RONALD KITCHEN BIO
Ronald Kitchen was walking to buy cookies for his young son on a summer evening in 1988 when Chicago detectives picked him up for questioning. As the officers’ car headed toward the precinct, the twenty-two-year-old called out the window to his family, “I’ll be back in forty-five minutes.” It took him twenty-one years to make it home. Kitchen was beaten and tortured by Chicago’s notorious police commander Jon Burge, and his cronies, until finally confessing to a gruesome quintuple homicide he did not commit. Convicted of murder and sentenced to die, he spent the next two decades in prison—including a dozen years on death row—before at last winning his release and exoneration. Ronald Kitchen’s ordeal was not his alone. He was only one of scores of victims of Jon Burge and his notorious Midnight Crew, a group of rogue Chicago police detectives who spent decades terrorizing, brutalizing, and incarcerating men—more than 120 have come forward so far—in Chicago’s African American communities. During his years in jail, Kitchen co-founded the Death Row 10 from his maximum security cellblock. Together, these men fought to expose the grave injustices that led to their wrongful convictions. The Death Row 10 appeared on 60 Minutes, Nightline, Oprah, and Geraldo Rivera and, with the help of lawyers and activists, were instrumental in turning the tide against the death penalty in Illinois. Kitchen was finally exonerated in 2009 and won a high-profile lawsuit against the city of Chicago. "My Midnight Years" is the first book to be published about the Jon Burge scandal.
On May 22, 2023, I met with Illinois death row exoneree, Ronald Kitchen, at his new restaurant that he recently opened in Griffin, Indiana. He shared with me the extreme trauma that he experienced during the nearly two decades that passed during the time he sat on death row as an innocent man. His wrongful conviction was extremely traumatic in itself, yet it was made even more traumatic each time the state of Illinois executed another person he had come to know and often became close to during his time on Illinois death row (12 people executed in total). The first two links below provide more details about Ronald Kitchen's story of wrongful conviction. The third and final link below leads to information about his book being sold on Amazon.com, titled My Midnight Years, published in 2018.
I Lived Through Hell: Ronald Kitchen Shares His Story of Surviving Jon Burge’s Torture Ring
My Midnight Years- by Ronald Kitchen (Amazon.com)