Illinois criminal courts handed down a 4 year sentence to Jon Graham Burge, a convicted felon and former Chicago Police Department commander, who gained notoriety for torturing more than 200 criminal suspects between 1972 and 1991, in order to force confessions. A decorated United States Army veteran, Burge served tours in South Korea and Vietnam and continued as an enlisted United States Army Reserve soldier where he served in the military police. He then returned to the South Side of Chicago and began his career as a police officer.
Allegations were made about the methods of Burge and those under his command. Eventually, hundreds of similar reports resulted in a decision by Illinois Governor George Ryan to declare a moratorium on death penalty executions in Illinois in 2000 and to clear the state’s death row in 2003.
From the pattern of accusations against Jon Burge, it would appear that he began using electric shock to interrogate suspects in May, 1973. In the decades that followed, more than 100 men and one woman complained of shock, suffocation, mock executions, hangings by handcuffs, and other forms of torture and abuse administered by Burge and detectives under his command. The last accusations surfaced in the wake of arrests made in 1991.
Although the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office was aware that there was a pattern of accusations and convincing medical evidence, successive county prosecutors, including current Democrat Mayor Richard Daley, declined to investigate, even though leaving those stones unturned might mean that innocent men would be executed by the state. Federal prosecutors also declined to indict when approached in 1990.
Because of that prosecutorial reluctance, the statute of limitations on the acts of torture lapsed. Burge’s 2008 indictment by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was something of a fluke. Burge had made broad denials of the torture in two documents in a 2003 civil suit, and on the basis of less than 60 words, Fitzgerald found a way to indict him for perjury and obstruction of justice. He was convicted last June and sentenced on Friday, January 18, 2011. At sentencing, Burge’s attorney “praised him as ‘a man’s man,”’ so tough that even at 63 and in ill health he’d be a formidable foe in a fight.” More.