I confess to knowing little about police brutality
in Chicago except that there was rather a lot of it. What I didn't know in particular is how torture was systemised by the Chicago Police under its Democratic Mayor Richard M Daley, the son of an equally
infamous mayor, Richard Daley.
Chicago, a bastion of the right-wing of the
Democrats has been notorious for police violence ever since anti-Vietnam demonstrators protesting outside the 1968 Democratic Convention were set upon by the Police. The
existence of an organised system of torture, organised by its police chief, Jon
Burge led to international publicity and condemnation by the United Nations.
Much of this came to the fore after the revelations
of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. Mayor Daley was implicated in covering up
what happened as Illinois’s public prosecutor. The Marshall Project’s Payback reported that:
In the normal course of things,
the Wilson case would have been a double murder of C.P.D. officers solved in
record time, another brilliant success for Jon Burge. But this time, when Burge
and his men tried to drop Wilson off at the county jail for processing, the
supervisor took one look at him and called the jail's medical examiner. When
the examiner's report reached Dr. John Raba, the jail's medical director, he
was so outraged, he wrote a letter to the C.P.D. superintendent, Richard
Brzeczek. "All these injuries
occurred prior to his arrival at the jail," Raba said. "There must be a thorough investigation
of this alleged brutality."
Brzeczek sent the letter to the
Illinois state's attorney, Richard M. Daley, asking for marching orders. Daley
decided to skip the investigation, and his office proceeded to use the fruits
of Burge's torture session to put Jackie Wilson away for life. Andrew Wilson
got a death sentence.
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| Darrell Cannon - who was tortured into falsely confessing |
Tony Greenstein
Haymarket Books,
By Flint Taylor
March 19, 2019
This is one of those remarkable works that won't fit under any one
category. It's at once a history of a civil and human rights battles in Chicago
with national and global reach.
It is a text of modern urban sociology, an example of critical legal
theory, a long polemic against white and class privilege, a literature of
political exposure, a manual of strategy and tactics and, last but not least,
for Flint himself, an autobiography. In its pages, Chicago’s top lawyer of the
left also shares with us the intense and determined commitment, with all his
highs and lows, that lasted through five decades of his personal life to the
present day.
 |
| Flint Taylor |
Testimony of Jon Burge
The narrative begins with Taylor as a young man, teamed up with other
young radical lawyers fresh from passing their bar exams. They had been working
with Chicago’s Black Panther Party and were among the first on the scene just
after Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed.
As the cops pulled out, the young
lawyers managed to take over and secure the site, and pulled in the media and
community leaders to examine the scene before any evidence was altered or
disappeared. The reaction sent shock waves through Chicago, since it was clear
there was no ‘shoot-out,’ as authorities had claimed, but cold-blooded
assassination by Chicago police, with an assist from the FBI. To make a long
story short, Hampton’s killers were never tried and walked free, but Taylor and
his fellow legal team won a substantial wrongful death settlement from the City
of Chicago for Hampton’s family in 1982. In the spirit of the times, the young
lawyers took their share of the settlement and used it help sustain the
People’s Law Office (PLO), dedicated to fighting police brutality and other
injustices in the greater Chicago area, which they had founded in 1969.
To this day, the Chicago Police Department has never stopped supplying
the PLO and other progressive lawyers with a constant source of new clients
seeking justice. Whether by mistreating young people of color on the streets,
trying to suppress free speech and protest, abusing of men in prison, attacking
the LBGTQ community, or warping the courts with false evidence and accusations,
through the daily practice of the CPD, the State’s Attorney’s office and City
Hall, Chicagoans experienced or witnessed a decades-long reign of terror
carried out by a police force with the rarely, if ever, observed mission of 'we
serve and protect.’
The book cover of 'The Torture Machine’ features an odd graphic
at the heart of the story. Anyone not yet familiar will be puzzled by it. It’s
a plain black box with a series of wires streaming out of it, along with a
crank handle and knobs. It’s a replica of a device concocted by GIs in Vietnam
to torture captured Vietnamese, both soldiers and civilians. Based on field
telephones that could be charged up by cranking the handle, the wires, with
alligator clips, would be connected to fingers, ears, nipples, testicles and
genitals to deliver severe shocks and burns. Its jerry-rigged purpose was to torture
those it was inflicted upon, to punish, and to extract information, all at
once.
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| Protesters in Chicago |
What did the device have to do with Chicago? Taylor and the PLO team, in
taking up brutality and wrongful conviction cases over several years, kept
hearing from clients that 'confessions’ had been extracted from them by
torture, and these accounts often had one thing in common, the mention of this
device and its use in Chicago’s Area Two police headquarters, in its upstairs
detective offices headed up by Lt. Jon Burge, and a team of more than a dozen
detectives and other CPD officers.
Flint Taylor
The PLO lawyers did a simple but radical thing. They took their clients
at their word. They believed them and set about digging up the truth of their
claims. They learned that Burge was a Vietnam veteran, and learned to use the
electric shock device on prisoners during the war. Once Burge was in the CPD
and moving up to detective rank, he had built at least one of his own, and was
making use of it on Black male prisoners. And not just one or two prisoners,
but at least 100 or more. Nor was it a rare event. Burge did it regularly, over
decades. Nor did he do it alone; he had a squad of more than a dozen Area 2 and
Area 3 detectives regularly using the box and other torture devices, such as
plastic bags for suffocation. While they worked this evil mainly at night in
the upstairs rooms of Area 2, they weren’t hidden from other cops. Others, all
the way to the top of the CPD, knew about it. Likewise, the States Attorneys,
some judges, and the Mayor’s office-in short, to one degree or another, the
entire criminal justice system in the city was complicit in torture and other
human rights abuses.
These assertions may seem far-fetched and over-the-top, at least to
those unfamiliar with Chicago’s politics and police. But the power of the book
is Taylor’s relentless and tenacious bringing the truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth, to the surface and the bright light of day. He had to do
it doggedly, repetitively and sometimes little piece by little piece, decade
after decade. But in the end, there it is, and there’s no one who can deny it
without turning beet red with shame.
The torture saga begins with an incident in the early 1980s, where two
Chicago police officers were shot and killed in an altercation with several
Black men they had stopped. Over the next five days, six men were soon rounded
up and tortured, and two of them, Andrew and Jackie Wilson, brothers, made
'confessions’ and were found guilty of the killings. Jackie Wilson contended
that police abused him during interrogation, and his co-defendant and brother
Andrew, was found by doctors after his interrogation to have numerous injuries.
From prison, Andrew Wilson contacted the PLO and asked if they would work on a
federal civil rights case, since his confession was extracted by torture.
'Labyrinthine’ would be a mild word for the complex manoeuvres through
the courts on the cases of the two brothers over several years. But thanks to
the PLO and allies, Jackie Wilson, sentenced to life, won his freedom. Andrew
Wilson, sentenced to death, won a new trial, was convicted again, but was
sentenced to life instead of death, and eventually died in prison. Andrew had
also won a federal civil rights judgment.
Intermixed with the Wilson cases are dozens of others, some who
committed no crime save being in the wrong place at the wrong time, with many
victories for the defendants and their families. The crass examples of racial
and class privilege and abuse in the prisons and courts introduced in Taylor’s
accounts could fill a book on any one of those charged.
Chicago authorities were not happy with the work of the PLO lawyers.
Time and again they were slandered as liars, con artists and only in it for the
money made in million-dollar settlements. The cops were especially hostile and
the source of threats of violence as well. But opposing attorneys, politicians,
and supposedly neutral judges piled on as well.
Several key points, however, stand out in the course of the book and the
evidence behind it. First, Taylor and his PLO colleagues were meticulous in
putting the interests of their clients and their client’s families first and
foremost. Second, they went to great lengths in 'seeking truth from facts’,
even when dangerous to themselves. Third, they deserved every penny they got,
and continue to get, in settlements- a good deal of which keeps the People’s
Law Office alive and functioning for future cases.
But Taylor also had another motive, which weaves through the book like a
red thread. He is determined to bring Jon Burge to justice, to try him in a
court of law, and see him sent to prison. Moreover, he wants to see Burge’s
boss, Richard M. Daley, held accountable. To accomplish these goals, Taylor and
the PLO are well aware that the effort will be political as well as legal.
This is where a unique value of 'The Torture Machine’ shines.
It’s a field manual of strategy and tactics, and Taylor is very good at it.
From the start, he seizes every opportunity at the use of media to build his
clients’ stories with a bigger picture of big-city politics, corruption, and
injustice. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small neighborhood newsletter, the
independent Chicago Reader, the widely read free paper selling futons
along with progressive news, the Chicago Defender and other small Black
newspapers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune, local and national TV,
and the New York Times and other national publications. As one of his
adversaries warned, 'there’s nothing more
dangerous than letting Flint Taylor get in front of a camera or microphone.’
Even in unfriendly news outlets, Taylor takes the trouble to find and
befriend those reporters with an open mind and a degree of professional
objectively, if not sympathy. His goal seems to be recognizing that the court
record is not the only record of value, and once something is in print or on
tape, it might have multiple uses elsewhere, in or out of court, and often
does. Taylor is also deft at building organizations and making use of
coalitions, acknowledging a truth that trials are not only won in courtrooms,
but in the wider community as well. Organizations not 'officers of the court’
can often speak more freely to the public. To win the victories and settlements
aimed for, the PLO often had to assist in building an entire counter-hegemonic
bloc, from people in the neighborhoods to the media and political groups, to a
majority of the City Council.
Taylor and his comrades also do well in finding and making good use of
conflicts and tensions in the camp of their adversaries. They evaluate judges
one by one, check out the family inter-connections of various police officers
and officials, looking for hints of bias, and make good use of the well-known
differences between African American patrolmen and the rest of the force-all to
find information to get them closer to the truths that will help their clients.
A handful of cops even come forward out of the blue, disgusted with what they
know is happening and breaking the 'code of silence.’ One goes to great length
to remain secret-Flint nicknames him or her 'Deep Badge’-but he or she helped
reveal the scope and breadth of the torture scandal (it was early on in the
history of the scandal)
In the end, Taylor gets his man. First Burge is suspended, then fired,
and retires with his pension and boat, the Vigilante (you can’t make this up!).
But even as the statute of limitations runs out, Taylor makes trips to Florida
(with bodyguard) to depose Burge, gets him back in court, and gets him found
guilty of perjury, and finally sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison. Burge
is broken physically but remains an unbowed racist and fascist to the bitter
end. His luck with Daley is not quite as good. Taylor wins motion after motion
to bring Daley to a deposition table, but Daley is not without resources and
manages to parry all but one narrow last decision, one that might still go the
wrong way for the former mayor. The final version of the book reveals that
Daley, now suffering from the effects of a reported stroke, was deposed by
Taylor in 2018 but the transcript is shrouded in court-ordered secrecy.
As Taylor notes, however, this is far from the only reason that Burge’s
fate is only a partial victory. True, the PLO and allied lawyers have forced
the city to pay over $130 million to those tortured and their families-not
counting the enormous costs of lawyers for the police. Many police involved
remain free and many tortured prisoners remain behind bars. The torture
outrages will 'never be behind us,’ Taylor
writes in his epilogue, not until Chicago 'reckons
fully with the racist nature of law enforcement and mass incarceration.’
[Carl Davidson is the editor of Leftlinks, a DSA member and serves on
the National Committee of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and
Socialism. He is author of several books, including 'New Paths to Socialism,’ available
atChangemaker Publications.]
Payback
Chicago Police Commander Jon
Burge and his crew tortured false confessions out of hundreds of black men.
Decades later, the survivors fought for reparations.
By Natalie Y. Moore
Filed
6:00 a.m. 10.30.2018
May 6, 2015—Whereas, the City Council wishes
to acknowledge this exceedingly sad and painful chapter in Chicago's history,
and to formally express its profound regret for any and all shameful treatment
of our fellow citizens that occurred; and . . .
The nightmare starts in 1983. Darrell Cannon is driving a car down an
expressway, looking for a place to dump a body. Since his elementary school
days, he's been affiliated with a gang known as the Blackstone Rangers. By his
mid-teens, he was a high school dropout working for a Blackstone leader named
Jeff Fort, which is how he came to kill a man and go to prison the first time.
Now he's out and back in the mix, and a few hours ago, another gang member
named A.D. killed someone and asked him to help clean up the scene of the
crime.
They find a spot, toss out the body and speed away as fast as they can.
A few days later, police arrest Cannon for the murder. He tells them he
was just along for the ride, but they aren't in the mood to listen. They drive
to a remote spot by a railroad track and stand him up in the road with his
hands handcuffed behind him. One of the officers holds out a 10-inch cattle
prod and another holds a pump-action shotgun. In an affidavit for one of the
appeals he will file years later, he'll remember the warning one of the officers
gave him: "You're in for a long, hard day. We have a scientific way of
interrogating niggers."
See also
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