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Report: Prosecutors Expanding Torture Probe After Burge Conviction

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Jon Burge

Former Chicago Police Lt. Jon Burge (Credit: Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

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CHICAGO (CBS) — Federal prosecutors who sent former police Cmdr. Jon Burge to prison for lying about the torture of criminal suspects have now turned their attention to detectives implicated in torture, and to former Cook County prosecutors.

As WBBM Newsradio 780′s Mike Krauser reports, when Burge was convicted of perjury last year, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald promised the investigation into police torture allegations — dating to the 1970s and ’80s — was not over.

LISTEN: Newsradio 780′s Mike Krauser reports


Now, the Chicago Tribune is reporting, investigators are looking at old court cases involving detectives under Burge – who could not be tried for torture because the statute of limitations.

Several detectives have been accused of obtaining confessions through torture, and there are allegations that Cook County prosecutors played a role in railroading the innocent.

In some cases, charges were later dismissed or the suspects were acquitted, and filed wrongful conviction lawsuits.

Specifically, the feds are probing the 1990 murder and rape accusation that resulted in life prison sentences against Harold Hill and Dan Young Jr., who were exonerated by DNA and released in 2005, the Tribune reported.

Burge was convicted last year of lying about torturing prisoners into making confessions. He was sentenced in January to 4 1/2 years in prison, and reported to a federal penitentiary in Raleigh, N.C., in March.

Since Burge was fired from the Police Department in 1993, his name has become synonymous with police brutality in Chicago.

Dozens of suspects accused Burge and the detectives under their command of shocking them with a homemade electrical device, suffocating them with typewriter bags, putting guns to their head and playing Russian roulette — all to force them to confess to murders they didn’t commit.

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  • tom Sharp

    Are you saying Burge didn’t operate alone in torturing dozens of prisoners??? “Shocking”!!!! I wonder if the “I was only following orders” defense used by Adolph Eichman will work here.

  • Mark A. Clements

    Jon Burge and all detectives that worked under his command must be held accountable now. Prosecutors and even judge’s took part in this cover up. It’s time that justice come to all the victims that had to suffer as the result of Burge and his detectives.

  • workinman2

    Don’t we know someone who was a states attorney, turned mayor, back when this was all going on? hhmmmm!

  • Josh Hoff

    Powerful people in the city need to be mindful of the fact that more powerful people watch them and, in time, justice will prevail. For anybody to think otherwise is short-sighted and arrogant …

  • Lyndia

    It is about time that the other people involved in those crimes be brought to justice too. Maybe I should not say this but I am. I personally feel that not all of the people he beat the @rap out of was guilty and not all of them were innocent but he went to far when he and his honco’s took the law into their own hands. THEY WENT TO FAR. Years later it was proven that some of them were innocent. However, I feel that some of them were lucky and guilty as hell but they were able to walk due to Burge and his roving band of goons. I also believe that due to this imbecile’s behavior, the death penalty was abolished in Illinois.

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