You see, we’re a civilized nation
by digby
… unlike all those “bad guys” we’re fighting over there so we don’t have to fight them over here:
Today, former Chicago police commander Jon Burge, who was convicted of lying about torturing over 100 African-American men at stationhouses on Chicago’s South and West Sides, will walk out of the Butner Correctional Institution, having been granted an early release to a halfway house in Tampa, Florida.
Burge’s 2010 conviction for perjury came nearly 20 years after his reign of racist terror finally ended. From 1972 to 1991, he led a torture ring of white Chicago detectives who routinely used electric shock, suffocation with plastic bags and typewriter covers, mock executions and brutal attacks on the genitals to obtain confessions from their victims. A team of lawyers at the People’s Law Office, including myself, documented 118 such cases. But a series of police superintendents, numerous Cook County prosecutors and a cover-up that implicated former Mayor Richard M. Daley (during his time as both mayor and state’s attorney) protected Burge and his men from prosecution until well after the statute of limitations had run out on their crimes of torture.
Like Al Capone, Burge could only be prosecuted for lying about what he and his men did, not for the deeds themselves. He was sentenced to the maximum term of four and a half years, and ended up serving three and a half before being released to a halfway house—a stark contrast to the fates of his victims, many of whom received death sentences or life in prison on the basis of confessions that were tortured from them.
Despite his felony conviction, Burge continued to collect his pension (now at $54,000 per year) while serving his time, and the Illinois Supreme Court recently decided four to three that he may continue to do so in the future. But the nearly $700,000 that Burge has already collected is little compared to what Chicago, Cook County, the State of Illinois and federal taxpayers have already expended as a result of the Burge torture scandal.
It seems you just can’t prosecute any government official for torture in America. Perhaps we should ask ourselves why that is?
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