Chicago Opens Police Corruption Case

Aaron Patterson is a death row inmate who claims police officers punched him and suffocated him with a plastic typewriter cover 15 years ago to extract a false confession in the killings of an elderly couple.

A few years ago, Patterson’s claims might have been dismissed.

But beginning Monday, his claims will get a new hearing under orders from the Illinois Supreme Court. With the hearing come pressing questions about allegations of systematic torture at a Chicago police unit in the 1980s, mounting calls for an outside investigator and growing doubts about the convictions of as many as 10 Illinois death row inmates.

“It’s our point of view that there’s been a concerted effort to keep this secret within the police department for many years,” said Locke Bowman, an attorney at the University of Chicago Law School.

Bowman is one of two lawyers asking for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what happened at the Area 2 detective headquarters during the 1980s and decide whether charges are warranted.

At the heart of the scandal is a violent crime unit in the far southern end of Chicago in the 1980s commanded by former police Lt. Jon Burge.

Burge was fired in 1993 after a death row inmate, Andrew Wilson, won a $1.1-million civil suit against the department, claiming he was tortured with electric shocks and handcuffed to a hot radiator at Burge’s precinct.

A police board found that Wilson was indeed abused while in Burge’s custody. A subsequent investigation by the police department found that abuse occurred and was systematic.

A federal judge in 1999 also painted a damning picture of Burge and his precinct.

“It is now common knowledge that in the early to mid-1980s, Jon Burge and many officers working under him regularly engaged in the physical abuse and torture of prisoners to extract confessions,” U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur said in the case of another suspect who claimed he was tortured.

Burge, who lives in Florida, continues to deny that he tortured anyone. His former attorney, William Kunkle, called the department’s report “garbage.”

In calling for an outside investigator to look into allegations of police torture, Bowman and others point out that prosecutors have tried to cut deals with inmates to get them to drop their claims against police.

Cook County State’s Atty. Dick Devine agreed in January to an early release for another defendant, Darrell Cannon, who has served 17 years of a life term for murder as part of a deal that includes his dropping of claims that Burge put a shotgun barrel to his mouth and used an electric cattle prod to shock his genitals.

Bowman and others also say Devine and Cook County prosecutors have too many conflicts of interest.

Devine was an assistant state’s attorney when Richard M. Daley, now Chicago’s mayor, was the county’s top prosecutor. At the time, a number of the criminal cases that involved Burge’s unit went to trial.

The city also paid Devine’s former law firm more than $850,000 to represent Burge and three others in the Andrew Wilson civil lawsuit.

That’s irrelevant, said Assistant State’s Atty. Gerald E. Nora, who is representing Devine in the case to decide whether a special prosecutor is needed.

Nora said the statute of limitations on any crimes that officers may have committed ran out. Even if a conspiracy had existed, he said, it would have been over long ago. There is nothing to prosecute, he said.

The calls for an outside investigator come at a time when the fairness of Illinois’ entire criminal justice system is under increasing scrutiny.

Thirteen death row inmates have been freed because of wrongful convictions since capital punishment was restored in 1977, prompting Gov. George Ryan to declare a moratorium on executions and establish a panel to review the death penalty process.

Earlier this month, three men who served 14 years of their life sentences in prison for the rape and murder of a college student were set free after Cook County prosecutors said there was no evidence they had anything to do with the crime.