Torture In Chicago
Update October 21, 2008: JOHN BURGE INDICTED
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Torture and the Mayor Commentary |
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From the 1970’s well into the 1990’s, a band of white Chicago police officers led by Jon Burge routinely tortured African-Americans suspected of crimes. This was not garden-variety police brutality, such as kickings, stompings, beatings. It was real torture in the third world sense -- electrical shocks to the ears, lips and genitals, cigarette burns to the arms, legs and chest, plastic bags over heads, shacklings to hot radiators, gun barrels in mouths. In the quarter of a century since the scandal came to light in 1982, the City of Chicago, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, and the judges of the Cook County Criminal Courts became part of a web of denial and cover-ups. Special prosecutors appointed in 2002 failed to act while the statute of limitations ran on certain criminal charges that clearly could have been brought.
Read:
The Failure of Special Prosecutors Egan and Boyle