By KATIE FRETLAND and RACHEL CROMIDAS
June 28, 2010
Jon Burge, the former Chicago Police commander at the center of the city’s decades long police torture scandal, was convicted today on federal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. He faces up to 45 years in prison
Burge, 62, was expressionless as the verdict was read. He was found guilty of lying under oath in a 2003 civil court case about the torture of African American police suspects in the 1970’s and ’80’s. The jury — seven men and five women, including one African American– began deliberations at 3 p.m. Thursday. Their verdict marks the first criminal conviction of a cop in the police torture scandal. A report of a suspect being tortured by Chicago police first surfaced in 1973.
Juror Gary Dollinger, 31, said the testimonies of a former detective who was granted immunity and a convicted killer who died while in prison were crucial to his vote for conviction.
“I think it was first there was an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing to the fact that he was lying on his statements and there was some torture going on at Area 2 to coerce statements, between Andrew Wilson and Mike McDermott’s testimonies … those were the two biggest things that really pushed me over the top,” Dollinger, the CEO of an IT consultancy, said.
McDermott, Dollinger said, “he gets on the stand he looks a little scared when he’s up there, he’s got a lot on the line, they’re threatening to cut his pension, cut his health benefits lose his job.”
McDermott is a former police detective who testified he saw Burge point his gun in the direction of the area where a suspect was and that he saw Burge hold something to the suspect’s face. McDermott was an unhappy witness, who said he feared being charged with perjury and obstruction of justice if he did not recall details of the 1985 incident as the prosecution wanted him to.
McDermott’s testimony was inconsistent with his grand jury testimony.
“He changed his statement, but he never said no, there was no brutality,” Dollinger said. “[Burge] still pointed a gun and something plastic over his face.”
“All people who care about justice had a major victory today,” said Flint Taylor, an attorney for many of Burge’s accusers.
Burge attorney Bill Gamboney said he was “very disappointed and somewhat surprised” by the verdict.
“We’re starting to muster our resources together for a motion for a new trial and ultimately an appeal if it comes to that,” Gamboney said.
Burge supporter Jim Knightly, a retired Chicago police captain, vented his disappointment with the verdict.
“That they would take the word of convicted felons over a highly-decorated police officer,” Knightly said. “I’m sure Flint Taylor, the liberal attorney who has been hounding him for years, is happy. I hope he can sleep at night.”
“I’m glad it’s over,” said Ald. Ed Smith (28th), who sat through much of the trial. “This has been a great concern for a lot of people. It’s a case that has caused a black eye on the city.”
Smith said that the verdict should open the door for the release of Burge accusers who are currently imprisoned.
More than 100 people have accused Burge and officers under his command of torturing them during the 1970’s and 1980’s. The men said they were electroshocked, suffocated with plastic bags, subjected to mock executions, beaten and burned. The allegations contributed to the decision to place a moratorium on executions in Illinois, and Chicago agreed to a nearly $20 million settlement to four men who were pardoned.
Prosecutors never filed charges of assault or attempted murder and the statute of limitations has since run out.
Mark Clements, 45, cried in front of reporters in courthouse lobby Monday. He said detectives under Burge pulled on his genitals until he confessed to four murders and an arson. He served 28 years.
“I was 16 years old and these people stole my [expletive] life,” he sobbed. “I hate to tell you the truth. I sat in a prison cell, and I prayed for this day. Today is a victory for every poor person. I was 16 years old. This is America. Sixteen years old. What are we gonna do about other people who are sitting in those prisons.”
More than 20 people who claim they were tortured remain incarcerated in Illinois.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said the jury’s decision was a measure of justice, and that it was sad that it took until 2010 to reach a criminal court of law.
“What’s clear is that the jury necessarily found that torture occurred in Chicago police stations at Area 2 in the 1980’s and it’s a disgrace that in this city in the 1980’s people could be subjected to abuse and torture ranging from guns to the face, guns in mouths. Suffocating, electric shocks, radiator burns and that sort of thing.”
“We need to have it on the record that this happened,” Fitzgerald said. “We need to treat it as a fact that it was proved and recognize that it was an awful thing before we can move forward.”
During the past month’s trial, federal prosecutors called four men to the witness stand to testify they were abused in an effort to prove the perjury and obstruction charges. The jury also heard testimony from Andrew Wilson, who died serving a life sentence for the killings of two police officers.
The defense argued that the police torture claims were fabricated by career criminals for the purpose of getting out of jail, and Burge broke years of silence to testify in his own defense, denying each allegation brought against him during the trial. His lawyers played up his dedication to police work — that he often went out on the street with his officers, looked in on interrogations and spent days working without going home on the case of the killings of two police officers. Burge, ill with cancer, broke down crying on the witness stand talking about that investigation.
Burge joined the police department in 1970 and two years later was assigned as an investigator at Area 2, where many of the alleged victims said they were brutalized by police.
A doctor who saw one man’s injuries in 1982 wrote a letter to then-police superintendent Richard Brzeczek asking for an investigation into a case of possible police brutality. Brzeczek forwarded the letter to Mayor Richard M. Daley, then Cook County State’s Attorney, but charges were never brought against any officers.
Daley’s name was not mentioned during the trial.
The Chicago Police Board fired Burge in 1993, three years after a report by the police department’s Office of Professional Standards sustained Wilson’s accusation that Burge abused him and found evidence of systemic abuse at Area Two.
Taylor said men who worked under Burge could still be prosecuted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. As of May, a grand jury was hearing matters involving detectives who worked under Burge at Area Two in the 1970’s and 1980’s, according to documents filed in the Burge case.
Fitzgerald declined to comment on that investigation.
Judge Joan Lefkow found that eight people could take the Fifth Amendment and not testify in the Burge case. They are former assistant state’s attorney Larry Hyman and retired police officers Michael Hoke, Thomas McKenna, Ronald Boffo, James Pienta, John Paladino, Dave Dioguardi and Leonard Bajenski.
Clements said he will never get back the time he missed with his daughter.
“My daughter is 29 years old,” he said. “I missed all those years with my daughter sitting in a prison cell for a crime I did not commit. I do not feel sorry for Jon Burge. I do not feel sorry for him.”
Fitzgerald: Burge Verdict is a 'Measure of Justice' from Chicago News Cooperative on Vimeo.
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