Legal Commentary

Indifference Allowed Torture to Persist in Chicago

By TChris

In 1982, Chicago's Dailey administration was indifferent to reports that "police killer Andrew Wilson's face looked normal going into an interrogation room, but resembled ground beef hours later." A few years later, the Chicago Police Department was indifferent when a police watchdog "raised serious questions about the electro-shocking of suspects."

In 1990, another watchdog "catalogued 50 cases of alleged police torture." The police department suppressed the report and retaliated against the watchdog. The report created a brief sensation when it became public in 1992 and a few strong voices in the alternative media and civil rights community tried to sustain an interest in reform, but public and media indifference soon prevailed.

Janet Reno was indifferent. So was the Reagan administration. In an atmosphere of indifference, Jon Burge and the detectives under his command found unchecked power to torture suspects, primarily black, on the south side of Chicago. [more ...]

Though the county's head of the criminal courts, Judge Paul Biebel, did a courageous thing in 2002 by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Burge and his band of brothers, the result was a four-year, $7 million exercise in maintaining the status quo.

How ironic that former Gov. George Ryan, who sits in federal prison today, brought international attention to the tortured confessions of men on Death Row when so few others in powerful places had the will to act.

What accounts for our collective failure?

"My instinct is that racism, pro-police bias and bias in terms of poor black suspects, made it something that the press and prosecutors didn't want to deal with," [civil rights attorney Flint] Taylor said.

George Ryan did the right thing when he commuted Illinois death sentences in 2003, in part because he lost faith in confessions that the police swore were voluntary. Patrick Fitzgerald did the right thing this week when he indicted Burge. Others have done the right thing over the years by opposing and publicizing the abuse of criminal suspects. But Carol Marin is correct that too many for too long have been indifferent to a domestic torture scandal.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on October 25, 2008 (boomark / email).