . . .
“They just like stomped Anthony all the way down–like boom, boom, boom, they don’t want Anthony to get up,” he says, gulping orange pop. “But look at me now.”
Porter’s days blur monotonously. He sleeps late. He dresses methodically, sporting a showy wardrobe of two-tone tassled loafers, silky shirts and straw hats.
When he’s not in front of the house, Porter sits on the couch of his mother’s apartment, where he lives. A TV drones with Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Oprah. Friends visit. Someone gets takeout. He naps.
Porter’s best friend, Charles Pough, drops by nearly every day. Pough, known as Baby Charles, also serves as Porter’s adviser, bodyguard and chauffeur. The two men often dress in sync–one all in black with a white hat, the other all in white but for a black hat.
“I try to keep him out of trouble. . . . There are a lot of crazy people out there,” says Pough, who favors wraparound shades. Pough has had his own run-ins; he has been convicted of burglary and possession of crack cocaine. Though Pough drives Porter everywhere, the secretary of state’s office says he hasn’t had a valid Illinois driver’s license since the early 1980s.
Porter’s only sister, Debra, a nurse who works the overnight shift, also says she wants to keep Porter out of trouble. One girl among eight brothers, she helps Porter with his banking and his mail.
She has devised a method to grab her brother’s attention. She stands before him, reaches her small hands around each of his shoulders, stares up into his eyes and speaks forcefully: “I need to talk to you. Alone. Now. Over here.”
“It’s the only thing that works,” she says.
Like his moods, Porter’s ambitions shift from day to day. He wants to help in a soup line. He wants to go to Disneyland. He wants to open a community center for troubled kids.
He asks strangers for help finding work. But he has turned down one construction job that would have paid $50,000 a year. “I’m trying to still get myself together,” he says. “I’m still in the same place. I’m still going through things.”
Porter has signed up for free tutoring, three afternoons a week, at Kennedy-King College, but the school will not talk about his progress. Porter says he regularly attends the public speaking, reading and math classes, calling them “marvelous.” But other days he is less enthusiastic. “I can’t go to school,” he says. “I can’t deal with it.”
Porter says his one definite goal is getting out of his neighborhood near Washington Park. He wants a home on a street with big lawns and friendly neighbors.
“If God let me get away from around here, my mind could open up,” Porter says. “It’s like you’re trapped.”
But he can’t get there without money, which, in Porter’s view, should come from the state, prosecutors and police.
“They owe me,” he says. “Give me something so I can get my family out of here.”
The state has yet to provide restitution through its Court of Claims–Porter’s eligible for up to about $140,000–and it’s unclear when he might get any money and how much it will be. Porter, though, has received between $10,000 and $20,000 in contributions from individuals, according to his lawyer, Daniel Sanders.
Lately, the Porter family has bought some new items: a used Chevy van, a TV, a framed print of roses and butterflies with a message from Anthony to Clara Porter: “I love you, Mom.”
No picture can cover up the dilapidated state of Mrs. Porter’s apartment–the golf ball-size hole in the door, the basketball-size hole in the ceiling, or the phone numbers scrawled in pencil on the living room wall.
A constant stream of friends and relatives stops in, some crashing for the night on plastic-covered couches and tucking their folded clothes under sofa cushions for storage. The Green Line grinds past the living room window, past the tattered apartment buildings and vacant lots.
Porter has deep and painful roots in this community.
His school record was abysmal. He fell behind by two grades, then dropped out of DuSable High School before his junior year. In 1966, a school psychologist’s report on then-11-year-old Porter offered not a single word of hope. He had missed 38 school days out of 100. He was “hostile.”
He needed “urgent help, educationally and socially.”
Home offered no solutions. Clara Porter, records show, was raising her family alone, relying on public aid. The year Porter turned 16, his eldest brother, Larry, was shot to death by Chicago police after they said Larry robbed and beat a cabdriver.
From the time Anthony Porter turned 17 until he was sent to Death Row 10 years later, he was questioned for 26 different crimes, court records show. In most of the cases, including three for murder, Porter was sent home without being charged or the charges were later dropped. He was convicted of robbery, bail jumping and aggravated battery.
The stakes climbed in August 1982 when police questioned Porter about a double homicide in Washington Park. A police lineup photo from that night shows Porter, in turquoise high-top sneakers, beside four other men who are staring straight ahead. Porter’s eyes are fixed on the floor.
Despite his denials to police, a jury convicted Porter of murder, armed robbery, unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful restraint, and he was sent by a judge to Death Row.
Last September, with his lethal injection 50 hours away, concerns about Porter’s mental competence led officials to delay the execution. The psychologists couldn’t agree about whether Porter understood, as the law requires, that he was going to be put to death.
One intelligence test determined that Porter’s IQ was 51, in the range of mental retardation. But a couple of the psychologists concluded that Porter was purposely failing test questions and was faking mental illness to dodge execution.
Then, as a hearing was being conducted on Porter’s competence, a group of Northwestern University students helped track down another suspect, who admitted that he had committed the 1982 killings. Porter was freed, having spent a year in jail and more than 15 years on Death Row for the crime.
The question about his intellectual abilities never was resolved. Even his closest friends seem uncertain about the answer.
But among hundreds of opinions rendered by the experts, one seems to describe so many of his current relationships: “He is a lonely person with strong needs for closeness,” one neuropsychologist wrote. “. . . Such persons have more intense need experiences and tend to seek out relations with others and often become more vulnerable to the manipulations of others.”
A reluctant spokesman for a political cause
Porter wakes up, groggy and disoriented, in the second-to-last row of a chartered bus that has been rolling toward Philadelphia all night, through endless stretches of farmland, farther away from Chicago than Porter has ever been.
The air is rancid with sneaked cigarettes and sacks of homemade food that have spoiled overnight. In front of Porter are rows of tie-dyed activists and college students for whom Porter’s exoneration was a milestone in their crusade to abolish the death penalty. His case had helped prompt state agencies, including the state Supreme Court, to launch inquiries into Illinois’ Death Row, which has released as many inmates as it has executed over the past two decades.
The bus is bound for a massive rally on behalf of current Death Row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, who in 1982 was convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer. Porter, a featured speaker at “Millions for Mumia,” has been allowed to bring along a dozen friends and relatives.
For all the high expectations, this hasn’t been much of a getaway. Sleeping while sitting up was hard; Porter slipped into dreams about old bus rides, shackled at his feet, between prisons, he said. He has brought luggage with extra clothes, and was expecting a shower on the bus.
When the bus pulls in after 16 hours, most people go straight to Philadelphia’s City Hall, where thousands already are gathering. Porter is taken to a $130 hotel room, arranged and donated at the last minute by one of the protesters, where he showers. Tracy Thomas, a tall, striking young woman who keeps him company on this trip, brushes out Porter’s hair while he watches HBO, shirtless, from the edge of bed. He pulls on a hooded black warm-up suit.
At the rally, Porter climbs on stage, where he is seated in the dignitaries section. He has practiced his speech earlier this morning, reading notes from a yellow pad. But the other speeches–by activists and street poets, mostly– are running long.
Porter’s eyes narrow with impatience and panic and rage. Suddenly, he runs off the stage and down the stairs.
The anti-death penalty activist who has brought Porter here chases him and begs him to return.
“You are a miracle,” Joan Parkin screams over the speech that is still blaring from the stage. “You are going to be great. You are going to go back up there now. And you are going to talk next.”
Frowning, Porter climbs back on the stage and waits again for his turn.
“Free Mumia,” Porter starts, stumbling over the rest of the famed inmate’s name.
“Free Mumia,” he tries again. “I spent 17 years on Death Row. I was on Death Row for something I didn’t do. An innocent man. Twenty-three hours a day in a box. . . . Look at me. I’m a witness.”
Parkin, a leader in the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, met Porter the night he was released from jail. She handed him a pink-and-black Abolish the Death Penalty T-shirt and a cake, frosted with the words “Lucky 10,” since Porter was the 10th man to be released from the state’s Death Row. Two more have followed since. Parkin ate dinner with Porter’s family at an Old Country Buffet on the South Side. She often stopped by his mother’s apartment to talk to him.
“We had a connection,” she says. “I consider him an intelligent, thinking human being.”
Parkin, a 39-year-old socialist, has chained herself to the James R. Thompson Center, marched on City Hall, shuttled to state prisons to meet with other Death Row inmates and encouraged Porter to speak at half a dozen other rallies and community meetings.
“He is a vision of hope,” Parkin says. “There has never been a case like this. He’s got a message and it’s a terribly important message. No one is Anthony Porter, and no one ever will be. . . . We may stop the death penalty in Illinois because of Anthony Porter.”
Parkin acknowledges that her main interest in Porter is his value to the goal of abolishing capital punishment. “He may not get it,” she says. “But you know what, I don’t know if it matters if he gets it.”
In 1973, nine people, including relatives of Parkin’s, were bound and held hostage by two men in Lodi, Calif. Her father’s uncle turned over $4,000 from the family safe before the men shot and killed everyone in the house, including a 9-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl who were cowering under their bedsheets.
Last year, one of the men was executed. Parkin opposed it.
Now, she is behind on her rent and nearly broke. Assistant national coordinator of her grass-roots organization, she has spent her $12,000-a-year salary copying leaflets and placing cellular phone calls to arrange rallies.
Usually Parkin passes a hat to collect donations for Porter–she has given him about $3,000 already– but after his speech in Philadelphia, Parkin refuses. She opts to raise cash for legal appeals for current Death Row inmates.
Porter presses her. ” `I know you’ll take care of me, Boo,’ ” Parkin recalls him saying. Then, she says, Porter left without a goodbye.
He will find his role in the cause, she says, when he recognizes that she cannot be his family’s “personal ATM machine.” She believes that somewhere inside, Porter understands the need to speak out about the injustices of Death Row.
“He’s got to just wake up and see that it’s not just about Anthony Porter,” Parkin says. “You take someone like that, generational poverty, no influence of any ideas or anything. You throw them in jail for 17 years for a crime they didn’t commit, and then you put them back into the same neighborhood that they were living in and offer no services, and this is what you’ve got. You’ve got Anthony Porter.”
Feeling besieged and craving a little peace of mind
On the ride back to Chicago, the caravan of buses pulls over at a truck stop near Breezewood, Pa., just before midnight.
A war has been brewing the past 60 miles. Tracy Thomas is furious at Porter, accusing him of flirting with another woman. If he doesn’t cut it out, Thomas warns, she is going to walk off the bus.
The other woman, Porter assures her, is just an old family friend, but Thomas doesn’t believe him.
In February, Thomas had watched, intrigued, as Porter made his dramatic return to their neighborhood, she said. The next day, Thomas dropped by and offered a shy sentence of congratulations. After that, she said, she became his girlfriend.
Thomas, 25, is one of several women who have gravitated to Porter since he found a bittersweet fame. Among them are Gladys Ruttley, the Kentucky woman who for weeks introduced herself as Porter’s fiance and tucked her hand in the bend of his elbow as they walked; Carlia Perkins, an ex-girlfriend who is the mother of three of his six children; and Linda Porter, the devoutly Christian woman he married almost three years ago while in prison.
Porter says he has been faithful to his wife. Of all the other women, he shrugs. “I guess they see dollar signs in their eyes.”
In the Breezewood parking lot, arguing with Tracy Thomas, Porter finally explodes at her.
“Anthony Porter wants to be left in peace, thank you very much,” Porter announces as he stands, surrounded by his best friend and three of his grown children.
“I gave you food, right? Money, things and clothes. They’re yours.”
With that, Porter climbs back onto the bus, still eating his dinner from a Styrofoam tray. His relatives are just behind.
Later that night, at another truck stop, Thomas wants to hand Porter a greeting card. “From Tracy,” she has written in curvy script on the envelope. Inside, the greeting card shows the image of a man and a woman in a passionate embrace. “I Love You” is pre-printed inside.
Thomas plans to give it to Porter when he is alone, but he almost never is and she doesn’t get a chance.
She is confident Porter will come back to her eventually. She smiles, her eyebrows rising over her sunglasses. “Just wait and see. Just wait. I know what he wants. He wants me.”
Attending church with a God-fearing woman
Linda Porter shakes her head as she looks down the long, darkened hallway inside Clara Porter’s apartment. It’s Palm Sunday morning, and her husband is still behind a far door, grooming himself in the bathroom.
As usual, he is late for church.
“The Lord don’t be late for us, so we shouldn’t be late for the Lord,” Linda Porter says, her “I (heart) Jesus” scarf carefully knotted over her dress.
For Linda Porter, 36, God comes first. She says she had a calling at age 10 to minister to others. She goes to a variety of churches where her favorite pastor preaches. Linda Porter wants to become a pastor herself.
Her husband is destined to spread the word, too, she says. “I don’t think so. I know so. . . . God called on him to preach. God says so. When you see him up there, you’re going to say, `Hmmm, his wife sure said that.’ “
Linda Porter says she is unconcerned about the other women in her husband’s life. Sometimes she stays with Anthony at his mother’s house, and she has seen some of the women who covet her husband’s affections.
“I don’t worry about it because I’ve got God on my side,” Linda Porter says. “He let me know: just hang in there and be patient. It’s in the process and God is moving. Like I said, I’m standing in the gap. I’m standing in the gap for my husband.”
Years ago, the pair met over the telephone while he was on Death Row. Soon, she was making regular visits, with her young child from a previous relationship in tow.
She drove 450 miles round trip. He was shackled at the waist as they talked in the visiting room. “When I met my husband, I seen stars,” Linda Porter says. “The Lord showed me my husband.”
On Dec. 21, 1996, at Menard Correctional Center, Linda wore a white knee-length dress, covered in sequins, to wed Porter, whose Death Row sentence made it next to impossible that he would ever join his bride outside of prison.
Now, Linda Porter says they’ll be together to their final days. If God will have it, they’ll have children together, she says. She hopes they will renew their vows inside a church.
When Porter is with Linda, he showers her with affection, playfully kissing his wife on the lips in front of visitors. “That’s my baby,” he says, turning to her again. “I love you.”
Linda regularly accompanies him to Sunday services at the Apostolic Assembly of the Lord Jesus Christ. On a recent Sunday, Linda Porter rises from a pew, lifts one arm in the air, and begins to weep as Bishop Jerry L. Jones delivers his sermon. A drum accentuates his words.
Anthony Porter stands beside her, tucking a comforting arm around her shoulder.
The bishop’s message today is simple. Don’t rely on other human beings. Depend on God. He is the one, Jones intones, the only one whom you can count on.
Courted by Hollywood, waiting for a windfall
John Ketcham, a tanned 37-year-old Hollywood producer in a sports jacket, doesn’t seem distracted by the smell of urine in the lobby or the words carved in the walls as he climbs the stairs to Clara Porter’s apartment. His rented Cadillac is parked outside.
It’s another Sunday, and Porter, his wife and Pough, all dressed in their finest, are pulling up to the curb from church.
Inside, Anthony Porter awkwardly shakes hands with Ketcham, who takes a seat on an edge of the couch. Pough and Linda Porter sit silently beside him. They tuck Ketcham’s business card into the leather pouch that holds Porter’s appointment book and the phone numbers people hand him.
Ketcham, who has just finished a feature film about exonerated Death Row inmate Rubin “Hurricane” Carter starring Denzel Washington, wants Porter to consider giving him the TV rights to his story.
Porter tells Ketcham he wants the facts told right, that he’s got other offers, including one from a famous director. Porter doesn’t want to commit to anything yet. In 10 minutes, the meeting is over.
Back in L.A., Ketcham considers the meeting a success.
“Anthony seems genuinely thrilled to be living in the real world,” he says.
So far, despite flirtations with Hollywood agents and producers, and despite the interest shown by one of his attorneys in writing a book, no money has come Porter’s way.
Among Porter’s family and friends, though, there is a standing assumption that Porter will soon be rich–from a book deal or a movie deal or a lawsuit. He should be, they say, for the years he wasted. They cite the Ford Heights Four–former inmates who reached a $36 million settlement for wrongful imprisonment.
They joke about wealth. Walking down a street one day, Porter and Pough pass a Lexus. Pough points it out to Porter. “There’s our next one!” Both men chuckle.
But Porter seems destined to wait.
In the aftermath of Porter’s release, Gov. George Ryan, a lifelong supporter of capital punishment, expressed sympathy for Porter and other former Death Row inmates, saying the state should do more for them.
Ryan spokesman David Urbanek said last week that the governor is still “in the discussion stage” with Department of Corrections officials over ways to help exonerated prisoners get assistance from state agencies that handle human services, education and employment training. “We’re working on it,” Urbanek said.
In Porter’s case, Urbanek said, Ryan already has done what he can by officially pardoning Porter to speed up restitution payments.
But that may not be enough. When Porter was exonerated in the double homicide, prosecutors did not dismiss three other convictions against him from that same night, charges that carried 30-year terms for unlawful use of a weapon, armed robbery and unlawful restraint.
Prosecutors, citing eyewitness accounts, say there is still evidence Porter committed those crimes. If the convictions stand, it likely will mean less money for Porter from the state Court of Claims, which bases restitution awards on how many years an inmate was wrongly imprisoned.
It also could affect how much Porter might get in a civil suit against authorities who charged him with murder. State prosecutors could argue that Porter should have been spared time on Death Row but that he would have been in prison anyway.
Sanders, Porter’s attorney, has launched a legal effort to have the convictions dismissed. During a hearing on that issue earlier this month, the judge looked at Porter and professed a vague recollection. Had Porter appeared in his courtroom before?
Sanders suggested that the judge might have seen Porter on TV or in the newspaper.
“Oh, that’s right,” the judge said, laughing. “He’s a celebrity.”
Porter laughed too. Then he got in the van, and Pough drove him back to South Indiana Avenue.
Facing a new trial and an uncertain future
Once more, Anthony Porter is standing before a judge.
His long-ago girlfriend, Carlia Perkins, and their eldest daughter, Evelyn Porter, have said he beat them. Porter, his lips parted slightly, watches in silence.
So many of the forces in his life are here, in the Domestic Violence Court on the seventh floor of a shabby building at 13th Street and Michigan Avenue.
They have come to wrestle over what will become of Porter. How to keep him out of jail, how to turn around this new chaos and find a future he had hoped for when he emerged from Death Row.
The cramped room is filled with families in trouble, but Porter’s group is bigger than the rest, louder than the others, and it draws curious gazes even from tearful spouses who came here to sort out their own lives. Porter’s life looks even more tangled.
Porter’s elderly mother, Clara, carefully powdered in rouge, sits stiffly in the gallery on this spring day. Beside her is Pough, his sunglasses on. Assorted relatives– Porter’s sister-in-law, a brother’s former girlfriend, a young nephew–fill two more rows.
Porter’s accusers are beside him, before the judge’s bench. Perkins, 44, is bouncing up on her toes, raising her hand and shaking her head. She is trying to tell the judge that she and her 28-year-old daughter have changed their minds about pressing charges. A bailiff shushes her.
Despite the women’s objections, prosecutors will go forward with two misdemeanor domestic battery charges against Porter. The women’s first descriptions of the March 21 incident, a spokesman for the state’s attorney’s office explained later, was of “a sustained and rough attack on two women.” Porter, who denies the allegations, is set to be tried next month, and could return to jail if convicted.
“We don’t want it,” Perkins says, as she marches from the courtroom and slams the door. “We’re trying to make our lives move on and the state’s attorney won’t let us.” Evelyn Porter erupts in tears.
In the hallway, Porter’s entourage gathers around him. He says he doesn’t understand why the case is going forward.
Members of his group issue more advice, more instructions: demand to know why his attorney didn’t fight this more vigorously; keep your distance from the two women; don’t speak to them; don’t even look at them.
The two women are lingering nearby. Perkins, dressed in an old “Free Anthony Porter: End the Death Penalty” T-shirt, reaches over to touch Porter’s arm.
Porter frowns but doesn’t move. He looks around, then turns his eyes to an empty spot on the floor, where he might find some peace.
