Trial by Torture
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Trial by Torture
Think the LAPD and NYPD are corrupt? Over two decades, a single
brutal unit of the Chicago Police Department allegedly tortured confessions
out of dozens of suspects, including 10 who are now on death row. Now, some
of them are finally getting another day in court.
by Sasha Abramsky
March 3, 2000
Darrell Cannon and his attorney discuss Cannon's
alleged torture by Chicago police
Sitting in an interview room deep within the walls of Unit Nine,
Darrell Cannon hunches over suddenly, his huge hands clench and unclench,
and his jaw works wildly as he tries to rein in his emotions. It doesn't
help. The six-foot-three-inch prisoner, a senior figure in El Rukn, one of
Chicago's most notorious gangs, begins to cry.
Metamorphosis. The 48-year-old has become a terrified child. "I
hate them just that bad," he says softly through his tears.
It's an hour and a half into the interview, and either Cannon
has just demonstrated an improbably powerful acting talent -- responding
exactly how physicians who examine torture victims expect them to behave
when reliving their torment -- or he has just finished recounting a chilling
true story of police torture.
Unit Nine is one of three maximum-security wings in Chicago's
sprawling Cook County Jail. Cannon has been housed here since mid-1998, when
he was moved up from a state prison to attend court hearings on a motion to
suppress the 1983 confession that landed him a life sentence for murder.
Cannon has never denied that he was driving the car in which a
young man was shot and killed, but has long argued that he neither knew in
advance about the murder nor participated in it -- and that he only
confessed after a prolonged encounter with the fists, boots, shotguns, and
cattle prods of the police who arrested him. His denial of the murder plans
may or may not wash, but the torture claims could eventually land him a new
trial.
Cannon is getting another day in court, more than a decade and a
half after the crime, with the help of attorneys Flint Taylor and Tim
Lohraff of the People's Law Office -- and he's not alone.
Cannon's diagram of police torture. Click the image to see
an annotated enlargement.
Dozens of other prisoners have come forward saying they were
tortured into confessing by police officers from Chicago's Area Two who
were, at the time, under the leadership of Commander Jon Burge. Their claims
are hair-raising -- and remarkably consistent. They tell of alligator clips
attached to their ears, noses, mouths, penises, and testicles; of electric
shocks to the genitals; of being burned atop radiators. Now, after years of
such claims being brushed aside, at least five prisoners in addition to
Cannon who say they were tortured are having arguments heard in the state
and federal courts this year. All told, 10 people on Illinois' death row
claim they were tortured by Burge's squad into admitting guilt, and the
validity of the confessions of dozens of other current and former prisoners
are now in doubt.
This could turn into one of the great scandals in modern
American judicial history, exposing a pattern of police violence as horrific
as many of the crimes against which they were supposed to be fighting.
Due process be damned
The mentality of the police, according to then-head of the
Chicago PD Richard Brzeczek, seems to have been "'we know he did it, but we
have to circumvent these goofy rules of due process, either by lying or
fabricating evidence, whatever it takes to convict this person.' Or they'd
fabricate evidence and lie even though somebody didn't commit the offense.
(They thought) it's OK, because he's going to do the time for all the crimes
he didn't get caught for."
Darrell Cannon is, to put it mildly, no saint. Initiated into
his gang at 14, he spent two years in a juvenile detention center for
shooting two rival gang members. Later, as an adult, he spent 13 years in
prison on a murder rap. He was released in early 1983, but soon migrated
back into the arms of El Rukn.
Less than a year later, the ex-prisoner was involved in another
murder. A small-timer named Darrin Ross owed some drug money to A.D., a
gangster colleague of Cannon's. Darrell and A.D. took Ross for a ride. Ross'
body was later found in one of the far South Side's remote tracts of
low-slung public housing.
It wasn't too long before the police from Burge's Area Two
violent crimes squad caught up with Cannon. The cops arrested Cannon inside
his apartment early in the morning, and then took their prisoner for a
little ride of their own. Several hours later, they had a confession.
Cannon claims that the officers drove him to a deserted
wasteground near the city's southernmost limits. "It was normal," Cannon,
says for the police "to beat you up a little bit, put a few bruises on your
head. But what the characters here was doing was very out of character."
Darrell Cannon in the Cook County Jail.
Cannon alleges that first the officers suspended him by his
arms, which were handcuffed behind his back. Then, he says, an officer named
Peter Dignan pulled a shotgun from the car's trunk and showed Cannon the
shell in its chamber, saying "Look at this, nigger." According to Cannon,
the officers then forced the gun into his mouth, and pulled the trigger --
but through a sleight of hand, the cops had slipped the shell out of the
gun's barrel. The trigger clicked, Cannon's hair stood on end, and the
officers started laughing, he says. "In my lifetime, I'd never experienced
anything remotely close to this," Cannon recalls.
Three times, Cannon was mock-executed. Still he wouldn't
confess. And so, Cannon says, the officers re-cuffed him with his hands
stretched out above his head, laid him down on the backseat of the car,
pulled his trousers and underwear down, and stuck a cattle-prod to his
testicles.
"It was a burning sensation that seemed to go all through [my]
body. After about the fourth time, I lost count. The pain got to the point
where I couldn't handle it anymore and I told them that I'd say whatever
they wanted me to say."
Cannon's lawyer brought up the torture charges during his trial,
but the judge refused to hear him out. (That judge is now serving time for
accepting bribes.) Cannon was sentenced to life without parole.
A history of brutality
Chicago has a long history of violence, both gangster- and
police-related. The People's Law Office, now representing Cannon and many
other putative torture victims, first made a name for itself by
investigating the FBI and Chicago police force's role in the shooting deaths
of Chicago's Black Panther leadership in the late 1960s. Last summer,
arresting officers managed to shoot three unarmed suspects to death in the
space of a couple of weeks. Last autumn, a jury awarded $28 million to a man
shot and paralyzed by police.
Cannon's story was echoed by numerous black men in Chicago over
a period of two decades. In the 1980s, Chicago judges routinely dismissed
these claims as fabrications concocted by desperate prisoners who were
facing either the death penalty or life behind bars. Still, the city often
paid out cash settlements to these prisoners -- without ever admitting the
truth of their allegations. This held for Cannon: Although the police never
admitted torturing Cannon, they did agree to a civil settlement of several
thousand dollars.
Over the following years, allegations by several dozen other
prisoners came to light, all claiming similar treatment at the hands of the
Violent Crimes Unit of South Chicago's precinct Areas Two and Three.
Gradually, largely due to the detective work of lawyers such as Taylor and
Lohraff, a pattern emerged. Either the dozens of men, all of whom were
African American and few of whom knew each other, had all coincidentally
fabricated essentially the same story over a period of nearly two decades to
numerous different attorneys, or a cabal of white police officers under the
command of Jon Burge were torturing a significant number of suspects into
making confessions.
One of them is Aaron Patterson, a former gang member who had
grown up near the old steel mills on the south side of Chicago. In 1986 he
was arrested and charged him with the particularly vicious stabbing murders
of an old Hispanic couple, named the Sanchezes, who had served as
neighborhood fences for stolen goods. It took a while, but eventually
Patterson confessed. However, the young man waited until his interrogators
were out of the room, and then used a paper clip to etch into a bench that
he had only admitted to the crime after being suffocated with a typewriter
bag, beaten, and told by Burge that he would be shot and killed unless he
owned up. "I passively agreed to what they said," he told me in a letter,
"by repeating these words, 'whatever you say,' every time they kept saying
things in reference to the case." As soon as he got to court, Patterson told
the judge he'd only confessed after being tortured.
The judge wanted none of it, and Patterson wound up on death
row. Now, he is hoping that newly uncovered evidence pointing to another
suspect's guilt for the Sanchez murder will free him, and hoping the courts
will recognize that he was tortured in time to prevent his execution.
The orchestrator
Jon Burge grew up in the working class Irish communities of
southern Chicago. A red-head with a pugilist's frame, he served as a
military policeman during the Vietnam War. That's likely where he first came
into contact with tools of the trade such as the electric shock-producing
"Tucker Telephone," as well as psychological torture methods such as
meticulously staged mock executions.
In the early 1970s, Burge joined the Chicago police force,
rapidly rising up the ranks. By the early 1980s, he headed the violent
crimes squad in the drug- and gang-infested south side streets patrolled by
the Chicago PD's Area Two. In the late 1980s, he moved over to Area Three,
taking his methods with him.
Burge was a popular commander, a hands-on leader who inspired
the trust of his underlings. In the summers Burge would live on his boat,
The Vigilante, hosting cop parties on the waters of Lake Michigan. Sources
have told Darrell Cannon's lawyers that, at these water-borne gatherings,
Burge would boast of his ability to break prisoners.
Burge's unit got results: They solved bloody homicides and got
numerous dubious characters off the streets and into Illinois' prisons.
There was only one problem. Scores of the poor, always African American men
who confessed their misdeeds to Burge's unit would tell their
state-appointed defense lawyers, and often the judges hearing their cases,
that they had been viciously brutalized by Burge or his underlings. They
claimed that they had had alligator clips attached to sensitive parts of
their bodies and had electric shocks administered; sometimes cattle prods
were used. They claimed that they had had bags put over their heads for
minutes at a time, a technique known as the "Dry Submarino."
Others stated they had been burned atop radiators or subjected
to mock executions, like Cannon's. Several drew detailed diagrams of the
instruments used to torment them. Others, including Cannon, directed
investigators from the Office of Professional Standards to the locations
where the violence allegedly occurred.
Burge seemed to revel in his power to inflict injury on those he
had within his clutches. In many cases, the people he and his colleagues
allegedly tortured had probably done the crimes he was extracting
confessions about. Other times, they may well have been innocent of the
particular crime of which they were being accused, but guilty of a slew of
other offenses.
But, in February 1982, Burge's unit slipped up, leaving such
visible torture marks on a prisoner that the courts were eventually forced
to take action.
That month, three Chicago police officers were shot dead,
prompting the force to launch one of the biggest manhunts in its history.
Hundreds of officers combed the streets, arresting young black men, frisking
people at random, saturating the ghetto in their search for the killers.
Amid a welter of publicity, two brothers were picked up and
taken to Area Two's headquarters. The elder brother, Andrew Wilson, later
was taken to the county jail with severe facial bruising and cuts suggestive
of a prolonged pistol-whipping, strange alligator-clip marks on his ears,
nose, penis, and testicles, marks indicative of wires having been attached
to his extremities, and large burns on his body. The jail was so concerned
that his lawyers would blame its staff for the injuries that they refused to
admit him without a doctor examining him first. Police chief Brzeczek was
contacted, and in his words, gave the local commanders "one of the great
chewing-outs of a lifetime."
Andrew Wilson was sentenced to death. But three years later
Wilson's confession was indeed thrown out by the Supreme Court, which found
ample evidence of excessive police force. In 1987, at a new trial, Wilson's
original death sentence was changed to life without parole. Wilson then sued
the city and eventually won a $1.1 million settlement.
Breaking ranks
As the scandal unraveled in the early 1990s, Chicago's political
establishment gradually began to abandon Burge. Decorated war hero and
police commander that he was, he was to take the fall for all of the
violence and brutality and disregard for due process that had permeated
Areas Two and Three for a quarter of a century under the studiedly blind eye
of Chicago's political machine.
Brzeczek claims to have ordered a special internal investigation
into Wilson's torture shortly after it happened, and to have sent a letter
to Richard Daley Jr., then the State's Attorney, in charge of Illinois'
prosecutors. (Daley is now Chicago's mayor.)
In the letter, Brzeczek outlined the specific charges against
Burge and his team, detailed his belief that top officers in the precinct
must have known what was going on in their holding cells, and called for a
broad outside investigation. Daley's office never replied.
"This was not a legal decision," Brzeczek asserts, "but a
political decision. They chose to ignore it." But, when Wilson's lawyer
successfully appealed the death-penalty conviction and won the suit against
Chicago, Burge's star began to wane.
In December 1991, after two years of demonstrations and a
scathing Amnesty International report, the city's leadership suspended
Burge. More than 2,000 police officers demonstrated in support of him, and
black-tie fund-raisers were held in his honor. Nevertheless, facing a
mountain of evidence as to Area Two's brutal methods, Burge was fired in
1993.
Yet despite dropping Burge, the police department and
prosecutors never admitted a systematic pattern of abuse, settling civil
suits without ever acknowledging criminal wrongdoing. Rather than admit that
Area Two had gone rotten, the state's attorney's office still refuses to
recognize all the other claims of torture. None of the state's attorney's
lawyers would comment on the allegations against Burge made by Cannon or any
of the other prisoners. The current police department administration also
refuses to comment. No other Area Two officers have been disciplined for
their actions. Six years after being fired, Burge himself has never been
brought up on any criminal charges.
Keeping a low profile
More than 1,500 miles from the rough streets of inner-city
Chicago lies Apollo Beach, Fla., a rinkydink little town perched on an inlet
feeding into the Gulf of Mexico.
Built around the lawns of a well-manicured golf course, complete
with a series of artificial and stultifyingly similar canals, it is a new
community, home mainly to people fleeing the harsh winters and day-to-day
complexities of life on the rest of the continent.
Burge, now in his mid-50s, retired down here after his career
went up in flames in Chicago. He lives near the Apollo Beach golf course, in
a large bungalow with pink wooden window shutters, a red-tile roof, and an
indoor swimming pool. Amid the other pink, yellow and sky-blue bungalows,
the ex-commander's house stands out for its excessive sterility: The walls
and the driveway look as if they have never been touched or even breathed
upon, his car is hidden behind the locked door of his garage, the garden has
no flowery touches, and drawn window shades shut out the world.
The ex-commander has an unlisted phone number. A Vietnam
veteran, he is not a member of any of the myriad American Legion and Veteran
of Foreign Wars posts in the vicinity. A boat-owner, he is not a member of
either of the town's marinas. Nor is he a member of the golf course a
stone's throw from his property, or the nearby racket club and gym. His is
the existence of a man who does not want the world to know where he is.
Burge did not reply to letters that I sent him. When I knocked
on his door he told me he didn't like my "ethics or manners," ordered me off
his land and threatened to call the sheriff. When I phoned him he shouted
down the line, "I have nothing to say. My friend, I don't need to defend
myself. I've done nothing wrong and I don't need to talk to you or anyone
else." He proceeded to insult me a few times, and then hung up.
Justice creeps nearer
Sometime in the next few months, the judge hearing Darrell
Cannon's case will make his rulings. Known to be no fan of defendants, Judge
John Morrisey may nevertheless have to confront the torture charges laid out
before him by doctors who specialize in treating torture victims, an
investigator from the Office of Professional Standards and the personal
testimony of several prisoners. Ex-police chief Brzeczek, who now practices
law as a defense attorney, believes that all those who claimed torture at
the time of their trial, but who weren't listened to, should now get new
trials.
In the end, this is not primarily a story about innocent men
framed for crimes they did not commit, although that is certainly a big part
of it. Rather, it is about how a democratic society, that claims to imbue
all its citizens with "inalienable rights," deals with those people --
almost always poor and often non-white -- who have chosen, or fallen into,
lives of crime, or who have otherwise fallen outside the margins of the
acceptable.
"People are entitled to a fair trial," says a colleague of Judge
Morrissey's who is involved in hearing the appeal of another prisoner who
confessed at the hands of Burge. "That's the real issue."
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