HICAGO, Dec. 16 — The sky was black and the air frigid, yet Sue Gauger's palms were sweating as she arrived at Statesville Correctional Center just after 4 this morning.

Mrs. Gauger could not help but relive the humiliating pat-downs and shoe searches before her visits to Gary Gauger, the boy she met in first grade, fell in love with after he was convicted of murdering his parents, and married upon his exoneration. This morning, Mr. Gauger, who spent 22 months in Statesville's execution-house before his release in 1996, walked from just below its watch towers carrying a letter that implored Gov. George Ryan to commute the sentences of the 160 people on the state's death row.

"I've never seen the front gate, except in the old movie, `Call North Side 777,' " Mr. Gauger, 50, said of the prison as he began a unique relay walk. Thirty-one men who were wrongly convicted of capital crimes and later freed from death rows around the country carried the letter 37 miles from Statesville to Governor Ryan's office here. Starting in the wee hours did not bother Mr. Gauger because, he said, "I haven't been able to sleep since I got arrested."

The relay, dubbed "Dead Men Walking" and taking almost 14 hours to complete, was the latest in a string of creative lobbying tools employed by one side or the other in the death penalty debate in Illinois recently.

Governor Ryan, who declared a moratorium on executions three years ago and appointed a commission that proposed 85 measures to overhaul capital punishment, ordered a series of clemency hearings this fall for nearly all the state's death-row inmates. Now, he faces the defining decision of his tenure: How many of those 160 souls should he spare before leaving office Jan. 13?

"These people are literally walking proof that the effort to divide people into guilty and innocent, problem cases and not-problem cases, doesn't typically work," Lawrence C. Marshall, legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University, said of the walk's participants.

Mr. Marshall, who was Mr. Gauger's lawyer and organized the walk, added that "if the governor thinks that he's going to be able to create two piles, the book of life and the book of death, and confidently determine who belongs in which, history shows that he will make profound errors, fatal errors."

After the state Prisoner Review Board sat through hundreds of hours of wrenching testimony from victims' relatives during the clemency hearings in October, the governor held two intense sessions this month in which those relatives begged him to let the death sentences stand.

Even so, 21 retired judges, and nearly 1,000 lawyers, have signed letters calling for commutation. E-mail messages, for and against, flood in daily to the governor's office.

Meanwhile Mr. Ryan, who declined to be interviewed for this article, reviews the 160 case files, and the board's confidential recommendations, even during dinner and while flying in the state plane. He has said he is unlikely to grant a blanket clemency, but will not give a hint as to whether commutations to life in prison may be dispensed in the single, double or triple digits.

"He asks a lot of questions about cases or about things happening in the system, but he clearly is still in deep deliberation," said Dennis Culloton, the governor's press secretary. "It's really hard to handicap."

Today's march followed a Sunday session at Northwestern Law School, during which 36 men who had been released from death row in 13 states lighted candles and reminded the audience that people had once been certain of their guilt, too.

The speakers wore sweatpants and three-piece suits, leather jackets and argyle sweaters, cowboy hats and chunky gold cross pendants. They told of their 2, 5, 6, 11, 19 years on death row. One came within 50 hours of execution. Another, 36. A third, just 15.

Tonight, many of the freed men were in the audience for the Chicago premiere of the documentary play "The Exonerated," with the actors Richard Dreyfuss, Danny Glover and Mike Farrell portraying Mr. Gauger and several other men who had been part of the day's march.