CHICAGO Report: Police tortured suspects

Many of the alleged victims are suing the city.
CHICAGO (AP) -- Chicago police beat, kicked, shocked or otherwise tortured scores of black suspects in the 1970s and 1980s to try to extract confessions from them, prosecutors reported Wednesday.
However, the prosecutors -- appointed by a Cook County judge four years ago to look into torture allegations -- said that the cases are too old or too weak to prosecute anyone now.
Prosecutors Robert D. Boyle and Edward Egan said they found evidence that police abused at least half the 148 suspects whose cases were reviewed. Nearly all of the suspects were black.
Among other things, suspects claimed police beat them, played mock Russian roulette, administered electric shocks with a cattle prod-like device and a crank-operated "black box," and threw typewriter covers over their heads to make them gasp for air.
The investigators were not able to substantiate all of the allegations, but made it clear they believed many of the claims, including the use of the black box on at least one man, and said that in the majority of cases, suspects were beaten with fists, feet or telephone books.
Boyle and Egan said that in only three cases involving a total of five former officers was there enough evidence to prosecute, but the three-year statute of limitations has run out.
"We only wish that we could indict on these three cases," Boyle said, after a $6.1 million investigation that involved more than 33,300 documents, the issuance of 217 grand jury subpoenas and interviews of more than 700 people.
Among those five officers was Jon Burge, a lieutenant who commanded a violent-crimes unit and the so-called "midnight crew" that allegedly participated in most of the alleged torture.
Neither Burge nor anyone else has ever been charged, but Burge was fired in 1991 after a police board found that a murder suspect was abused while in custody. Burge's attorney has said that Burge never tortured anyone.
Report
In their 300-page report, the prosecutors accused then-police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek of dereliction of duty and said he and a former top official at the Cook County State's Attorney's office, William Kunkle, failed to pursue an investigation into allegations of torture.
"They can blame me for whatever they want to blame me for," Brzeczek said. "I know what I did was correct. It was not dereliction of duty."
Kunkle, now a Cook County circuit judge, was not available for comment, his staff said.
Mayor Richard M. Daley was the state's attorney during part of the period investigated, but Boyle dismissed any notion that Daley knew about the torture. Daley delegated responsibilities to people in his office, and his only mistake was "perhaps relying on the judgment of others," Boyle said.
The Daley administration had no immediate comment.
The report goes into graphic detail about the torture of Andrew Wilson, the convicted murderer of two Chicago police officers. Wilson said that he was beaten and kicked during his interrogation, and that officers put a plastic bag over his head and burned his arm with a cigarette.
Then, he said, an officer pulled from a grocery bag a black box that had a crank on it. He said alligator clips were attached to his left ear and left nostril and he received a shock when an officer cranked the box. Burge, he said, also cranked the box and then put a gun in Wilson's mouth and clicked it.
The report said no black box was ever recovered. But the report makes it clear that there is ample evidence -- including burn marks on Wilson's nostril and ear -- that such a device was used.