To Catch a Torturer: One Attorney’s 28-Year Pursuit of Racist Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge

[Judi Lynn]

March 30, 2015

To Catch a Torturer: One Attorney’s 28-Year Pursuit of Racist Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge

A human rights attorney looks back at his nearly three decades going after Chicago’s notorious torturer of African-American men.

BY Flint Taylor

On February 13, 2015, former Chicago Police Commander Jon G. Burge was released from Federal custody, having served a little less than four years of his four-and-a-half year sentence for lying under oath about whether he tortured scores of African-American men during his time as commander. Less than a week before, I sat across from him in a small room in Tampa, Florida, questioning him, pursuant to a court order, yet again about his role in a torture case—this time, the case of Alonzo Smith, who was repeatedly suffocated with a plastic bag and beaten with a rubber nightstick in the basement of the Area 2 police station by two of Burge’s most violent henchmen after Burge informed him that they “would get him to talk, one way or another.”

Reading from a prepared script, the 67-year-old Burge, weakened by several physical ailments but nonetheless exhibiting a hostility that has marked our many encounters over the years, responded to my first question by once again invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He then stood up, informed me that he would not respond to any further questions, and started to leave the room.

After I told him that he would be in violation of the judge’s order if he left before I had finished my questioning, he reluctantly returned, and asserted the Fifth Amendment to each and every subsequent question, including to the most damning one: Was the torture of Smith part of a pattern and practice of systemic and racist torture and abuse against African-American men which he orchestrated? After a contentious concluding exchange between us, a look of smug self-satisfaction came across his face as he answered my final question by stating, “I exercise my Fifth Amendment rights—even though I would like to say you are a liar.”

Of course the answer to that question of the systemic and racist nature of Burge’s torture is now well established by a mountain of evidence that has been assembled over nearly three decades in the teeth of an unremitting official cover-up that has implicated a series of police superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more than 30 police detectives and supervisors, and, most notably, Richard M. Daley, first as the State’s Attorney of Cook County, then as Chicago’s long-serving Mayor, in a police torture scandal that had spanned the more than 40 years that I had been a lawyer at the People’s Law Office.

More:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17794/to-catch-a-torturer-one-attorneys-28-year-pursuit-of-racist-chicago-police

[Stuart G]

1. This is a long read, about Chicago police torture ...over many years..and its outcome..

Burge eventually spent some jail time, but not for torture, but for lying to a grand jury about "torture"

This is an incredible story, and hard to believe, but this is a first hand account.


Thanks for posting this. In Chicago, in Burge's district, torture was common and pervasive. The cover up and his treatment by Chicago prosecutors and politicians is as damning as any scandal anywhere. People went to jail who were innocent, but that did not matter. This is almost beyond belief. Because of this, and a couple of more instances like this, Illinois outlawed the death penalty. I strongly recommend this reading, but the story is ugly and corrupt. But it is what really happened in Chicago.