Now, there's only one Chicago police torture scandal I know of. Could it be? Yes! Jon Burge, the cop responsible for the torture of numerous black suspects in police stations on Chicago's south side--and the sentencing of at least 12 innocent people to death--has been arrested for perjury.*
Burge, a Vietnam vet who joined the police force in 1970 and rose rapidly through the ranks, was responsible for the torture of somewhere between 40 and 200 African-American suspects who were unlucky enough to pass through the interrogation rooms at the Area 2 and 3 police stations on Chicago's south side. Among his victims were members of the Death Row 10, black men sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit, who found each other on Death Row, compared notes and realized that they had remarkably similar stories of police brutality--tales of suffocation, beatings and electric shocks that they discovered had all been perpetrated by the same person.
Burge was finally busted as a result of a civil suit filed by Madison Hobley, one of the Death Row 10. I remember first hearing Madison's voice over a scratchy prison phone connection at a Campaign to End the Death Penalty event as a freshman at Columbia. That was in 2000, and Madison had been on death row for 13 years.
In 2003, in a large part because of the publicity that had built up around the Death Row 10, Governor Ryan emptied Illinois's death row, declared a moratorium on executions, and commuted the sentences of several members of the Death Row 10. I heard Madison speak in person for the first time some time in 2003. He seemed like a broken man. Unused to freedom after so many years in prison, or simply unable to speak about the events that had led him there, I remember him as barely able to finish a sentence. About a year later, I heard him speak somewhere else and he seemed like a human being again. The transformation was amazing. Since his release, Madison has become a tireless organizer against the death penalty and the prison system.
Madison once said that he feels no hatred toward Burge and the people who sent him to prison for 16 years. I guess after so many years, he decided it just wasn't healthy to hold on to that anger. I, on the other hand, happen to think that the idea of Burge spending even one night in the prison system into which he sent numerous innocent people (and others who were not innocent but certainly didn't deserve the treatment they got) is pretty friggin' sweet.
*Note: As it turns out, Burge can't actually be tried for any of the cases of torture, which are now quite well-documented, because the statute of limitations has expired. So he's being tried for lying about torture. But as a US Attorney involved in the case said, "If Al Capone went down for taxes, it's better than him going down for nothing."
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