New hearings sought in Chicago police torture case

By KAREN HAWKINS - Associated Press | Aug. 9, 2011



CHICAGO (AP) — Fifteen incarcerated men who claim they were sent to prison

by confessions that were beaten, burned and tortured out of them by

convicted Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge and his officers are getting some

high-profile help — including from a former Illinois governor.



In a friend-of-the-court brief to be filed Wednesday with the Illinois

Supreme Court, ex-Gov. Jim Thompson and more than 60 current and former

prosecutors, judges and lawmakers are asking for new evidentiary hearings

for inmates who say their convictions were based on coerced confessions.



The brief marks the first effort on behalf of alleged Burge victims as a

group and not separate individual cases, attorneys said.



Burge's name has become synonymous with police abuse in the nation's

third-largest city, and more than 100 men — most of them African-American

and Latino— have alleged Burge and his men tortured them from the 1970s to

the 1990s.



Burge was convicted last year of lying about whether he ever witnessed or

participated in the torture of suspects. He's serving a 4 1/2-year

sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.



Burge never has faced criminal charges for abuse. He was fired from the

police department in 1993 over the 1982 beating and burning of Andrew

Wilson, a suspect later convicted of killing two police officers.



The brief "gives the Illinois Supreme Court the opportunity to finally and

firmly repudiate the Burge era of the Chicago Police Department," said

Thompson, a former Republican Illinois governor and U.S. attorney.



Lawyers are filing the brief in the case of Stanley Wrice, an inmate who

has been claiming since 1982 that he falsely confessed to a brutal sexual

assault only after Burge's officers beat him in the face and groin with a

flashlight and a piece of rubber.



Wrice, 57, is serving a 100-year sentence. Attorneys say he's one of the

longest-serving inmates with a Burge torture claim.



Each of Wrice's attempts for a new hearing had been turned down until

December, when the appellate court granted him a new evidentiary hearing.

Prosecutors looking to block the hearing asked the Illinois Supreme Court

to take the case, and the justices agreed.



At issue before the high court is whether a coerced confession can ever be

considered "harmless error" in a criminal trial, attorneys said. The

special prosecutor's office that's handling Wrice's case has argued that a

conviction could stand — even if it involved a coerced confession — if the

person could have been proven guilty without the confession.



Wrice's case has gone farther than any other current claim involving

Burge, and other inmates are either awaiting decisions or have given up,

attorneys say. The brief to be filed Wednesday asks the high court to:

order prosecutors to identify each inmate who claims their confession was

coerced by Burge or his men; appoint lawyers to inmates who need them;

order evidentiary hearings in the cases; and to order the Cook County

Circuit Court to vacate the convictions of inmates whose convictions it

was determined were based on coerced confessions.



Justices "have an opportunity to take control of this problem and to fix

it," said attorney Locke Bowman, who plans to file the brief. He's

represented several alleged torture victims who have been freed from

prison and have civil suits pending against Burge.



The brief's signers include both attorneys and advocates who have

represented alleged Burge victims as well as former prosecutors, judges

and politicians who have rarely, if ever, publicly weighed in on the Burge

case.



"This brief is a group of non-usual suspects coming forward to implore the

court to seize the opportunity to declare emphatically that torture has no

place in our criminal justice system," said Bowman, legal director of the

MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University.



Former U.S. Attorney Thomas Sullivan said he signed on to stop the

piecemeal approach the Burge cases have taken in the past.



"I feel that it's important that there be a full judicial examination of

what went on...not case by case," Sullivan said.



Heidi Lambros, one of Wrice's attorneys, said the friend-of-the-court

brief was signed by "some heavy hitters" to help demonstrate an outside

perspective on the case.



She said she is also pleased with a brief filed Tuesday by students

working with the Chicago Innocence Project, who got affidavits from

witnesses in the Wrice case who say they were tortured into implicating

him.



Thompson said that while the hearings will take time and money, "the end

is worth it."



The Supreme Court could hear oral arguments in Wrice's case as early as

mid-September.