Ignoring an injustice - Chicago Doing Nothing about Systematic Torture of Blacks in Police Custody

From the Chicago Tribune [HERE]

By Rob Warden
April 29, 2007

Richard M. Daley has eclipsed his late father in many ways, and assuming he serves out his current term, also will surpass him as Chicago's longest-serving mayor.

His legacy, like his father's, will be impressive.

Yet, like his father's legacy, his will not be spotless.

It will be marred by what he himself has acknowledged as "a shameful episode in our history" -- two decades of systematic torture of African-American criminal suspects by white Chicago police officers.

What went on -- plastic bags over heads; shackling to hot radiators; gun barrels in mouths; electrical shocks to ears, nostrils and genitals; cigarette burns to arms, legs and chests -- is now well known and has been cited repeatedly in court opinions and, last year, in a special prosecutors' report.

Not so well known, however, is Daley's own role in the scandal, first as Cook County state's attorney, then as mayor.

In 1982, Chicago Police Supt. Richard Brzeczek notified State's Atty. Daley in writing of credible evidence that Area 2 Police Commander Jon Burge and a group of subordinates had tortured a prisoner named Andrew Wilson.

Daley had the power -- and the duty -- to act.

He did nothing.

In 1983, Daley's prosecutors won the conviction of Wilson, who was sentenced to death. Meanwhile, the torture of African-American murder suspects continued. The result: Innocent men were convicted of murder while the guilty remained on the street.

It took years for the facts to penetrate the walls of official silence. The first major development came in 1987, when the Illinois Supreme Court reversed Wilson's conviction, citing "extensive medical testimony and photographic evidence corroborating the defendant's injuries" -- the very evidence Brzeczek had sent to Daley four years earlier.

In 1989, in a civil rights case brought by Wilson, dozens of other torture cases came to light, leading to an investigation by the Chicago Police Office of Professional Standards.

Then in 1993 -- four years after Daley became mayor and 11 years after Brzeczek informed him of the torture -- Burge was fired (with full pension benefits) after the police investigation documented that he and more than a score of subordinates had been torturing suspects since the early 1970s.

Despite the police findings, however, there was no criminal investigation until 2002, when the presiding judge of the Cook County Criminal Court, Paul Biebel, appointed two special prosecutors, Edward Egan and Robert Boyle, to examine the evidence against Burge and his men.

The special prosecutors' investigation took 4 years and cost Cook County taxpayers more than $7 million before ending last July with a 292-page report that concluded "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Wilson had been tortured but lamenting that "the statute of limitations bars any prosecution of any officers."

In a bizarre perversion of logic, the special prosecutors' report shifted the blame for Daley's dereliction of duty to, of all people, Brzeczek. And, at a news conference after the report's release, Daley condemned the torture, as if he were merely an uninvolved third party.

On Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of the special prosecutors' appointment, a group of civil rights organizations, lawyers involved in torture and other police brutality cases, legal academics, civil rights leaders and human rights advocates (myself among them) released a report critical of the weak official response to the scandal. The report pointedly laid out the facts regarding Daley's role.

After all these years, however, the only consequence for Daley will be the judgment of history -- shame in the eyes of posterity. When his life is chronicled for the generations that follow, his role in the torture scandal can neither be ignored nor judged kindly.

The pity of it is that he could have avoided the disgrace simply by doing the sensible thing -- the right thing -- when Brzeczek notified him of Andrew Wilson's apparent torture in 1982. Wilson had been charged, along with his brother Jackie, with the murders of Chicago Police Officers William Fahey and Richard O'Brien.

There was little doubt that Wilson was guilty -- or that he had been tortured.

At Cook County Jail, he had been examined by Dr. John Raba, the jail medical director, and found to be suffering from "multiple bruises, swellings and abrasions on his face and head," according to jail medical reports. After having Wilson's injuries photographed, Raba sent them to Brzeczek requesting "a thorough investigation of this alleged brutality."

The situation presented a conflict for Daley. Because his office was prosecuting Andrew Wilson, he could hardly investigate the police involved. All Daley had to do was refer the matter to the attorney general or the U.S. attorney and so advise Brzeczek.

Instead, according to the special prosecutors' report, he did nothing more than confer with his two top aides -- Richard Devine, the present state's attorney, and William Kunkle, now a Cook County Circuit Court judge -- and enter into a conspiracy of silence.

Brzeczek's letter went unanswered, and Daley's office proceeded to win Wilson's tainted conviction in 1983. Wilson was sentenced to death. After the Supreme Court reversed his conviction 4 years later, he again was convicted -- without his tortured confession -- and this time sentenced to life.

Meanwhile, at least 50 other credible torture allegations had come to light. Some of the victims, unlike Wilson, no doubt were innocent. Among the more egregious examples were Madison Hobley, Leroy Orange, Stanley Howard and Aaron Patterson, who were sentenced to death under Daley based on false confessions extracted through torture.

Those four men, who languished behind bars a total of more than 70 years before securing pardons based on innocence in 2003, were among nine innocent men sentenced to death and two dozen others sentenced to prison for crimes they did not commit during Daley's 9-year tenure as state's attorney.

Although for the time being the public remains largely oblivious to Daley's role in the torture scandal, the reality may begin to sink in as monetary damages from that period continue to soar.

To date, city and county taxpayers have coughed up more than $45 million to settle civil rights claims dating from Daley's time as state's attorney, plus an estimated $20 million in legal fees. And, on top of the $7 million the county paid for the special prosecutors' investigation, the city reportedly is on the verge of settling torture claims brought by Hobley, Howard and Orange for $15 million, lawyers involved in the case say.

History is unlikely to pass lightly over facts so plainly etched into the public record. Torture, it seems, is an indelible stain on the Daley legacy -- a damned spot that neither he nor his apologists can out.

Rob Warden is the executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law.