the history of the chicago police depts use of torture, fk the police
Chicago's history of torture is centered on police commander Jon Burge, who was assigned to Chicago's south side in 1972. Between then and 1981, Burge and his men used torture to elicit confessions from more than 110 African-American men. In addition to beatings, the police under Burge allegedly suffocated suspects with plastic bags and used electrical shocks to victims' genitals, a technique Burge may have learned as a military police investigator in Vietnam. Burge also suffocated his victims with plastic bags. Anthony Holmes, one of the victims, provided this description of the torture in a statement to special prosecutors:
""[Burge] put some handcuffs on my ankles, then he took one wire and put it on my ankles, he took the other wire and put it behind my back, on the handcuffs behind my back. Then after that, when he—then he went and got a plastic bag, put it over my head ... so I bit through it. So he went and got another bag and put it on my head and he twisted it. When he twisted it, it cut my air off and I started shaking. ... So then he hit me with the voltage. When he hit me with the voltage, that's when I started gritting, crying, hollering … It feel [sic] like a thousand needles going through my body. And then after that, it just feel [sic] like, you know—it feel [sic] like something just burning me from the inside, and, um, I shook, I gritted, I hollered, then I passed out."
In 2001, campaigners managed to convince then-Governor of Illinois George Ryan to pardon four men tortured by Burge, and commute all death sentences in the state because of concerns about the fairness of the state's justice system.
The statute of limitations for most of Burge’s alleged criminal acts ran out long ago, but prosecutors were still able to charge him with perjury because he had lied under oath about his acts of torture during a civil case. Though Burge was convicted in 2006, he was released in October after serving less than four years in prison, and a police board determined that he could retain his pension. Meanwhile, most of those Burge tortured have received no compensation. At least nineteen people who were convicted on the basis of confessions elicited with torture remain in prison.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/chicago-police-torture-jon-burge/383839/