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Attached is the torture report, endorsed by 212 organizations and
individuals active in the areas of human rights, racial and criminal
justice, and civil rights, entitled: <b>REPORT ON THE FAILURE OF SPECIAL
PROSECUTORS EDWARD J. EGAN AND ROBERT D. BOYLE TO FAIRLY INVESTIGATE</b>
<b>SYSTEMIC POLICE TORTURE IN CHICAGO</b>, that we released on April
24th. The Report and Appendices are attached. The release received
very good coverage and we hope that the agencies to whom it is addressed
will take appropriate action. It appears that there may be a hearing
before the Cook County Board on June 13th, and African-American aldermen
are planning to introduce an ordinance calling for a hearing before the
Cghicago City Council. The Tribune's coverage, including Rob
Warden's commentary, is below. Please feel free to further
distribute the Report and post it on your website or in your archives.
Thanks in advance for your support.<br>
<br>
Flint Taylor <br>
People's Law Office<br>
773-235-0070<br>
<br>
Rob Warden<br>
Center on Wrongful Convictions<br>
312-503-3291<br>
<br>
For the Drafting Team<br>
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</font><h1><b>New report blasts probe into cop
torture</b></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=3>By Michael
Higgins, Tribune staff reporter. Tribune staff reporter Alexa Aguilar
contributed to this report<br><br>
April 25, 2007<br><br>
A four-year, $6.5 million investigation into police torture in the 1970s
and '80s was a whitewash that left crooked cops unindicted and
soft-pedaled mistakes by top law-enforcement officials, including then
Cook County State's Atty. Richard M. Daley, a coalition of civil rights
groups argued in a report released Tuesday.<br><br>
Two special prosecutors appointed to the matter in 2002 had ample
evidence to charge former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and others with
perjury and obstruction of justice, according to the coalition's
report.<br><br>
But instead, prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle conducted a
"hopelessly flawed" investigation that was "calculated to
obfuscate the truth about the torture scandal," the coalition's
report said.<br><br>
"Any prosecutor worth his salt would have prosecuted Jon
Burge," Locke Bowman, attorney at Northwestern University's
MacArthur Justice Center, said at a news conference.<br><br>
Egan and Boyle also protected Daley and other supervisors from public
embarrassment by ignoring the "conspiracy of silence" that
allowed Burge's wrongdoing to continue, the report said.<br><br>
Coalition officials said they would forward the report to federal
prosecutors, Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan, an international
human-rights body and others in the hope of spurring further
action.<br><br>
More than 200 groups and individuals signed on to the coalition's report.
The authors of the report include lawyers who have filed multimillion
dollar lawsuits against the city on behalf of alleged torture victims and
who believe that city officials have reneged on a settlement.<br><br>
Law Department spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle said Tuesday that city
officials had just begun to review the coalition's report. She said that
though the coalition urges the city to stop paying for Burge's defense in
civil lawsuits, the city is legally obligated to pay.<br><br>
Egan and Boyle could not be reached Tuesday for comment. James Sotos, an
attorney who represents Burge in two civil cases, declined to comment.
Last year, Egan and Boyle defended their investigation to the Cook County
Board and objected to the notion that they went too easy on Daley for his
handling of a 1982 letter that documented police torture.<br><br>
In July, Daley said the letter was sent to his office's special
prosecutions unit, which he said followed up, although he said some
witnesses did not cooperate with investigators.<br><br>
A Cook County judge appointed Boyle and Egan in 2002 to investigate
claims that Burge and detectives working under him routinely used
torture, including electric shock, Russian roulette, beatings and
attempted suffocation.<br><br>
In a long-awaited report released in July, the special prosecutors said
there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Burge and four other
former officers abused suspects to extract confessions.<br><br>
But Egan and Boyle also concluded that none of the men could be charged
with a crime because the state's three-year time limit on felony charges
has passed.<br><br>
"We have considered every possible legal theory that would permit us
to avoid the effect of the statute of limitations," Egan and Boyle
concluded. "Regrettably, we have concluded that the statute of
limitations would bar any prosecution."<br><br>
But in its report Tuesday, the coalition argued that Burge and others
should have been charged criminally for lying to cover up their original
wrongdoing. The coalition's report alleged that Burge, for example, had
denied under oath in 2003 that he had witnessed or participated in any
police torture.<br><br>
At the coalition's news conference, Madison Hobley, who spent 16 years on
Death Row before he was pardoned by Gov. George Ryan in 2003, called the
special prosecutors' report a "sham" and said information he
provided about the torture he endured was not included in the special
prosecutors' report.<br><br>
Hobley said he was handcuffed to a wall, beaten, smothered with a plastic
typewriter cover and repeatedly called a racial slur by police detectives
in 1987, when he was arrested after a fire killed his wife, son and five
other people.<br><br>
Other groups that signed on to the coalition's report include The Center
on Wrongful Convictions, the Midwest office of Amnesty International, The
Innocence Project, Cook County Bar Association, National Association of
Black Law Enforcement Officers and numerous groups that oppose the death
penalty.<br><br>
Individuals who signed on include U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, Cook County
Circuit Clerk Dorothy Brown, Rev. Jesse Jackson and authors Studs Terkel
and Howard Zinn.<br><br>
After the coalition's report was released, about 30 protesters from
Campaign to End the Death Penalty and other groups staged a rally outside
City Hall.<br>
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</font><h1><b>The spot on the Daley
legacy</b></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=3> <br><br>
April 26, 2007<br><br>
<i>How will history judge Mayor Richard Daley's legacy considering his
handling of torture allegations? Send your comments to
<a href="??">perspective@tribune.com</a>, along with your name, hometown
and a phone number where we can reach you, and we'll print some of your
responses on Sunday.<br><br>
</i><b>By Rob Warden<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
His legacy, like his father's, will be impressive.<br><br>
Yet like his father's legacy, his will not be spotless.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
prosecutor's report.<br><br>
Not so well known, however, is Daley's own role in the scandal, first as
Cook County state's attorney, then as mayor.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Daley had the power—and the duty—to act.<br><br>
He did nothing.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The special prosecutors' investigation took four 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."<br><br>
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 press conference after the report's release, Daley condemned
the torture, as if he were merely an uninvolved third party.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
There was little doubt that Wilson was guilty—or that he had been
tortured.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 four years later, he again was
convicted—without his tortured confession—and this time sentenced to
life.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 nine-year tenure as state's
attorney.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
To date, city and county taxpayers have coughed up $45 million to settle
civil rights claims dating from Daley's time as state's attorney, plus an
estimated $20 million in legal fees in those cases. 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, Orange and Patterson for $15 million, according to
lawyers involved in the case.<br><br>
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.<br>
----------<br>
<i>Rob Warden is the executive director of the Center on Wrongful
Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law.</i> <br>
Copyright © 2007,
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