On February 22 federal magistrate Geraldine Soat Brown ruled that Mayor Richard Daley could at last be put on the hot seat: he would have to answer questions under oath about the Jon Burge torture scandal.
Egan and Boyle issued their final report last July. They concluded that torture had occurred, that it was too late to prosecute anyone, and that the state’s attorney’s office had demonstrated “a bit of slippage”–as Boyle put it at a news conference–in failing to do anything about it. “Slippage” was a remarkable understatement. As each victim was typically subjected to several acts of torture, by several officers, who then proceeded to lie about it multiple times at successive court hearings, the number of unprosecuted felonies committed by the Burge gang could exceed 3,000. (In each case, the officers involved might have been charged with aggravated assault, official misconduct, perjury, obstruction of justice, conspiracy, compelling a confession by force, and intimidation.) Labeling this failure to charge anyone “slippage” was typical of the special prosecutors’ approach to their task. Egan and Boyle are former high-ranking attorneys in the state’s attorney’s office, and their enthusiasm for investigating Daley’s role might best be illustrated by the fact that they didn’t interview him under oath until June 12, 2006, when their report was virtually complete. They asked him about office procedures, personnel assignments, and only one of the more than 50 cases that occurred on his watch, the infamous Andrew Wilson case. Wilson killed two police officers on February 9, 1982. He emerged from Burge’s custody with a corneal abrasion, radiator burns on his chest, the imprint of alligator clips on his ears and nose, and the story that detectives had applied shock devices to his head, genitals, fingers, and back.
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Last year special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle concluded that about 74 men had been tortured at Areas Two and Three. These men were not named, but given the time span of the torture allegations it’s likely that most were tortured during your tenure as state’s attorney, from 1981 to 1989. If the special prosecutors were right, a relatively small group of policemen committed several thousand felonies on your watch. Yet not one officer was indicted. Did you ever suspect that your office was enabling criminal behavior? If you did harbor that suspicion, what action did you take? If you did not, what advice would you have for state’s attorney Richard Devine and other prosecutors regarding police misconduct and torture cases?
According to state’s attorney Devine’s sworn testimony, you would review each case in which prosecutors wanted to seek the death penalty. From the outset there were red flags about Wilson’s confession: Hyman’s failure to ask the coercion question, the police lockup keeper’s refusal to accept Wilson after he emerged from Area Two with so many apparent injuries, the Mercy Hospital records, the Cook County Jail intake photos, the letter from Dr. John Raba, who examined Wilson soon after his arrival at the jail, and a letter from police superintendent Richard Brzeczek asking you for guidance on the matter. Later there would be photographs of alligator-clip-patterned scabs on Wilson’s ears and nose. With so much evidence of coercion, were you comfortable asking that this man be put to death?
In 1998, five years after Burge was fired and three years after the city’s law department formally acknowledged that torture had taken place, the police department gave Dignan a merit promotion to lieutenant, considerably improving his pension. What role did you play in approving that promotion?
- According to a motion filed in federal court recently by attorneys for three of the four men, Judge Marvin Aspen mediated a settlement agreement last November in which the city agreed to pay them $14.8 million and in exchange their lawyers agreed to certain noneconomic terms suggested by the city’s counsel, including that (a) they wouldn’t name you as a defendant “in a civil rights, obstruction of justice, and racketeering conspiracy” and that they would not seek a finding of liability and damages from you for your “alleged conspiratorial actions while serving as Cook County State’s Attorney”; (b) they wouldn’t ask you for a deposition in the three cases though they would continue to seek one from Mr. Devine and other Cook County officials; (c) they wouldn’t criticize you in any public statements made in connection with the settlement.
