For Decades, Chicago Police Used City Jails as Torture Chambers

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/decades-chicago-police-used-city-jails-torture-chambers



Meet American torture victim Darrell Cannon. On the morning of Nov. 2, 1983, Cannon, then 32 years old, was tortured while in the custody of the Chicago Police Department. Officers escorted him from his Southside home at 7:30am and took him to a local precinct where they shocked him in the testicles and the mouth with an electric cattle prod and struck his knees with a baton, trying to force him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. Cannon gave a false confession around 2pm that afternoon.

He spent the next 24 years in prison until he was exonerated and released in 2007. While serving his sentence, Cannon sued for damages in connection with the torture; he was awarded the paltry sum of $3,000 and left with $1,247 after costs and legal fees were deducted.

He has been diagnosed with PTSD as a result of the physical abuse he endured, and he still carries memories of what the cops did to him that day.

“I think about it continuously, even though it’s been over 20 years,” Cannon told AlterNet. “I still remember it as if it happened yesterday.”

[CurtEastPoint]

1. And the cop who did all this? Out of prison, still collecting $4K/mo pension. Has cost Chicago

PD over $100M.

Google Jon Barge.

Nasty old fuck.

[Ykcutnek]

4. Gotta protect those pensions at all costs.

Can't have dastardly people getting what they've "earned" taken away from them, under any circumstances. Nope, gotta keep strong-arming the taxpayer through the corrupt, impenetrable wall of no-consequences-at-all bargaining contracts.

I'm still angry about them taking Social Security away from NAZIS!

[Scuba]

2. No words.

[DeSwiss]

3. K&R

- All these years, so many thought they were free. This is just one permutation in the evolution of the plan:

In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression-a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.

-- Howard Zinn
A People's History of the United States - Chapter 11: Robber Barons And Rebels

[marym625]

5. I don't believe that this has completely stopped

I just don't.

[Faux pas]

6. ...

[marmar]

7. K/R

[leveymg]

8. US has been a human rights abuser for a long time

It's only now that the public is beginning to learn the details. This sort of thing would have simply been ignored 20 years ago.