The Associated Press
CHICAGO- The special prosecutors’ report that concluded Chicago police officers tortured dozens of suspects over the course of two decades will strengthen other police brutality lawsuits in the city, attorneys said Thursday.
“It gives credibility to what all these people are claiming, that this stuff is real, these kind of third world tactics did happen and in some cases continue to happen,” said Kathleen Zellner, a Naperville attorney who has helped free a number of wrongfully convicted Illinois inmates.
Today, there are five federal lawsuits pending against the leader of the unit that the report said won confessions from suspects after beating them, shocking their genitals with electricity, smothering them with plastic bags and placing guns in their mouths. Four of those were filed by former death row inmates pardoned in 2003 by former Gov. George Ryan.
None of those suing are involved in three cases in which the special prosecutors said there was enough evidence to charge former Lt. Jon Burge and others. In their report, the special prosecutors said Burge and the others could not be charged because the alleged torture occurred in the 1970s and 1980s and the statute of limitations had run out.
But an attorney representing two men who allege in lawsuits against Burge and others that they were tortured say authors’ comments that there was evidence of torture in about half the 148 cases the report examined can only help the lawsuits.
“We’ve been alleging a pattern of torture and this strengthens what’s previously been found in other cases, in other courts and by other investigative agencies,” said Flint Taylor of the Peoples’ Law Center.
Further, by laying much of the blame for the torture at the former police superintendent, whom the report said did nothing to stop the abuse, Taylor said it will be easier to show a pattern of abuse that community members, lawyers and others said for years existed in the Area 2 detective unit Burge commanded on the South Side.
One problem, though, might be that the report found insufficient evidence of the allegations made by four of the men named in the report and expressed doubts about the credibility of at least three of them.
If one thing is clear it is that the city’s price tag in the Burge case will continue to climb. Burge has cost the city about $10 million -- with about $5.4 million of that paying for his defense in civil lawsuits and defending the city in other cases in which he is named.
Wednesday’s report, as damning as it is against Burge, doesn’t change the fact that even though it’s been more than a decade since a police board found a suspect had been mistreated while in Burge’s custody and fired him in 1993, the city still is on the hook for his defense.
“We are legally obligated to provide a defense for employees who are sued based on their actions they took within the scope of their employment,” said Jennifer Hoyle, spokeswoman for the city’s law department. “With Jon Burge we challenged that issue because we had him fired for misconduct but the 7th Circuit (appellate court) ruled against us.”
At the same time, at least one alderman reacted to the report with a promise to go after Burge’s wallet.
“We intend to introduce a resolution in the City Council ... to strip Burge of his pension,” said Alderman Dorothy Tillman, whose ward includes the area where the torture occurred. “We look like some buffoons when we pay him.”
On Thursday, Taylor announced that he most likely will add Mayor Richard Daley as a defendant in lawsuits seeking millions of dollars in damages. The authors of the report only mildly criticized Daley, saying if he made a mistake it was relying on others’ judgment. But Taylor said the report shows Daley and Richard Devine, the current state’s attorney and first assistant state’s attorney in the early 1980s, knew about the allegations that Andrew Wilson was tortured and did not investigate.
Devine already is named in the lawsuits. His spokesman, John Gorman, said Devine was made aware of the allegations, alerted subordinates and also was aware that a judge dismissed those allegations before trial.
The mayor was out of town Thursday and his office said he would comment Friday when he returned to Chicago.
Taylor issued a subpoena for all “statements, testimony, documents or other materials” provided to the special prosecutors by Daley, Devine, former Mayor Jane M. Byrne, Judge William Kunkle -- a former prosecutor -- and former Chicago police Supt. Richard Brzeczek.
The report from the special prosecutors was critical of Brzeczek for failing to crack down on abuses by homicide detectives under Burge.
The authors of the report have said procedural changes, including the videotaping of murder suspects’ interrogations, leave them confident that the kind of abuse Burge participated in and approved could not happen today.
Significantly, the department says, 45 percent of the sworn force are minorities compared to 24 percent in 1982.
Further, spokesman Pat Camden said officers are far more supervised, better trained and must be more educated to join than in the 1970s and 1980s. Also, he said, with DNA and other scientific evidence it is much easier to determine if police have arrested the wrong person, independent of anything a suspect might say.