Amanda Rivkin

Chicago Police Torture Survivors

Free audio guide / virtual tour available on: 

App Store | Google Play 

 

In the late 1980s, Chicago lawyer Flint Taylor began to receive anonymous letters in Chicago Police Department envelopes detailing the allegations of police torture under former Commander Jon Burge and naming some of the officers involved. The anonymous source, who has never been identified, became known as “Deep Badge” after Watergate’s “Deep Throat”.  

A decade and a half-long investigative series of stories by The Chicago Reader’s John Conroy began in 1990, unraveling the story for public consumption. Using Conroy’s first article as a starting point, the police oversight Office of Professional Standards began the first municipal investigation in 1990. That investigation concluded that electric shock had been deployed, that the torture had been systematic, and that command personnel had been aware of it. The OPS reports led to Burge’s firing in 1993. 

Due to the failure of judges and prosecutors to recognize that confessions had been coerced, the Illinois legislature established the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission in 2009. The Commission investigates allegations of police torture submitted by those convicted of crimes and offers one more chance at judicial review. The process is not perfect and the number of claims has created a backlog.  

In 2015, after years of successful activism by community groups including most prominently Chicago Torture Justice Memorial, the Chicago City Council passed a reparations ordinance for Chicago police torture survivors who were violated by officers working under Jon Burge, the first of its kind in the nation, that set up a $5.5 million fund that ultimately paid reparations to 57 men. Also included in the ordinance were free counseling, free tuition at city colleges for the survivors and their families, and plans to teach about Chicago police torture in Chicago Public Schools in the eighth and tenth grades, among other things. Unfortunately, several of the men remain incarcerated based on charges brought after interrogation by Burge and his “midnight crew” or related cases. 

Jon Burge was convicted of perjury in 2010 and was imprisoned from 2011 until 2014. No other police officer has been prosecuted for the torture carried out by detectives at Area 2 and Area 3, where Burge transferred in 1988. 

Burge died at the age of 70 from cancer on September 19, 2018.  

To hear from survivors, in their words, please download the app “Burge Victims Speak” and kindly listen with headphones. Sensitive audiences should be advised the audio guide includes graphic descriptions of intimate acts of torture that may be especially disturbing for some. 

  • PONTIAC, ILLINOIS. Alnoraindus Burton, a victim of torture under former police commander Jon Burge, at Pontiac Correctional Center on November 8, 2017.
  • CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Mark Clements, a victim of Chicago police torture that occurred while Jon Burge was Commander, sits in a park in the South Loop on August 16, 2015.  Clements was 16 when he was arrested, tortured and accused of arson and involvement in the death of four individuals inside the building where the fire occurred and convicted at 17 before serving 26 years for a crime he did not commit; while in initial detention, police beat a false confession out of him by striking him repeatedly and squeezing his genitals.
  • CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Darrell Cannon, a survivor of torture which included beating with a flashlight, Russian roulette, hanging by handcuffs on his wrists, a cattle prod to his testicles and penis, a shotgun pumped in his mouth, all while being verbally abused and repeatedly called the n-word in an abandoned area of the South Side in November of 1983, sits at Leona's restaurant in the Hyde Park neighborhood on June 26, 2016.  Cannon spent 24 years wrongly incarcerated for the crime he confessed to after all the torture was committed against him, an act he calls {quote}the most sadistic thing anyone has done to me in my whole life,{quote} based solely on the confession as there were no witnesses or nor evidence to support the confession.
  • CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Anthony Holmes, a former Gangster Disciples leader and the first known victim of electrotorture carried out by former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge after he returned from Vietnam and joined the Chicago Police force, in the living room of a cousin in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side on July 18, 2016.  Holmes was severely electrotortured in 1973 until he confessed to a murder he says he did not commit; released from jail 30 years later long after statute of limitations expired, he works now as a newspaper delivery man.
  • VOSSBURG, MISSISSIPPI. Curtis Milsap, a survivor of police torture carried out by detectives working under former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, sits in a wheelchair, the result of a car accident he had shortly after his release from being wrongfully incarcerated for about three years in the early 1990s, in the foyer of his home on June 22, 2016.  Milsap was chained to a file cabinet by police and repeatedly kicked and punched, ultimately beaten so badly that he required six months of outpatient care for his testicles while in custody and awaiting trial due to the damage that resulted from the beating he endured and he is also a recipient of a $100,000 reparations check from the City of Chicago.
  • DIXON, ILLINOIS. Stanley Howard who was tortured by detectives working with former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge in the Dixon Correctional Center on April 24, 2018.
  • MARKHAM, ILLINOIS. LC Riley, who was repeatedly punched, kicked in the ribs, stomach and face as well as hit with a phonebook while in custody at Area 2 in 1985 as detectives worked to successfully coerce a confession out of him for a murder robbery, in his living room on July 25, 2016.  Riley spent 20 years in prison for a crime he said he did not do and believed it was retaliation for an earlier charge he successfully defeated in court.
  • CALUMET CITY, ILLINOIS. Stanley Wrice sits in the living room of the home he shares with his daughter and son-in-law on November 4, 2015.  Wrice spent 31 years in jail for a crime he did not commit after a confession was extracted from him in 1982 by Chicago Police Area Two detectives using methods classified as torture.
  • ROBINSON, ILLINOIS. Marcus Wiggins, who was beaten and electrotortured by several Chicago Police detectives working under Commander Jon Burge at Area 3 in September 1991, sits in an administrative office of the Robinson Correctional Center on August 10, 2016.  Wiggins received a $95,000 settlement which did not end his troubles as the same group of officers sought to pin two more murder cases on him, the first having been when he was tortured age 13, the second was thrown out of court by  the judge who called the case flimsy and the third attempt of the same group of officers was successful when the case landed in front of Judge Dennis Dernbach, a former Assistant State's Attorney who worked on Area 2 cases when Burge was Commander there.
  • CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. Marvin Reeves, 56, stands near the front of the house he bought for his daughter in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood on November 29, 2015.  Reeves purchased and renovated the house with money he received in settlement from the City of Chicago after a codefendant, Ronald Kitchen, and he were both tortured and Kitchen confessed to a crime both were innocent of; Reeves spent 21 years incarcerated from 1988-2009 for a South Side arson that killed two women and three children and had received five consecutive life sentences.
  • Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Oil Pipeline
  • Odessa Diary
  • Turkey in Transition
  • Turkey Gezi Uprising
  • Serbia Turbofolk
  • Postwar Bosnia Reconstruction
  • Prague Stag Nights
  • Trumpistan
  • Chicago Police Torture Survivors
  • Sustenance: Chicago + the Food Chain
  • portraits
  • tearsheets
  • bio
  • awards
  • exhibits
  • contact