One sunny March morning, freed murder convict and tireless rabble-rouser Mark Clements was getting the kind of attention that had eluded him in the nearly three decades he spent in prison. Clements was leading a small rally outside the dreary Cook County Criminal Courthouse at 26th and California. The demonstrators were celebrating the fact that Jon Burge, the notorious former Chicago police commander, would be reporting to prison in North Carolina on this particular day to begin a four-and-a-half-year sentence for obstruction of justice and perjury. Burge oversaw the torture of innumerable suspects in south-side police stations in the 1970s and ’80s, and the fallout from that scandal helped Clements extricate himself from a life sentence.
“You were 16 at the time?” the reporter asked.
“For a crime I didn’t commit.”
“Burge!”
“And every cop who tortured African-Americans and Latinos!” Clements thundered.
Clements resumed the mike. “Hey, guess what?” he said. “Burge is reporting to North Carolina prison right now!”
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His pace is nothing new; his family called him Rabbit when he was a child. (“Because I was fast,” he says. “Because he couldn’t be still,” his mother says.) He enjoys making a ruckus. “He loves that bullhorn,” Marlene Martin says. It amplifies a voice that’s already deep and loud. One-on-one, Clements speaks deliberately, and, as he did at his sentencing, protractedly. The first time he and I talked it was for three hours, the second time for four. We didn’t talk, really; he talked, and I interrupted.
