Hill v. Walker

The plaintiff, William R. Hill, is a prisoner at Tamms Correctional Center serving two concurrent prison terms of 30 to 90 years each for murder. Hill was sentenced in 1980 and became eligible for parole in 1983. In 2006, he filed this civil complaint seeking a declaratory judgment and a writ of mandamus. In it, he alleged that (1) the law permitting his parole hearings to be scheduled less frequently than once a year is an ex post facto law, (2) the way the Illinois Prisoner Review Board has interpreted one of the statutory criteria for parole, “the seriousness of the offense,” has changed…