Background: Almost two weeks after an elderly couple was found stabbed to death in their home in April 1986, police arrested Eric Caine for the brutal double murder.

Caine's name first came up after Lt. Jon Burge and Area Two detectives tortured another suspect, Aaron Patterson. Beaten and suffocated into submission, Patterson gave false oral statements implicating himself, Eric Caine, and two other innocent men who were never charged. When detectives finally left the interrogation room, Patterson scratched a desperate message into the bench with a paperclip:

Aaron 4/30 I lie about murders
Police threaten me with violence
Slapped and suffocated me with plastic
No lawyer or dad No phone

Eric Caine was then arrested and brought to Area Two Headquarters, where detectives told him that Aaron Patterson had confessed and named Caine as his accomplice. Caine rejected this story and maintained his innocence, so police coerced Caine into a false confession to comport with Patterson’s. Detectives falsely told Caine that he could go home if he "confessed" to a small role in the murders and implicated Patterson as the killer. Battered, tired, and in pain, Eric Caine agreed to cooperate.

The forceful beatings caused Caine's ear drum to rupture, which was documented by a doctor when Caine reached Cook County Jail after being wrongly charged with murder. He has been incarcerated ever since.

At trial, Eric Caine was found guilty of double murder, home invasion, and residential burglary, and sentenced to life in prison. The only evidence ever introduced against Caine were his and Patterson's coerced "confessions." (John Conroy, "Pure Torture," Chicago Reader, Dec. 2, 1999.)

Caine's jury did not know that Caine and Patterson gave statements coerced by officers involved in dozens of other torture cases. Since Caine's trial in 1989, it has become widely accepted that Area Two detectives under the command of Jon Burge subjected over 100 suspects to beatings, electric shock, and suffocation.

Due to the overwhelming evidence of systematic torture at Area Two, several convictions have been vacated because the only evidence of guilt was obtained through torture.

In 2003, Governor George Ryan pardoned Patterson due to his actual innocence. In a sad twist, Eric Caine could not be pardoned because he had "only" received a life sentence. (Steve Mills, "Freedom eludes inmate who got life, not death; His co-defendant walked free, but an oversight kept Eric Caine from being considered for clemency," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 17, 2003.)

Over twenty-five years after his arrest, and years after his co-defendant was freed, Eric Caine remains in prison. In 2009, The Exoneration Project filed an Amended Petition for Post Conviction Relief on behalf of Eric Caine. The petition asserted that Caine's confession was coerced, and introduced new evidence of misconduct by the officers who interrogated Caine. The petition also introduced new evidence identifying the true perpetrators.

In response to this petition, the Cook County Circuit Court granted Mr. Caine an evidentiary hearing on all of his claims.