in Chicago, where the Illinois Supreme Court has let stand a less than 7-year prison sentence for former police officer Jason Van Dyke, who was found guilty last year of second-degree murder for killing African-American teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014. The Illinois Supreme Court denied a request by the state’s attorney general to resentence Van Dyke on Tuesday. Van Dyke, who is white, was found guilty on 16 counts of aggravated battery—one count for each of the 16 bullets he fired at McDonald. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul petitioned the state Supreme Court to vacate Van Dyke’s second-degree murder sentence and instead impose a sentence on each of the 16 counts. If the petition had been granted, Van Dyke could have faced to up 96 years in prison.
The news that Van Dyke will not be resentenced has sparked criticism throughout Chicago. The city’s mayoral candidates, who are both African-American women, have spoken out against the decision. Lori Lightfoot, the front-runner in the race, tweeted, quote, “Today’s ruling is the latest disappointment in the Jason Van Dyke sentencing, and a sad reminder of the work we must do to create a system that is free of institutional racism and truly holds police accountable for their misconduct, including criminal acts. We cannot build trust between police and the communities they serve if officers who commit crimes are not held to the same standards as [other defendants].” Lightfoot and her opponent, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, both have vowed to reform Chicago’s Police Department. Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer to be sentenced for an on-duty shooting in half a century.
Flint Taylor talking:
I named it The Torture Machine for two different but related reasons. First of all is rather obvious. On the cover, the torture machine, that was the electric shock box that the notorious Commander Jon Burge and his men used on many African-American suspects over that 20-year period that you just mentioned. But also “the torture machine” refers to Chicago’s machine, the notorious political machine, often known as the Daley machine and the Democratic machine, here in the city, which not only countenanced this torture, covered it up, but also was involved at the highest levels of the police department and, yes, the State’s Attorney’s Office, when Richard M. Daley was the state’s attorney of Cook County—were involved in this conspiracy, this scandal, that has gone on for so many decades in this city.
On December 4th, 1969, 14 Chicago police officers working under the control of the state’s attorney of Cook County—at that time, Edward Hanrahan—raided a West Side apartment where Black Panthers were sleeping. And one of those Black Panthers was the chairman of the Black Panther Party, Fred Hampton, a charismatic young leader, who was targeted not only by the police, but by, it turns out, the FBI. And that raid, which was covered up, was claimed to be at first a shootout, was later shown to be a total shoot-in. And then, over the years, as we and others were able to litigate a case in federal court, we were able to show not only that this was a vicious, racist attack on the Panthers and its leadership, where two men were killed and many others wounded, but it was part and parcel of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, the counterintelligence program devised and implemented by J. Edgar Hoover over the years, which in the late ’60s targeted the Black Panther Party, and specifically Fred Hampton in Chicago, and, in fact, that the raid on the apartment was part of this COINTELPRO program.
we see now—and it was uncovered during our trial in the ’70s—that the COINTELPRO program targeted black liberation organizations and leaders. And they specifically named targets—Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad—and pointed to Malcolm X, as well. And as the Panthers rose and became powerful, first in Oakland and later in Chicago—as you can see from the clip what a charismatic, young leader, at 21, Fred Hampton was—Hoover and his people focused on the Black Panther Party and, specifically in Chicago, on Fred Hampton.
They had an informant in the Black Panther Party by the name of William O’Neal. He sketched out a floor plan that showed where Hampton would be sleeping. They went to the apartment. They supplied that floor plan to the police—the FBI did. They went to the apartment in the early-morning hours. And Fred was asleep. It appeared that he had been drugged by O’Neal or some other agent. And he was murdered in his bed.
Over the years, we uncovered documents that showed this floor plan. That was all covered up, as well. It showed that the FBI took credit for this raid as part of its COINTELPRO program. And it showed even that O’Neal, after the raid, was given by Hoover and the people in Chicago a $300 bonus, what we later called the “30 pieces of silver” for the informant, O’Neal, for setting up the raid. So, he was receiving from Hoover a bonus for the success of the raid at the same time he was serving as a pallbearer in Fred Hampton’s funeral.
The narrative shifted over the years, thanks to the community, thanks to the Panthers and thanks to the lawsuit that we filed. And as you could hear from the clip, the position that the police took—and they thought they were going to get away with scot-free—was that this was a shootout, that these were vicious Black Panthers, all of that. Well, because we and the Panthers went to that apartment, we were able to show that it was a shoot-in. We were able to change the narrative to the fact that it was an unjustified and violent shoot-in by the police. But over the years, as we were able to join the FBI in the case, we were able to uncover these FBI documents that showed that, yes, it was not just a murder, it was not just a shoot-in, but it was an assassination. It was a political assassination straight from Washington and the FBI.
The Wilson case arose in February of 1982. Two white police officers were shot and killed. The two black perpetrators had escaped. And the city of Chicago, under Jane Byrne and Police Superintendent Brzeczek, set out on the most vicious and terroristic manhunt in the history of the city. They terrorized the black community. They kicked in doors. They dragged people out of their houses. If they thought that they had some information about the killings, they tortured them. They tortured them with suffocation. They tortured them with all kinds of medieval types of torture. They finally found the two people who the eyewitness identified as the persons who were involved in the crime. And the person who was identified as the shooter was Andrew Wilson.
Andrew Wilson was taken back to the police headquarters on the South Side of Chicago. And this notorious commander, who at that time was a lieutenant in charge of the manhunt, by the name of Jon Burge, led a torture of Andrew Wilson that included electric shock with the torture machine, that is mentioned and depicted in my book, and suffocation with a bag. They handcuffed him across an old, ribbed steam radiator and electric-shocked him so that he was burned across his chest. And they also burned him with cigarettes, beat him and got a confession from him.
This came out at that time, but nobody really cared. The state’s attorney of Cook County, Richard Daley, was informed specifically by a doctor and the police superintendent about this torture, and he chose to do nothing about it. Because he did nothing about it, Burge was able to, in the next 10 years, torture another 75 individuals—all African-American men.
And a few years after that, Andrew Wilson, who had been sentenced to death, filed a pro se complaint in federal court challenging his torture and suing Burge. That’s how we got involved. During his trial, an anonymous police source, who we later dubbed as “Deep Badge,” started to give me information that laid out exactly the map of what had happened, the systemic nature of the torture, the fact that Daley and his surrogates were involved, that the police superintendent, that the mayor were all involved.
And we followed that map, basically, for the next 20, 30 years, even as we sit here today, to uncover evidence that supported the idea that this was a systemic torture. This was something that sent people to death row. This was something that convicted innocent people. And, ultimately, all of this led to Burge’s firing. It led to, many, many years later, his conviction for obstruction of justice for lying about the torture. And, of course, it led to the remarkable reparations that the city of Chicago granted to the survivors of police torture and their families here a couple of years ago.
Lilia Fernández talking:
one of the things that a lot of people don’t realize, I think, because police abuse and brutality often does get framed within a black-and-white racial framing, is the fact that Latinos were very frequently the victims of police misconduct, abuse, brutality, throughout these same years that Flint covers. Going back to the 1960s, when Mexicans and Puerto Ricans first started arriving in the city, I was actually very surprised when I started to uncover cases of different Puerto Rican and, to a less extent, Mexican-American men who were having violent encounters with police officers. And in fact, for example, the Division Street riots, which not many people know of, which happened in the summer of 1966, were set off by a white police officer who had shot a young Puerto Rican man named Arcelis Cruz. Once the community learned of this, people started pouring out into the streets. And they did so not because this was a unique or unprecedented event, but because people were really fed up, as in the case with many other urban riots in the 1960s. People were really fed up with the repeated mistreatment and abuse and brutality that they experienced at the hands of local law enforcement.
Flint Taylor talking:
And I want to say that at the same time that we were dealing with the Fred Hampton case, that there was the murder, the police murder, of Manuel Ramos in the city of Chicago, which the Young Lords and others stepped forward to protest very strongly in 1969. So, what Lilia is saying is certainly true, and what she’s written about certainly is very important.
The corruption of the Chicago Police Department goes all the way back to Haymarket. It goes all the way back to Pullman. It goes through the Summerdale scandal and the Marquette 10. And corruption does go hand in hand with brutality and violence, because, of course, they’ve been able to get away with it. It’s been part of the culture, along with the code of silence, along with the systemic racism that is so prevalent in the Chicago Police Department. And so, when you have not only the department and its higher-ups countenancing this, being involved in it, as well, but you have the prosecutors who look the other way and who are involved in it, and then, ultimately, you have the judiciary, you have the judges—and you have the judges, who I’ve documented in my book, who were former prosecutors, who give passes to police officers. Most recently, in the Laquan McDonald case, the former prosecutor, the judge, who I knew from taking a tortured confession of a 13-year-old in a case of mine, she acquitted the three officers who covered up the Laquan McDonald video and lied about it.
the judge, after Van Dyke was convicted, as you mentioned, for 16 counts of aggravated battery, as well as second-degree murder, went against the Illinois Supreme Court precedent and decided to sentence on the murder charge, which, surprisingly perhaps, carries a lighter potential sentence than the aggravated battery the bullets carried. And he did this, and it raised quite a bit of alarm and anger in the community, as well as with many progressive people.
So, the attorney general, who was just elected, an African-American man by the name of Kwame Raoul, took this to the Illinois Supreme Court and said that the judge acted outside of his authority, based on prior Supreme Court decisions, and that he should have sentenced under the aggravated battery convictions, and that would have made it possible to give Van Dyke a more stringent sentence, more than the four or four-and-a-half years that he ultimately gave Van Dyke.
It did, however, raise some interesting questions in the left and progressive community, particularly in the abolitionist movement, about whether to advocate for longer sentences, even if it is a police officer who is convicted. And we also—in the wake of all of this, we can’t lose the fact that this was a victory to get him convicted. It was a victory that people in the streets, for years, made happen. And without that, there wouldn’t have been an indictment. There wouldn’t have been a conviction. So, we can’t get lost, in my view and, I think, in the view of many, in the idea of how much time Van Dyke got, even though, of course, it raises the fact that officers are treated totally differently than your average African American or brown or poor white would if they were convicted of the same crime.
Lilia Fernández talking:
So, as I was saying earlier, that, you know, the communities in the city were familiar, for many, many years, with repeated cases of police brutality and violence, sometimes against people who were legitimately criminal suspects, and sometimes against people who were completely innocent or who were framed for crimes that they did not commit. So, you know, the fact that beginning in the mid-’90s, I believe it was, perhaps even earlier, that some of these cases were beginning to be overturned, with the advent of DNA evidence, for example, this was in large part the result of years of protest and activism and community members trying to raise awareness about the injustice that many African Americans and Latinos were experiencing. And really, it was those cases, ones like that of Rolando Cruz and many of the African-American men who Flint Taylor also writes about in the book—it was the fact that they had been convicted—I’m sorry, given the death sentence, that advocates were trying to get those wrongful convictions overturned.
Flint Taylor talking:
As Lilia just referred to the Death Row 10, what happened in the ’90s was, as the torture evidence came out and we and other raised these issues in cases of post-conviction in death row cases where men had been sent to death row based on tortured confessions, that the men behind bars on death row organized. And they organized into the Death Row 10. And that Death Row 10 was a group of 10, and later 12, men who were all on death row on the basis of torture. And so, that movement, that was spearheaded by the Death Row 10 and activists on the outside and lawyers that were bringing these cases in the courts, came together with the movement against the death penalty, that was gathering so much strength, the wrongful conviction movement, that was spearheaded at Northwestern and at DePaul and other places.
And as a result of this coming together, the Republican governor, as you mentioned, Juan—Ryan—at first granted a moratorium on the death penalty, and then, as he was leaving office in 2003, he cleared death row, commuted the sentences of all 163 men and women on death row, and pardoned four of the Death Row 10 on the basis of innocence and torture. And that movement, you could see the coming together of those two strains of the movement was so significant in accomplishing that. And then, eight years later, that movement continued, to lead not only to the indictment of Burge, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, to the abolishment of the death penalty in Illinois.
Darrell’s case is a major part of the book, because Darrell’s case—not only the torture, the fact that he was sent to Tamms, the supermax prison, for nine years and suffered another form of sensory deprivation and torture, the fact that when we got him out many, many years later, he became a leader in the reparations movement, a spokesperson for reparations for the men who, like himself, did not get proper compensation. So, Darrell, as you can tell from that clip, is a remarkable leader and someone who is very much a part of the story of The Torture Machine.
Lilia Fernández talking:
And I think this is a reason that, in the case of Latinos, there were a number of cases of police abuse in the surrounding suburbs, because beginning in the 1980s, some immigrant populations and some Latinos who had been living in the city started moving out to the suburbs, or arriving to the suburbs initially when they came to this country. And so they were experiencing misconduct, brutality in those places. But one of the things that I think is important for us to understand is the fact that a lot of this police abuse and brutality stemmed from the racial hostility of white communities that really resented the influx of so many Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and African Americans who were moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods in the city. And so, the police carried this out, you know, carried those prejudices out into the street, as well, when they encountered these suspects in a variety of different settings.
________
Lilia Fernández
professor of history and Latino studies at Rutgers University and the author of Brown in the Windy City: Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Postwar Chicago.
Flint Taylor
attorney with People’s Law Office who has represented survivors of police torture in Chicago for nearly half a century. His new book is titled The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 20, 2019