By John Conroy
The city’s lawyers have agreed to abide by half of the judge’s order. They have not appealed the judgment that the city was responsible for the misdeeds of policemen who were aware of brutality and did not stop it or get proper medical attention for Wilson. For their inattention to duty, the city has already issued checks to the Fahey family for $50,448 and to the People’s Law Office for $504,749. The city’s lawyers deny, however, that taxpayers should pay for the misdeeds of policemen when they apply electric shock to suspects. The corporation counsel is appealing that portion of the Gettleman judgment in the U.S. Court of Appeals.
It sounded like a fantastic story, but the evidence was hard to dismiss. In reviewing his first trial, the judges of the Illinois Supreme Court cited medical reports from Mercy Hospital that listed 15 separate wounds to Wilson’s head, chest, and leg. The judges came to “the inescapable conclusion…that the defendant suffered his injuries while in police custody.”
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Jones told Coventry that he had been electroshocked by Commander Burge nine days before Wilson received the same treatment, and Coventry located a transcript of a seven-year-old court hearing in which Jones had described the interrogation. At that hearing, Jones had said that Burge tried to intimidate him by naming two other men who had writhed on the floor in pain when they were shocked. Coventry and Sincox found those two men, and they led to others, and soon word went around various prisons that someone was interested in torture victims from Area Two and from Area Three, where Burge also served as a commanding officer. Today, the list of victims compiled by the People’s Law Office includes the names of 61 men and one woman who claim they were physically abused in a variety of ways by Commander Burge or by detectives who were serving or had served under his command. Some of those victims have received substantial payments to settle their claims out of court, the most recent being Marcus Wiggins, who was 13 when he alleged he had been beaten and subjected to electric shock. The city recently paid the Wiggins family $95,000.
Wilson’s lawyers might have been able to blow the case wide open with their growing list of alleged victims, who often told remarkably similar stories, but U.S. District Court judge Brian Barnett Duff was unwilling to let the jury hear about it. In a survey published in Chicago Lawyer just as Wilson’s first trial got under way, Duff had been rated the worst judge on the federal bench (this past October he resigned from the bench, claiming a physical disability, amid reports that the Justice Department had filed a judicial disciplinary complaint against him). Duff’s reasoning, rulings, and demeanor through both of Wilson’s civil rights trials bordered on the bizarre. He chastised Wilson’s attorneys for allegedly shuffling their feet, for their facial expressions, for having their hands in their pockets, and for leaning on the lectern, and he found them in contempt of court on at least eight occasions. When Taylor, Haas, and Stainthorp moved to put Melvin Jones on the witness stand, Duff denied them. Among other reasons, he cited what he saw as an inconsistency in the testimony of the two men who said they had been shocked by the same man in the same police station within nine days of each other: what Wilson had referred to as alligator clips Jones had called tweezers.
Seven months after the second trial ended and long before Judge Posner’s ruling, David Fogel, the chief administrator of the Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards, decided to reopen the agency’s investigation of the Wilson case, having reached the conclusion that it had been bungled the first time around. Fogel had been a university professor in criminal justice before being appointed to direct OPS by Mayor Harold Washington in June 1984, more than two years after the Wilson murders. Periodically, Fogel demonstrated a sort of maverick personality. In 1987, for example, he wrote a memo to Mayor Washington entitled “Proposed Revamping of Office of Professional Standards” in which he noted, “A good number of our investigators continue to be irremediably incompetent. They are part of the inherited politically corrupt heritage of pre-Washington days.” He estimated that the “group of incompetents” numbered 17, approximately 30 percent of the investigative staff. He went on to say, “The troops love OPS….The appearance of doing a thorough investigation with full due process (and endless unnecessary reviews) for all, actually operates to immunize police from internal discipline, increases their overtime, leads to an enormous “paper storm” and has institutionalized lying….I have come to the conclusion that OPS gives the appearance of formal justice, but actually helps to institutionalize subterfuge and injustice.”
In his separate report, investigator Goldston listed the names of 50 people allegedly mistreated at Area Two between 1973 and 1986 and grouped them by the techniques imposed (electroshock, suffocation, hanging by handcuffs, etc). He concluded that “the preponderance of evidence is that abuse did occur and that it was systematic….The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture….
