Chicago Justice
December 2nd, 2006The Chicago Reader has been documenting police torture in Chicago since the 1990s, and the archive can be found here. It’s always disgusting, showing us the darkest realm of the human soul and the Justice system that has protected those who have abused their authorities. The latest report on the matter is here, and it is a DOOZY.
LAWYERS WHO DEFEND police-torture victims in Chicago long ago reached a harsh conclusion about Cook County’s criminal judges: most have a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge police brutality. Now these lawyers can point to a case so extreme it’s almost funny: a judge who apparently ruled on his own performance as a prosecutor, deciding there was no taint to a confession that the judge himself had written. Judge Nicholas Ford passed judgment on assistant state’s attorney Nick Ford. Ford had no problem with Ford’s work. It’s a case that’s unusual only in degree. Four years ago a group of 17 attorneys whose 12 clients alleged they’d been tortured submitted a remarkable petition to chief criminal court judge Paul Biebel. They wanted Biebel to disqualify the Cook County judiciary from any further involvement in their cases—in essence, to grant them a change of venue to some other county. The attorneys argued that 50 of Cook County’s 61 criminal court judges had ties to institutions or individuals who’d benefit from there being no investigation of torture cases.
According to the petition, 3 of the 50 judges were former Chicago police detectives and 2 of those had worked with the notorious former police commander Jon Burge; 3 other judges had previously defended the city in lawsuits alleging police brutality; and 16 judges were former assistant state’s attorneys directly involved in the torture cases, men and women who’d either testified on Burge’s behalf at police board hearings that led to his firing or who’d taken confessions allegedly coerced by physical means, prosecuted suspects whose statements of guilt were allegedly obtained by torture, or supervised the prosecution of defendants alleging electric shock, suffocation, attacks on the genitals, severe beatings, or other physical abuse at the hands of Burge’s detectives. Even judges who as prosecutors had had no direct or supervisory participation in the torture cases were suspect, the petition argued, because they’d presumably want to protect their former colleagues. And it noted that six judges, all former ASAs, had appeared as witnesses on Burge’s behalf at police board hearings when the city was trying to fire him for torture.
The core of the attorneys’ argument—that judges with law enforcement or prosecutorial backgrounds cast a blind eye in police brutality cases—was made against a fluid judiciary. Judges retire and are replaced. New ones are hired to relieve caseloads. Yet it would seem the blind-eye infection alleged by the defense attorneys has persisted despite the changing cast of characters. This July, special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle released the report of their investigation into alleged police torture by Burge and his detectives in the years 1973 to 1991. Boyle said he believed torture had occurred in “about half” of the 148 cases their staff examined during their four-year investigation. If he was right, detectives committed hundreds of acts of torture, because in abusing a victim they almost never stopped with a single act. And as no officer ever admitted to any coercion, those detectives presumably committed hundreds of acts of perjury. In how many of those cases did a skeptical judge suppress a confession because he or she felt it had been coerced? Zero. (Judge Earl Strayhorn once suppressed a confession for the “oppressive atmosphere” in which it was given, but he didn’t conclude that physical abuse had taken place.) And not a single judge publicly recommended that any officer be prosecuted for giving false testimony under oath. Nor did the state’s attorney’s office prosecute a single officer for perjury, misconduct, or assault. And it’s from the ranks of those prosecutors that most of today’s criminal court judges have come.
Dishonesty is the trait I loathe above all others, and I believe that the abuse of power and authority is an extension of it. There’s nothing quite like a Judge who pretends to be impartial but has his hand around the gavel ready to silence the truth, nothing quite like a boss at work who harasses an employee knowing full-well that the employee will never fight back, or a person who tells someone to shut up and not speak after screeching at them knowing that they can’t respond. Knowing that about me, I’d hope you understand, Dear Reader, how incredibly disgusting I find this entire scenario to be.
Someday, when I have authority over something and someones — well, if I ever turn out anything like these men, please write me angry messages because intellectual curiosity, honesty and the open mind are the keys to a great country and a great person.