LAW AND ORDER, CALIFORNIA-STYLE

Tribune Op-Ed, March 1, 2000

By Cathryn E. Stewart and G. Flint Taylor.

When the Los Angeles police scandal broke a few months ago, citizens were horrified to learn that as many as 20 Los Angeles anti-gang officers were relieved of duty for planting drugs, fabricating evidence and even killing a man and placing a gun next to his body to make it look like a justifiable shooting. What surprised many, however, was the city's response.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's office acknowledged that the officers committed illegal acts and opened closed cases to look for tainted evidence. Forty cases have been overturned because of the allegations that the officers framed innocent people. The district attorney's office demonstrated its understanding that public trust in the criminal justice system outweighs the need to preserve criminal convictions resting on tainted evidence.

The actions of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office stand in stark contrast to the Cook County state's attorney's office. Consider the wealth of evidence against Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge, fired by the police board in 1993. Burge's tactics of using torture to force confessions from suspects have been widely documented, resulting in civil judgments and new court proceedings for some of his victims.

The Illinois Appellate Court has ordered a hearing in the case of convicted murderer Darrell Cannon to determine whether there was a pattern and practice of torture at the time Cannon "confessed" to detectives working for Burge.

Despite evidence in Cannon's case and several others, the state's attorney's office has refused to meaningfully review cases to see if they were tainted by police brutality. In fact, the office has spent untold amounts of money and man-hours resisting court inquiry into allegations of torture by people on Death Row whose confessions were obtained by Burge and officers under his command. For example, the Cook County state's attorney's office has consistently attempted to block efforts of the Death Row 10, a group of condemned men who each maintain he was tortured into confessing by Burge, to obtain hearings on their long-standing claims that the confessions used to convict them were the product of police torture.

When prosecutors were presented with documents that 17-year-old Mario Hayes was in jail at the time of the murder to which he confessed, they did not concede police error but instead attacked the record-keeping practices of the Cook County Jail. Hayes was tried not once, but twice, and ultimately acquitted. Then there is the case of Eddie Huggins, a 15-year-old who allegedly confessed to stabbing a woman.

After being presented with undisputed evidence that the victim was strangled to death and that blood from the victim was found on another man's coat, prosecutors still forged ahead with a trial, having no reason to suspect Huggins other than the so-called confession that was patently inconsistent with the evidence. Huggins also was acquitted at trial. Ronald Jones spent several years on Death Row for a rape and murder that he did not commit.

The Cook County state's attorney's office spent months fighting against Jones' efforts to have DNA tests performed. Despite those efforts, the tests were performed and Jones was exonerated and released from Death Row. These and other cases reflect an apparent unwillingness on the part of the state's attorney's office to place the truth-seeking function of the justice system above the goal of securing convictions.

The costs of this practice include not only the conviction and incarceration of innocent people but also erosion of public confidence in our criminal justice system. There is no doubt that the Cook County state's attorney's office and the Chicago Police Department must work hand in hand to protect citizens and uphold the law. The identification of wrongful-conviction cases reveals the tragic consequences of injustice and presents an opportunity to repair our system. The Cook County state's attorney's office should lead the efforts to reform the criminal justice system in Illinois, just as Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti is doing in California.