[News] Flint Taylor on the Fight for Fred Hampton and Against Police Torture

[Anti-Imperialist News]

susieday-snidelines.com
<https://susieday-snidelines.com/flint-taylor-on-the-fight-for-fred-hampton-and-against-police-torture/>
Flint Taylor on the Fight for Fred Hampton and Against Police Torture
susie.day
June 2, 2026
------------------------------
“A Whole Movement Arose”
*Dec. 4, 1969, Chicago police remove the body of Fred Hampton, leader of
the Illinois Black Panther Party, slain by police on Chicago’s west side.
(Courtesy of Chicago Sun-Times via AP & CounterPunch)*

Almost six decades ago in Chicago, during the rise of the Black Panther
Party, Flint Taylor, a white, twenty-something law student, helped start
the People’s Law Office. Like Flint, the People’s Law Office has been
around ever since, defending people excluded from the political power grid
against systemic discrimination and racist abuse. One of the PLO’s first
cases, in fact, involved exposing the 1969 shooting deaths of Black
Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as FBI-orchestrated
assassinations—not, as the public was meant to believe, another
*cops-vs-thugs* gun battle. For years at the People’s Law Office, Flint has
worked through hundreds of subsequent cases, including some that proved
instrumental in bringing to light a police torture ring, led for over
twenty years by Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge.

In 2019, Flint wrote *The Torture Machine*, a book about these cases and
the top-down federal/state corruption that engendered them. But, a few
years later, looking at the police torture and murders of Black people that
continued across the country, Flint realized that you don’t always need
government directives to destroy the lives of “marginalized” people. He
decided to go deeper into the Chicago cases, to burrow into forgotten
records and study the work of ordinary, less notorious beings—prosecutors,
judges, elected officials, informants, jailhouse snitches…. And now, Flint
Taylor has written *The Conviction Machine*
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2733-the-conviction-machine>, an
account of the people whose everyday corruption and brutality create
tragedies like the Hampton murders and Chicago police torture. I talked to
Flint about his book…

*Not a shootout; a shoot-in*

*sd:  You write that the People’s Law Office began in a converted sausage
shop in 1969, only months before Hampton’s murder. Did Fred have anything
to do with starting the PLO?*

*Flint Taylor: *Fred Hampton certainly had a hand in starting the People’s
Law Office; also, the young lawyers I was working with, including Dennis
Cunningham, who represented Fred before there *was* the Panthers. Dennis
and the others—Skip Andrew, Don Stang, Jeff Haas—were connected to the
Chicago Legal Aid office. But Legal Aid didn’t permit representation of
radical and revolutionary groups, so they decided to start a new office. I
was a second-year a law student at the time and, along with other law
students, went in with the lawyers representing the Panthers. August 1,
1969, is the date we celebrate as the office opening.
*Flint Taylor (Courtesy of Haymarket Books & AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)*

There’s different versions of how we came to be known as the People’s Law
Office. The one I like is that the Panthers talked about Power to the
People, the People’s Health Clinic, the People’s Breakfast Program…. So the
people’s lawyers became the People’s Law Office. That stuck; it’s something
we continue to take seriously.

*sd: Did you, like some of your clients, consider yourselves
revolutionaries?*

*Flint Taylor: *I think, primarily, we identified with our clients. We
believed in what people like the Panthers were trying to do—and they were
getting arrested and brutalized in large and small ways every day. That was
what we lawyers shared, that collective resolve to represent them in the
cases they were catching, mostly in the criminal courts.

Within months of our starting, Fred Hampton was assassinated. That cemented
our commitment to the PLO; he was our client. We were the ones who went to
Fred’s apartment, who went to the jail for those who survived the raid. And
we were the ones—along with the Panthers, of course—who initiated the
fightback against the lies people in power were telling. Lies like Hampton
being involved in a police shootout. No, there was no shootout; Hampton was
killed in a shoot-*in*: 90-some police bullets to one Panther bullet. It
was a political assassination, part of a national assassination program.

*sd: Fred Hampton was an extraordinary leader who worked for a coalition
that would unite racial and ethnic groups. Do you think that was partly why
he was targeted?*

*Flint Taylor: *No doubt. He and the Panther leadership, like Bobby Lee.
There’s a wonderful movie by Mike Gray called American Revolution 2
<https://vimeo.com/351632080>—you see the coming together of the Young
Patriots, which was a white working-class Appalachian group, the Young
Lords with Cha Cha Jimenez, the SDS—both factions, after their split.

The Panthers were also trying to bring in the street gangs, particularly on
the south and west sides of Chicago. There was a war on gangs, led by Mayor
Richard J. Daley and Ed Hanrahan, Cook County State Attorney, who’s
featured as a prime villain in my book. This was really a war on the Black
community and Black youth.

*Prosecutors heard the screams*

*sd: Why does your book have a double focus on the Hampton/Clark murders
and the Jon Burge police torture regime?*

*Flint Taylor: *The assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and its
coverup, along with the 40-to-50-year scandal of police torture in Chicago,
are two of the most significant political and racially motivated events in
the city’s history. In terms of court battles, the People’s Law Office and
I were at the center of both cases.

My law partner Jeff Haas wrote a great book called *The Assassination of
Fred Hampton*
<https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/the-assassination-of-fred-hampton-products-9781641603218.php>.
But it and my prior writing about the Hampton case are focused primarily on
the FBI conspiracy and cover-up. Of course, that’s what Jeff and I, as
trial lawyers, were uncovering. But *The **Conviction Machine* looks at
other primary conspirators, like the prosecutors—because Hampton’s
assassination and the police torture scandal could not have happened but
for prosecutors. The Fred Hampton case looks particularly at Ed Hanrahan,
the key prosecutor. Not only was Hanrahan involved in the coverup, he was
involved in planning the assassination.

*sd: Your book first focuses on Hampton, a self-avowed revolutionary. But
later, covering police torture, you center on Jackie Wilson, a little-known
Black man with no discernible politics. Why?*

*Flint Taylor: *The 1980s Wilson case, in which Jackie and his brother
Andrew were tortured, was seminal. It opened the door to a systemic program
of torture that was enabled and facilitated by prosecutors.

Prosecutors in the torture cases were in the stationhouses when Burge was
torturing people. They were told, often by the victims themselves, that
they were being tortured. They heard the screaming; they saw the torture
implements. And yet they came into the rooms and took the confessions; they
were active participants in getting confessions. They then became witnesses
for other prosecutors. And those confessions became the basis for people
going to the penitentiary, often to death row. Then, in later cases,
prosecutors lied when the survivors said they’d been tortured.

Lo and behold, this went all the way up to the chief prosecutor, Richard M.
Daley, who went on to be Chicago’s mayor, after [his father] Richard J.
Daley. Through litigation, we got documents that show that Daley was aware
of the torture, specifically of the Wilson brothers, and that he actively
covered that up. He used their confessions to send them to the
penitentiary, Andrew for execution; Jackie for two life sentences. That’s
why Fred Hampton’s and Jackie Wilson’s cases come together, although you
might say they’re very different, politically.

*Justifying torture*

*sd: Didn’t Jon Burge started out as a police detective?*

*Flint Taylor: *He went on to become a commander of the police department.
Burge learned the torture trade in Vietnam, in a prisoner of war camp, and
brought it back to Chicago to use against scores of Black men suspected of
crimes. His police set up a torture machine, an electric shock box. There
was also a torture called “dry submarino,” which is putting a bag over
someone’s head and simulating execution. There was putting a gun in
someone’s mouth or to his head, pulling the trigger. There was beating with
rubber hoses. That’s what the regime under Burge practiced for 20 years.

*sd: Was the People’s Law Office aware of this torture before you took on
the Wilsons’ case?*

*Flint Taylor: *No. The first case we can document was in 1972, but it was
quite a closely held secret in the ’70s. There were a few cases brought to
court, but the defense lawyers representing folks Burge and his people
tortured either didn’t believe this could happen, or decided strategically
that they wouldn’t raise it, because no judge would ever acknowledge it.

*sd: The Wilson case, according to your book, started in 1982. The brothers
were in a car that was stopped by police. There was a struggle, and two
officers died in a shooting.*

*Flint Taylor: *Some eyewitnesses said that Andrew, who was on parole at
the time, got into it with the two cops and shot them both. Jackie was the
driver of the car and stood by—there was testimony to this—pretty much in
shock. Then they got back into the car and drove away. There was an intense
manhunt, which terrorized Chicago’s Black communities on the south and west
side; cops were kicking down doors and beating people. After five days, the
Wilson brothers were arrested and the full brunt of torture was brought
down on both of them.

But the city couldn’t keep the torture under wraps anymore. The Black
community was totally outraged by this broad-based police attack, so the
case was now in the public eye. The Wilsons’ public defenders were able to
demonstrate there was torture, particularly with Andrew, who had obvious
physical injuries, marks on his ears from where the machine clips had been
placed to shock him, and burns on his chest in the pattern of the steam
radiator he was tortured against. But the judge—connected, obviously, to
the Democratic machine—rejected the evidence. This torture was justifiable,
in prosecutorial and judicial circles. It was framed as “alleged police
brutality against a double cop killer”—Black is understood, of
course—carried out by a decorated Vietnam-veteran commander of the Chicago
police.

So Jackie and Andrew are charged with killing two white Chicago police
officers. They’re convicted. Andrew goes to death row; Jackie goes to
prison.

*sd:  Four years later, you got involved. How?*

*Flint Taylor: *In 1986, Andrew, who had a first-grade education, wrote a
pro se civil rights complaint, and filed it in federal court.

He drew a judge—we had some unbelievably bad judges in these cases; some
heroic judges as well—who was conservative and racist. So here’s Andrew
with this pro se case in front of a terrible judge, who’s assigning defense
lawyers. But this case is radioactive; nobody wants to take it. After they
go through a series of lawyers who respectfully decline, Andrew reaches out
to us, I think because he knew our reputation in fighting the Hampton case.
We had just finished 13 years of intense struggle against the police and
prosecutors.

We looked at this case, and there seemed little or no chance of winning.
But we decided to take it. In the late ’80s, we ended up with two trials in
Andrew’s civil case. During these trials, thanks to an anonymous police
source [Deep Badge
<https://chicagodefender.com/a-final-judgment-in-notorious-police-abuse-scandal/>],
we were able to develop evidence that the Wilson torture wasn’t just a
one-off; it was part of a systemic racist regime led by Burge, known to the
Daley prosecution and many higherups. Based on that evidence, we were able,
over ten years, to get a settlement for Andrew, and help get Burge fired.

*Andrew was a hero*

*sd: What happened when the torture story finally became public?*

*Flint Taylor: *A whole movement arose. Lawyers, activists, and people
locked up in prison were able to use this evidence of torture to fight
their cases. Some of these people were innocent, some not; but all of them
were tortured and gave confessions that should not have been used against
them.

Soon, the struggle turned back to the criminal courts to fight cases for
people on death row. Some men on death row came together and formed the Death
Row 10 <https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/19/jimmy_soto>, and they fought
politically from inside. People on the street and people fighting against
the Illinois death penalty united with them.

In Andrew’s case, because there was physical evidence of torture, they
threw out his coerced confession, but they still had eyewitness evidence,
so he was retried and convicted again. The judge very much wanted to give
him the death penalty again, but it was a jury question, and one or two
jurors held out. So Andrew got a double-life sentence, and spent the rest
of his life in prison. He died in prison in 2007.

But, in a way, Andrew was a hero. Over the years, he stood up again and
again and testified that Burge tortured him. Every time he had to talk
about it, he was put through another form of mental torture. But he
testified at two of our civil trials. He testified again later when Burge
was tried administratively and fired. Each time he talked, he told how he
was tortured.

Jackie also got another trial, was convicted again, and sat in prison for
decades.

*sd: Some of these activists created the Chicago Torture Justice Center
<https://www.chicagotorturejustice.org/> site. This must’ve been quite a
movement.*

*Flint Taylor: *Over the years, there were actually intergenerational
movements. The first arose around our trials in the late 1980s. People took
the evidence to Chicago City Hall and demanded that the police
superintendent deal with Burge and police torture. Then, in the early
2000s, as the cases shifted into criminal courts, the movements that came
together around torture and the death penalty led to George Ryan, the
governor of Illinois, a conservative Republican, granting clemency to all
the people on death row
<https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/illinois-death-row-inmates-granted-commutation-by-governor-george-ryan-on-january-12-2003>
and commuting their sentences to life without parole. He also granted four
innocence pardons on the basis of Burge torture. Two of those four were our
clients.

We were able to then bring civil suits that led to another wave of movement
activity that uncovered new levels of police torture. We got some former
Black detectives who worked with Burge to give statements that validated
the fact of torture. Ultimately, we found about 150 documented cases of
police torture under Burge’s regime.

That struggle went international, to the United Nations, which resulted in
a 2006 statement by the UN Committee Against Torture
<https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/publications/un-torture-report-2006/>
that connected Chicago police torture to US government torture in Abu
Ghraib, Iraq, and Guantánamo. And, because this became an international
issue, when the Daley people tried to bring the Olympics to Chicago in
2009, the movement said, *This is the torture capital of the country;* *you
can’t bring the Olympics here*
<https://inthesetimes.com/article/chicagos-olympic-dreams-undeserved>. That
struggle was successful.

This led to the feds actually investigating Jon Burge. But, because the
statute of limitations on torture had passed, the only thing Burge could be
prosecuted for was obstruction of justice and lying under oath about
whether he tortured anybody. He was convicted in 2010, sentenced to 4 ½
years, and went to a federal penitentiary.

*Reparations*

*sd: It isn’t often that Power admits wrongdoing. Did it actually happen
here?*

*Flint Taylor: *About 2010, the movement regenerated around the concept of
reparations. This was a total coming together, an intergenerational,
interracial movement of artists and activists during Rahm Emanuel’s time as
Chicago mayor. Emmanuel came in on the coattails of Obama, but he was
extremely unpopular in the Black community; he closed down schools,
clinics, gutted community services in predominantly Black communities. But
he was up for reelection, so the movement put a tremendous amount of
pressure on him in the run-up to the election.

They succeeded in getting a remarkable package of reparations for the
survivors of Burge’s torture. All those who were still alive got $100,000
each. There were nonfinancial things as well. One was job training for
people who wanted it, and for their families; another was the creation of a
memorial
<https://thetriibe.com/2025/12/chicago-torture-justice-memorial-to-be-built-in-washington-park/>,
funded by the city, on the south side, that would offer counseling and
other services, not only for the survivors and their families of Burge’s
torture, but for other victims of police violence in the city. A lot of
money has been raised, but there still isn’t enough to actually construct
it.

Then there was an apology from Mayor Emanuel in 2013, which took place at
City Council. We were there in the back of the council chambers, along with
the survivors. And Rahm Emanuel—whether sincere or not—gave a remarkable
apology
<https://peopleslawoffice.com/emanuel-apologizes-for-torture-under-former-chicago-police-commander-cohorts/>.
>From the 1980s and ’90s, all the way to the 2000s, we’d fought battles at
City Council, holding hearings on Christmas Eve, disrupting proceedings.
Then suddenly, these Council people—probably less than half of them ever
supported anything we’d done—all of them turned around to the men and
applauded. Whatever you think about politicians, they did this, and it was
meaningful, particularly to the men and their families. But perhaps the
most significant reparation was the establishment of a program for teaching
the history of police torture to eighth- and tenth-graders in Chicago
public schools.

Another accomplishment of the movement was that a group called Black People
Against Police Torture got the Illinois legislature to pass a Torture
Inquiry and Relief Commission Act [TIRC
<https://www.soulsjournal.org/article/a-human-right-to-reparations-black-people-against-police-torture-and-the-roots-of-the-2015-chicago-reparations-ordinance>]
that allowed people in prison who said they were tortured by Burge to bring
a complaint. If the Commission believed torture occurred, the case would be
sent to criminal court. So people who didn’t have any kind of appeal before
could, under this extraordinary TIRC Ac
<https://www.injusticewatch.org/archive/2022/burge-torture-taxpayer-tab-210-million/>t,
get back into court.

*36 years, $30 million*

*Flint Taylor:  *That TIRC Commission Act led Jackie Wilson, in 2011, to
file a petition. By now, he’s been in jail, what, 29 years? After more
years, in 2015, Jackie is given the right to go to court. This is his third
trial. Our office took his case and got probably the worst judge in
criminal court; he’d been involved in at least one torture case as a
prosecutor. We could see spending the rest of our lives fighting Jackie’s
case, especially since the judge himself was allowed to rule as to whether
to remove himself. Finally, I was able to bring this to the attention of an
upright editor at the *Chicago Sun-Times*, and the op-ed board wrote an
editorial saying, This judge should recuse himself.

So the judge is really angry now. We go back to court and he goes nuts and
accuses me of being on crack, among other insulting things. But finally, he
says, “You win; I’m off the case.” Then we get an independent African
American judge, Bill Hooks. He gives Jackie a new trial—and bond. So, in
2018, pending trial, Jackie’s out, he’s a free man. In 2020, Jackie’s case
was dismissed. Hooks not only threw out his confession, but found that
Jackie was factually innocent. That led us to bring a civil case.
Ultimately, in 2024, Jackie ended up getting $30 million for his 36 years
in prison.

Of course, the torture story is not over here in Chicago. There are more
cases in front of the TIRC, and people still being coerced into giving
confessions.

*sd: Have you studied how Chicago’s torture history compares to, say, New
York City or Ames, Iowa?*

*Flint Taylor: *I wish I had done more. This kind of racist criminal legal
system is not unique to Chicago, though it may be more extreme here. In
other places like San Francisco, where progressive prosecutors like Chesa
Boudin were elected, it’s hard. Chesa basically got voted out
<https://san-francisco-news.com/2025/10/22/san-francisco-voters-oust-da-chesa-boudin-amid-heated-crime-policy-debate/>
of office because he took on the police department and tried to make
changes in the criminal legal system.

*sd: I’m thinking that, given who’s president, something like a Burge
regime might appear in other places, and this time be better protected.*

*Flint Taylor:  *I hear you. The blatant illegality of the federal
government does conjure up those possibilities. But all we can do is resist
in any way we can. One way is to teach that this isn’t the first time this
fascist racism has happened—there’s been threads of it for at least the
last 50 or 60 years.

*Evidence = narrative*

*sd:  I get why you’ve gone below the headlines to uncover connections
between Hanrahan and Burge and all the people who worked with them.
Individuals do everyday, perfunctory things that create larger political
realities.*

*Flint Taylor:  *Exactly. That’s why I think of myself as a movement
lawyer. I fight to make this evidence part of a public narrative. People’s
narratives don’t just come out of thin air. They fight back against the
power structure’s narratives, whether it’s about assassination or hidden
police torture. What was the system?; how high did it go?; how deep were
the coverups? That’s changing the narrative. But it’s not going to stay
that way, unless we fight to defend it.

We—I use that term broadly—the Panthers, the lawyers, the activists and
progressive politicians—change that narrative. Over the decades, I’ve had
the fortune to work with the Panthers and other movements and a great set
of legal folks. Hopefully, my books will have an impact, large or small, in
teaching the truth, people’s stories about these events in Chicago history.

# # #

*—susie day, 2026
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/31/flint-taylor-on-the-fight-for-fred-hampton-against-police-torture/>*
<https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2733-the-conviction-machine>
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