Authors: Steve Bogira
Other staff in his courtroom likewise seem unaffected by the gory photos they see and the tragic tales they hear. “A normal person would hear some of these stories, and they’d go, ‘Holy
shit,
’ deputy Guerrero says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah? So what?’ You hear this stuff every day, and you’re like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s get this over with and go to the next thing.’ What actually am I supposed to do? Should my heart go out to every person we hear about getting hurt? My heart would be going out every single day—I wouldn’t have a heart left.”
THE JUDGE HAS
another matter to consider in the Orange case this morning. Yesterday Geraghty filed a petition asking Locallo to conduct a hearing that could lead to a new trial for Orange. The petition cited “compelling new evidence” that detectives were torturing suspects at Area 2 in the 1980s, evidence Geraghty says corroborates what Orange said happened to him.
Claims of police coercion are hardly unusual in cases involving defendants who’ve given confessions. But a host of defendants who’d given confessions at Area 2 in the 1980s have alleged more than coercion. Like Orange, many of them have described being “bagged” (suffocated with plastic bags or typewriter covers) or electroshocked. In 1990 the chief administrator of the police department’s Office of Professional Standards, David Fogel—an appointee of the city’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington—directed one of his investigators to conduct an inquiry into the Area 2 torture allegations. That investigator, Michael Goldston,
identified fifty criminal suspects who claimed they’d been tortured at Area 2 between 1973 and 1986, the vast majority of them during the 1980s. Thirteen of these alleged they’d been bagged, and nine said they’d been electrically shocked. Goldston concluded from his review that “systematic” abuse of suspects had indeed occurred at Area 2—abuse that hadn’t been limited to “the usual beating” but that had included “planned torture.” Commanders at Area 2 failed to end this practice, according to Goldston, and some had participated in it themselves.
Lieutenant Jon Burge, commanding officer of the Area 2 violent crimes unit for most of the 1980s, was fired in 1993, and two of his detectives were suspended for fifteen months.
Burge had served as a
military policeman in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, where he earned a Bronze Star for meritorious service, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and a Purple Heart for a minor shrapnel wound. He joined the Chicago police in 1970, at the age of twenty-two, and soon was winning commendations and promotions. He was named commander of violent crimes at Area 2 in 1982. In his off-hours, he relaxed on Lake Michigan aboard his cabin cruiser,
the
Vigilante
.
The charge that led to Burge’s dismissal from the force was made by a man named Andrew Wilson, who was interrogated at Area 2 in 1982 during an investigation of the murder of two police officers. Wilson and his brother Jackie confessed to those murders and were convicted of them. In 1986
Andrew Wilson sued Burge, three other Area 2 detectives, and the City of Chicago, alleging they’d violated his civil rights by torturing him. In testimony during that lawsuit, Wilson said that at one point during his interrogation, Burge had brought a black box into the interview room. The box had a crank and two wires with clips on the ends. Burge said, “Fun time,” attached the clips to Wilson’s ears, and began cranking, according to Wilson. The pain from the electric current, Wilson testified, “stays in your head … and your teeth constantly grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds. All my bottom teeth was loose behind that.” Photos
taken of Wilson when he arrived at the Cook County Jail after leaving Area 2 showed a pattern of U-shaped scabs on his ears.
Wilson said that Burge later moved the clips from his ears to his fingers, “and then he kept cranking it and kept cranking it, and I was hollering and screaming.” Wilson said his wrists were handcuffed to two separate rings on a wall of the room, so that he was stretched out in front of a radiator he sometimes brushed against, from which he sustained burn marks on his chest and thigh, burns that were also documented in the jail photos. But Wilson said he didn’t notice the radiator burning him while he was being shocked. “That box … took over. That’s what was happening. The heat radiator didn’t even exist then. The box existed.”
Wilson said Burge also shocked him with a round black device with a wire sticking out of it that he plugged into the wall. “He took it and he ran it up between my legs, my groin area, just ran it up there very gently.… Then he jabbed me with the thing and it slammed me … into the grill of the window.”
During Wilson’s lawsuit, his lawyers received several anonymous letters from someone who professed inside knowledge of the workings of Area 2 in the early 1980s—“
Deep Badge,” as Wilson’s lawyers would come to refer to him.
One letter advised the lawyers to interview a man named
Melvin Jones, who was in the Cook County Jail on a murder charge. The lawyers located Jones and learned that he’d been interrogated at Area 2 nine days before the Wilson brothers were. Jones told the lawyers that Burge had shocked him with an electrical device on his penis, foot, and thigh. He said he’d testified about the electroshock at a motion to suppress his confession in 1982. The lawyers obtained the transcript. Jones had testified that after Burge shocked him, he told the lieutenant, “You ain’t supposed to be doing this to me,” but that Burge had responded, “No court and no state are going to take your word against a lieutenant’s word.” Jones also testified that Burge told him he’d given the same treatment to two men nicknamed “Satan” and “Cochise.” According to Jones’s testimony, Burge said the two men thought they were tough but that he’d had them crawling over the floor.
Wilson’s lawyers found Satan—Andrew Holmes—in the Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet. Holmes said Burge had used the black box on him in 1973. Wilson’s lawyers also found an inmate in a Danville prison who said Burge had shocked him with a cattle prod in the genitals and stomach, and an inmate in a prison in Pontiac who said Burge had shocked him in the arms, armpits, and testicles.
Police brass at first suspected that Deep Badge was Frank Laverty, the detective who’d come forward during the George Jones trial. But the content
of one of the informant’s letters indicated that the person was still working at Area 2 after Laverty had been transferred from that station. The informant also mentioned in one letter his need to remain anonymous so he wouldn’t end up “shunned like Officer Laverty” had been.
After two trials, Andrew Wilson’s lawsuit was still unresolved in 1994. But by that time the Goldston report had been released to the public, along with a report by a second investigator for the police department’s Office of Professional Standards that concluded that Burge had tortured Wilson. And Burge had already been fired. In filings in the Wilson suit in 1995, the city’s lawyers—who previously had denied Wilson’s allegations—conceded that Burge had tortured Wilson and Melvin Jones at Area 2 and that the torture had included electroshock. Burge had “plainly inflicted punishment far out of proportion to the necessities of the city’s interest in solving a crime,” the city’s lawyers said. The commander’s conduct had been so outrageous, in fact, that the city couldn’t be held responsible, its lawyers contended—Burge and his colleagues had clearly acted “outside the scope of their employment” in torturing suspects at Area 2.
U.S. District judge Robert Gettleman didn’t buy the lawyers’ argument that the officers were liable but the city wasn’t. In 1996
Gettleman assessed the city a million dollars in damages. (None of the money went to Wilson. The judge directed that $900,000 go to his lawyers, who’d been litigating the suit for most of a decade without pay. The other $100,000 went to the family of one of the slain officers who’d won a wrongful death suit against Wilson years earlier.)
The city’s admission that suspects were tortured at Area 2 in the early 1980s “strongly supports the allegations that Mr. Orange has made from the beginning,” Geraghty contended in the petition he filed yesterday.
And now, in the courtroom, Geraghty tells Locallo that Orange’s claims can hardly be dismissed as “wild allegations”—prosecutor O’Connor’s term for them earlier this morning—considering that “the city has admitted that that’s what went on.”
O’Connor responds that the city made no admission about Orange’s particular case.
Locallo, likewise, tells Geraghty that even if some suspects were abused at Area 2, it doesn’t mean Orange was. “The court is well aware of what Mr. Orange had claimed,” the judge says. “The court is also well aware of what witnesses were called [at Orange’s trial] to rebut that. And there’s no evidence at this stage in the record which established torture.”
Locallo tells the lawyers he’ll consider this new matter at a later date.
• • •
LOCALLO ALREADY HAS
the Bridgeport case to contend with. Now he has a second issue with special resonance for African Americans. All of the suspects who alleged torture at Area 2 were black. All of the detectives who allegedly did the torturing were white.
That race may sometimes be a factor in police abuse of suspects in the United States isn’t something new. In 1931 the National Commission on Law Observance and Law Enforcement—commonly called the Wickersham Commission, after its chairman, former U.S. attorney general George Wickersham—reported that use of the “third degree” by police was widespread in the nation, that
“poor and uninfluential” suspects were the usual victims, and that Negroes were the victims “in some of the worst cases.”
Criminal suspects were sometimes punched, slapped, kicked, whipped with rubber hoses, poked with blackjacks, and deprived of sleep and food in attempts by police to extract confessions from them, the Wickersham Commission found. And sometimes they were subjected to electric shock: informants told the commission of a storage battery device called the “
electric monkey” used by Dallas police until about 1925. “
It had two terminals, one of which was put against the victim’s spine,” the commission’s special field investigator, Ernest Hopkins, wrote in his 1931 book,
Our Lawless Police
. “The police called this ‘giving him a needle in the back.’ It was chiefly used upon Negroes, at night, and in outlying woods to which they were taken with an implied threat that there might be a lynching. It got confessions.”
The third degree was
“thoroughly at home” in Chicago, the Wickersham Commission reported. The favored methods here included a rubber hose to the back or to the pit of the stomach, a club to the shins, or a telephone book to the head. “The Chicago telephone book is a heavy one and a swinging blow with it may stun a man without leaving a mark,” the commission said. Likewise, the marks left by a rubber hose usually disappeared in a few hours. A room at police headquarters was known as the “goldfish room,” and suspects were taken there “to see the goldfish”—to be beaten with rubber hoses. The Wickersham report noted that when someone suggested to Chicago police officials that the department try using the recently invented lie detector, the response wasn’t enthusiastic. “
Here’s the best lie detector,” one police official said, extending a clenched fist.
The Wickersham report also cited examples of suspects who succumbed to their interrogators’ pressure and confessed, only to have their innocence established later. It noted that in the late seventeenth century King William III had “
tried the thumbscrews on his own thumbs, and said another turn would make him confess anything.”
Psychological ploys have since displaced physical abuse as the dominant
method for extracting confessions, many criminologists say today. For detectives bent on inducing confessions, psychological coercion has an advantage over physical abuse: since it doesn’t leave marks, it’s even harder to prove. But a ruse such as falsely threatening a suspect that a death sentence is inevitable if he doesn’t confess or suggesting that freedom is likely if he does can wring a confession from the innocent as well as the guilty, so confessions deemed to have been
involuntarily given are legally inadmissible, whether they’re obtained through tricks or brutality.
Police perjury was another evil inherent in the reliance on coerced confessions, the Wickersham Commission observed. A detective who relied on the “best lie detector” during an interrogation was hardly going to admit to it on the stand.
If a defendant happened to have sustained observable injuries, police explained them away in court with one of their stock excuses: he fell down stairs while being arrested; his cellmates beat him up; he rolled off the bench in the lockup; he banged his head on the cell door as he was being taken out.
No matter how transparent the explanation, police could almost always count on a wink from the judge—could expect, that is, that the judge would find that no abuse had occurred, that the confession had been voluntarily given, and that the state was therefore free to use it against the defendant. A statement from the suspect that he was confessing
“freely and voluntarily” was routinely included in confessions, and judges would point to it as evidence that no coercion had occurred. Hopkins, the Wickersham field investigator, criticized the “general judicial tolerance of the fantastic fiction that a third, or a half, or three-quarters of our felony suspects are so gentle-natured that they voluntarily sob forth their guilt on the nearest detective’s shoulder.”
When Cook County Criminal Court judge Joseph Fitch stunned police and prosecutors by deciding, during a 1921 robbery trial, that the confession of nineteen-year-old Harvey Rogers was inadmissible because police had beaten it out of him, the local press was stirred to action—not by the police abuse in question but by the audacity of Judge Fitch.
COPS PROTEST COURT BAN ON CONFESSIONS
read the headline of the story rebuking Fitch in the next day’s
Chicago Herald-Examiner
. A police official warned in the article that 95 percent of the police department’s work would be nullified if other judges followed Judge Fitch’s example. “We are permitted to do less every day,” another police official complained. “Pretty soon there won’t be a police department.”