Chicagotribune.com

tinyurl.com/29gsd8

Chicago: New report blasts
probe into cop torture

By Michael Higgins
Tribune staff reporter

Tribune staff reporter Alexa Aguilar contributed to this report

April 25, 2007

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-----------

mjhiggins (at) tribune.com

Copyright 2007, Chicago Tribune

************

ABC Report critical of
investigation into police torture

WLS By Charles Thomas

Click here for video:

tinyurl.com/3ydopa

April 24, 2007 - A new report offers a very critical review of a special investigation into allegations of torture by Chicago police officers led by former commander Jon Burge. The report accuses the special prosecutors of having a conflict of interest. That four-year long investigation ended without any indictments.
The report says the special prosecutor's investigation was "hopefully flawed" and went out of its way to avoid implicating high-level officials.

You might call what happened Tuesday a "spring offensive" by Chicago's anti-police brutality movement. And again, they focused on the Chicago police torture scandal, which they say, despite a long-awaited report last summer, is nowhere close to being resolved.

In what they called a "birthday greeting," about two dozen demonstrators chanted below Mayor Daley's office Tuesday, reminding "Hizzoner" of the unfinished city business surrounding the quarter-century-old Chicago police torture investigation, and the activists have some new leverage indicating they might embarrass the city enough to jeopardize the 2016 Olympics bid.

"How can we have the Olympics here until we settle the cases?" said Frank Avila, attorney for alleged torture victim.

Daley and current state's attorney Dick Devine led the Cook County prosecutor's office during the 1980s when dozens of black men claim they were tortured. And there is physical evidence -- a letter -- indicating Daley was informed about the abuse. Last summer, special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle completed a $7 million, four-year investigation confirming there was a torture ring led by retired commander Jon Burge. But the report also concluded that Burge and his henchmen could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.

"Could they have charged battery, sir, as you asked? No, the battery time had run. But the conspiracy time has not run and the conspiracy continues," said a speaker at Northwestern Law School Tuesday.

Critics Tuesday called the Egan/Boyle report a politically tainted scam to protect Daley and Devine. And they released their own finding that Burge should at least have been indicted for perjury.

"John Burge himself in a sworn interrogatory answer denied that there was any torture at Area Two. If that's not a lie, then I am not standing here," said Locke Bowman, MacArthur Justice Foundation.

Several alleged torture victims have sued the city, while two dozen others remain imprisoned and trying to get new trials. They include Mark Clements--incarcerated now for 26 years.

"You should be ashamed of yourself, Mayor Daley. How can you live with this? How can you go to sleep with this? How can you wake up in the morning every morning and look at yourself in the mirror and shave," said Virginia Clements, Mark Clements' mother.

So far, the mayor's office has not commented on the demonstration outside City Hall.

Meanwhile, the lawyers who wrote the report criticizing the torture investigation have appealed again for intervention the US attorney's office. Those attorneys also agreed the unresolved torture scandal could become an issue in the city's Olympic bid.