I began to worry—I mean, really worry—about police violence in Chicago back in the summer of 2004. That’s when I saw you—a young man and young woman, barely teenagers—in your white shirts and khaki pants, on your knees at the corner of Lawndale Avenue and Cermak Road. Where I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, those clothes would’ve been private school uniforms. But in Chicago, I’ve been told, that lack of hue in your collared shirt is supposed to mean that you are public school students and not gang members—who, at that intersection, supposedly wear red and black.
I know you are much older now, and yet when I see Black and Brown teenagers of today’s Chicago, bustling down the streets, flirting with each other, clumped together over someone’s cell phone, I always flash back to that scene over a decade ago.
Four police cars were parked along the curb. Six officers frisked you on the sidewalk. The cops smiled at one another as they emptied the contents of your book bags into the gutter. Your bags were both white, each with a different word similarly airbrushed in graffiti letters—your names, I assumed, though I couldn’t make them out from where I stood. All I could tell was that one of the names was written in green, and the other was in pink. I remember trying to read those letters so that I could yell your names, pretend that I was a friend or relative, and ask if you were OK.
I know how long your encounter lasted because I clocked it: twenty-six minutes, forty-three seconds. I watched the whole time from across the street, transfixed. Later, I told my brother that I watched you so that I could be a witness in the event the incident went awry. But that was only half-true. I also watched because I was afraid and didn’t know what else to do.
I had moved to your city two weeks before this incident. And although I moved there to attend the University of Chicago, and to become a professor, tweed jacket and all the rest, I was afraid that I was witnessing an altercation with the police that I, too, might eventually have.
At the same time, I was afraid because I was seeing the past.
When I was around the same age as you were then, or at least the same size—which is to say, around twelve years old—I found myself in a similar position. My two older brothers and I had just moved from Baltimore to Columbia, Maryland, about a half hour’s drive south. We decided to go to the mall. We must have worn our Baltimoreness in our walk, in our lingo, or more likely, on our flesh, because before long a plainclothes police officer was following us from store to store. We knew full well that a strange man was bearing down on us, and we fought the temptation to run. I wouldn’t have admitted it to myself then, but I felt scared.
Before long, the man ordered us to stop. He frisked both of my brothers, who were fifteen and sixteen, against a rail on the second floor. I was within arm’s reach of my brothers, but the cop ignored me. Maybe because I was so puny he thought I was irrelevant. I have to admit: I was relieved he wasn’t touching me. But despite that relief, I could feel myself in my own skin unlike ever before. Adrenaline spiked my senses. All of a sudden I felt hair stand up from the follicles on my forearms. I could catch the sound of people chattering below me. I could smell fried potato wedges from the Boardwalk Café on the floor below, where a crowd of people gathered, eyes upward, watching the commotion against the second-story railing. I had been in that restaurant, eating those thick fries, just a few hours earlier. I wanted desperately to return to that moment.
I looked down at the people looking up at me, and I imagined them to be shaking their heads in contempt. An uneasy feeling settled in my stomach and stayed there. I began to worry that a classmate from my new school might see me, tell others, and someone would make fun of me. And then I would be forced to fight. Or even worse: word would spread about the incident and no one would want to be my friend. Then I felt ashamed of how quickly my embarrassment had taken the place of fear. I should still be afraid, I thought to myself, because my brothers had their arms behind their backs and I could tell they were scared.
The cop took my eldest brother, Wolé, through one of those doors that you never notice along the corridors of a mall until all your senses are heightened and you start to notice everything. He didn’t say anything to me or my other brother, Michael, so we were at a loss. Eventually, terrified, we called our parents. Four hours later, Wolé was released, but only after my mother and father showed up and threatened legal action. The cop had found no evidence to confirm his suspicion that Wolé had been doing something wrong. Only then did my relief feel justified and right.
When the police released you, West Side Chicago teenagers with matching airbrushed book bags, I felt a similar kind of relief. But I also felt a familiar combination of cowardice, anger, guilt, frustration—and yes, fear.
No doubt living in Chicago has taught you valuable lessons about the police. That early encounter with the mall cop taught me valuable lessons, too. When I related the story of that incident to my friends and their parents, they told me far-worse stories of being followed, frisked, humiliated, and even brutalized, for walking in malls or lingering in amusement parks, or for just going to school or coming home from work.
That was when I first learned that the police do not always live by the code of serving and protecting, or at least that they don’t serve and protect all citizens equally. Still, as a preteen, I didn’t understand just how far certain officers departed from that code, or the extent to which they were allowed to get away with doing so—much less why. I believe this knowledge is crucial for any young person of color growing up in the United States.
I am writing to you today because when I see kids in Chicago being stopped and frisked by the cops, I always feel guilty for not knowing what to do, just like I still feel guilty for not helping you that day. I’m also writing because we all need to talk—whenever and however we can—about the awful things that we have to deal with as Black people in this country, as well as what we can do about them.
•••
Even though I still don’t know what to do, and I still don’t know how to solve this scourge, I have done something. I have done, as an academic, the thing I know how to do best: research and study and write. So, I started a research project about the history of police violence in your city. For this project I’ve interviewed youth of color in Chicago and talked about their experiences with the police. What they said would probably sound familiar to you, given that they are your younger brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, friends—in a way, your younger selves. Although you two are now adults, and probably already have a general idea of the feelings young people might have toward the police, I want to give you a taste of what they said for a particular reason. Before my interviews and group discussions with Chicago youth, I would always tell them about witnessing your stop-and-frisk encounter as a way to give them some background on my earliest memory of the Chicago police. What happened to you has been an important point of departure for my research, and it has invited sobering reflections from the people I speak with.
In a discussion at Harold Washington Library in the spring of 2016, for instance, Nekia explained to a group of thirteen teenagers that when her brother was around fifteen (the same age she was then), he got arrested. “The police came in my house one night and grabbed him. I was scared,” she said.
Nekia saw the police put handcuffs on her brother, and she didn’t understand why they were taking him away. “My mom was there, so of course she was trying to calm me down. But she was distracted because I have older siblings. I’m the youngest of seven,” she said. Her brothers and sisters were angry and getting more and more agitated, which put pressure on Nekia’s mother to make sure no one else went to jail. “I definitely didn’t understand what was happening. There was a lot going on, and I was just like, ‘Where is he going?’”
Martin could sympathize. He had faced a similar situation. His father was arrested in his home when he was five years old. “I didn’t understand what was happening,” he said. All he knew then was that “there were a lot of lights.”
After Martin had finished sharing his story, Phillip spoke up. “My first memory of the police is from when I was thirteen,” he said, “and there was a shooting on the block.” Phillip had been walking in a large group with his brothers and cousins—eight of them in all. An unmarked police car braked right in front of them, and an officer jumped out and told everybody to put their hands above their heads.
“He started groping us in our private parts to look for guns and stuff. I’d say it’s a negative memory because I don’t want another grown man touching my private area. I was thirteen. What would I be doing with a gun?” said Phillip.
“I remember it like yesterday, and it still bothers me,” Phillip continued. “But I’m trying to get over it.”
Like Phillip, what happened to you at Lawndale and Cermak is probably something you’ve worked hard to “get over” and move beyond. But I want you to know that, just as your experience affected me, it is now affecting a younger generation of Chicagoans who are searching for a way to process their feelings about the police.
I plan to write letters based on my research on police violence to all of the youth of color in Chicago. By writing to this larger group, I hope that my silence that day in 2004 will be replaced by a loud voice that insists on my apology to you for not stepping forward back then. Through my letters, I’ll also be talking to the big, beautiful community of kids of color who still have to reckon with the same institutional racism that you faced on that day.
I cannot change that day. And I cannot change the pain and frustration and confusion you must have felt, walking home with your heads hung low. But what I hope to do is make something useful from that awful moment. I imagine you now, receiving this letter in the mail. I hope that if you could read this letter, you would give me your blessing, that you would feel the pain of that day—the burdens of that mistreatment—growing into something else, a greater sense of purpose, perhaps. When I think about that possibility, I can’t help but smile.
I am writing this letter to you, the tens of thousands of Black and Brown young men and young women living in Chicago. You don’t know me. But I know you; or rather, I know what can happen to you. I am writing to all of you because you are the next generation who has to fear violence from the same people who are tasked with protecting you and serving you.
The police department of your city is full, I am sure, of lots of officers who care about the law and serve the community. But the police department is also full of racism and abuse. I am guessing that many of you have already felt this; some of you have been pulled over for no reason or arrested just for being on a certain street corner at a certain time of night. What I hope none of you has experienced, however, is that the dirty looks and the illegal searches are not the extent of it. They are merely part of a long and frightening spectrum of mistreatment by the police—a spectrum (or what scholars call the use-of-force continuum) that extends all the way to the most egregious acts of torture you can imagine. For as long as you have been alive (and much longer than that), certain members of the Chicago Police Department have been torturing your fellow Chicagoans.
I am writing because you need to be aware of what could happen while you walk in this world. And I am also writing to you on behalf of those men and women who have suffered greatly at the hands of the police. When I talk to torture survivors, you are the group of people that they want most desperately to address. They hope that by learning about torture, you might be able to avoid their fate.
I have spent the last fourteen years of my life trying to understand the history of police torture in this city. How it happened. Why it happened. Whom it could happen to next. It is this last concern that connects you most viscerally to this history. And the reason I know this is from talking with your peers.
For example, one of your peers, a sixteen-year-old named Zach, told me that, just days before our interview, he had met a man who had been wrongfully convicted of a crime. The man said he was convicted because “he got tortured into copping a plea.” He had been locked up for twenty years, Zach explained, and got out in 2013.
Zach said that when he read the consent form to participate in my study, which mentioned the Chicago police torture cases, he kept thinking, “Is that what that man was talking about when he said he got tortured?” Then, Zach said he was going to ask me a question that he didn’t want to ask the tortured man: “If something like that happens to you, how do you survive?”
I still haven’t figured out an adequate response.
When one of your peers would ask me about the likelihood that they would be tortured someday, my stomach would ball into a knot and I would grow stiff. I would open my mouth, but no words would come out. It didn’t occur to me at the time to tell them that young people who once attended some of the same schools as them had recently traveled to the United Nations to protest police violence. In hindsight, I think that would’ve provided some reassurance and tamped down some of their fears. The only thing I could ever think of to do was to talk about the political fight for reparations—the struggle that would bring the history of police torture to their classrooms.
I would like to share that history with you.
In the spring of 2015, the City of Chicago’s Finance Committee held a hearing during which politicians considered a piece of legislation, officially called the 2015 Reparations Ordinance. This law was filed on behalf of fifty-seven survivors of police torture and included a number of demands, such as a public apology from the city and a monument to be built to honor the torture survivors. The survivors also filed for a monetary settlement to finance what they referred to in the Ordinance as “the Chicago Police Torture Reparations Commission” and additional funding to pay for health care (including psychological counseling), free tuition at the City Colleges, and job training and placement for survivors and their families. On May 6, 2015, the Chicago City Council agreed to many of these demands, including $5.5 million in reparations for the survivors.
Although this dollar amount is not the largest ever awarded to victims of police violence, the ruling was landmark in the way it framed the issue. Although certain previous settlements did acknowledge that a person was tortured, that acknowledgment always hinged on whether someone had committed a crime. To win a judgment, a person had to prove not only that he or she was tortured but also that the victim was innocent of the crime he or she had confessed to. By contrast, the fifty-seven Black men who were awarded reparations from the City of Chicago were never exonerated of the crimes that they were convicted of. They were compensated for their torture, in other words, not for time they had wrongfully spent in jail.
In this sense, the Reparations Ordinance separated the legal notion of guilt from the issue of torture. This is what made the ordinance unique: it was a concession on the part of the City of Chicago that torture was wrong no matter what, regardless of whether the suspect was innocent or guilty. That concession was unprecedented. Because of the intergenerational, interracial movement that arose to fight for this cause, African American men who were tortured received reparations for the first time in US history.
You may be thinking that there is an obvious connection between reparations for slavery and for the Chicago torture cases. If so, you would be right. In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates brought renewed attention to the issue with his Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” in which he argued that the United States should “atone” for stealing Black labor and wealth from African Americans and that, if the country did so, it would be very different from what it is today. While it is yet to be determined whether the torture cases in Chicago will have any bearing on the larger reparations debate, the kind of repayment that torture survivors won makes everyone see the legacy of racism and violence in the United States, as well as the impact of that legacy on police, health care, and education.1
This points to another reason I am writing you: to tell you about the important concessions the Reparations Ordinance included. Legal settlements typically compensate individuals only for the hardships they have suffered, but the Reparations Ordinance provided resources that are benefiting your entire city. For instance, it called for the Chicago Public Schools system to incorporate into its junior high and high school curriculum a history lesson about the Chicago police torture cases.
As a professor, I understood the call to educate the public about police torture as my call to action. When I heard about this demand, back in 2015, I had been researching police torture for more than a decade. In fact, I was thinking about giving up my research because I was convinced that nothing would ever change. But the thought of helping to educate you filled me with a renewed sense of purpose. I felt that my contribution could be to help teenagers of color like you rethink the idea of what it means to be guilty and to help explain the damage that judging someone to be guilty can do.
Torture is always wrong, no matter if the person is innocent or not. And thus, this letter also aims to dispel the trope of the wrongfully accused. A “trope,” simply put, is an idea that you hear over and over again, to the point that it becomes something that you believe in without even thinking about it. And, especially since the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which brought national attention to legal claims of racial discrimination, the trope of the wrongfully accused has become an extremely common way to make sense of the criminal justice system in the United States. As more and more police torturers are brought to light, this trope has become increasingly familiar: it is the story of an unjustly incarcerated and brutalized person who embarks on an ultimately successful quest to prove his or her innocence and obtain freedom.
Living in the United States, we hear stories of the wrongfully convicted—and eventually exonerated—all the time. We read magazine profiles. We watch documentaries. We listen to interviews with the exonerated and their families on morning talk shows and podcasts. These stories all share key elements. They portray the struggle for exoneration in heart-wrenching detail. We learn of the lost years of imprisonment, often numbering in the decades; the suffering of family members whose lives have been devastated by the absence of their loved ones; and the sacrifices that lawyers make on behalf of their clients. The feel-good conclusions to these harrowing narratives appeal to our longing for happy endings. They reveal that terrible things happen in life but that wrongs can be rectified. They conclude by reassuring us that life is fair. Who doesn’t want to believe that?
Sometimes, these narratives push a little further and offer a critique of the criminal justice system. Perhaps they mention the disproportionate sentencing of people who are Brown or Black or poor. But the underlying assumption is always the same: every once in a while, authorities might capture, imprison, or even torture the wrong person. Unlike those who are eventually revealed to be innocent, however, these stories tell us that most people deserve their fate.
The trope of the wrongfully accused therefore fails to acknowledge how pervasive these abuses are; it fails to acknowledge the fundamental problems within police departments and courthouses and prisons; it fails to acknowledge that our institutions of justice sustain and legitimize police torture. In fact, because the wronged person is exonerated at the end—nearly always through the dogged determination of lawyers or the progressive rationale of forward-thinking judges—these stories reaffirm our faith in the legal system, even though it is that system that has perpetuated the flaws that led to the person being convicted in the first place.
We must understand the problem with this trope.
That’s why in all of my letters I ask you not to think of the innocent person as the quintessential torture victim. Rather, imagine a person who committed a crime that you regard as especially heinous. Imagine that person being bagged and suffocated and beaten within an inch of his life. Ask yourself, can I see enough humanity in him to understand why it is just as wrong to torture him as it is to torture an innocent man?
And that question brings me to the other purpose of this letter: to tell you about Andrew Wilson. He is the first person to file a lawsuit against the City of Chicago for the crime of torture. Wilson was convicted of killing two police officers, and for a long time people in Chicago, your city, believed that the police tortured him in revenge for his deeds. Most Chicagoans did not care about Wilson because they believed him to be guilty. But I think you need to care about him. Why? It is not because Wilson could very well have confessed to something he did not do. Although confessions that are coerced from torture are always questionable, his guilt or innocence must be separated from the issue of his torture. You should care about Wilson despite what you think he did, because what was later done to him reveals something important about the anger and loathing directed against Black criminal suspects—indeed, against entire Black communities.
•••
Andrew Wilson’s story begins in 1982. It was a snowy afternoon on February 9, a biting northeasterly wind coming off the lake. Chicago was in the midst of its coldest freezing spell of the year. That afternoon, according to the police report, two officers flashed their lights on a brown Chevrolet Impala. The occupants of the car, Andrew Wilson and his younger brother, Jackie, were suspected of having recently committed a burglary. One of the officers, William Fahey, instructed the Wilson brothers to step out of the vehicle. Both men obeyed. They got out of the car and, as directed, placed their hands on the Impala’s hood. Fahey began to frisk Andrew Wilson while his partner, Officer Richard O’Brien, entered the Impala to search it.
Once he finished patting down Andrew Wilson, Fahey turned his attention to Jackie. Moments later, Andrew Wilson attempted to strip the policeman of his weapon. Wilson grabbed Fahey, and as the two men struggled for his gun, they fell to the ground. Andrew Wilson won the wrestling match, which ended when the gun discharged in the scuffle, critically wounding Fahey.
Richard O’Brien didn’t realize that the arrest had gone awry until he heard the gunshot. He was sitting in the Impala’s back seat, sifting through Jackie and Andrew’s plunder. At the sound of gunfire, O’Brien left the car and pointed his weapon at the first person he saw, Jackie Wilson, wide-eyed, his hands still on the hood.
Unaware that his partner was on the ground, wrestling with Andrew Wilson and bleeding out, O’Brien called for Fahey. When Fahey failed to respond, O’Brien approached the rear of the car. Andrew shot him in the chest.
According to the report, Andrew then climbed on the back of the car and while standing on the roof, shot Fahey again. The Wilsons sped off in the Impala as the two policemen bled out in the snow.
These are the events to which Andrew Wilson eventually confessed.
•••
For four days, Wilson was the subject of a citywide manhunt, at that time, the largest that Chicago had ever seen. Concentrating their efforts on the Near West Side and on the South Side, police officers parked their squad cars and combed Black neighborhoods block by block.
A dragnet like this is a nightmare not just for the person who is the subject of it but also for everyone in the vicinity. The hatred the police harbored for Wilson led to widespread abuses for Black residents across the entire city, all of which suggest a disregard for Black lives that can be accounted for only by deep-rooted assumptions about Black criminality.
Doris Miller, Andrew Wilson’s neighbor and friend, reported that the cops hauled her into the police station, handcuffed her to a pipe, and kept her in custody for twenty hours without food or access to a bathroom. When she denied knowing Wilson’s whereabouts, the lieutenant in charge of the Area 2 Violent Crimes Unit, Jon Burge, told Miller, “I’ll come back in here and beat your ass.”
Patricia and Alvin Smith reported that plainclothes policemen had broken down their door at one in the morning. The cops ransacked the premises and pointed their guns at the Smiths’ daughter, who was twelve. The Smiths didn’t understand how a little girl could be mistaken for a middle-aged man when the only similarity was that both were Black.2
An actual middle-aged Black man, Adolph Thornton, was not mistaken for Wilson but apparently his German shepherd was; police broke down Thornton’s door and shot the two-year-old dog in his gut.
Here’s another one: William Phillips was arrested for standing on the corner. He tried to explain to police that he was a hardworking firefighter. As he talked, Phillips showed his palms, as Black men of a certain station sometimes do to proactively prove their innocence, the officers told him to shut his trap and then knocked out one of his teeth for not quieting quickly enough.
Those were the people mistaken for having criminal associations. Those who actually had criminal records got much worse. Julia Davis, who would later testify against the police in Wilson’s case, explained that her son, Larry Milan, had been a gang member, but she was proud that Larry had served his time and come home a changed man. Even so, Larry’s prior conviction justified a raid on Davis’s home and destruction of her property. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Larry was arrested and held at the police station for three days as officers tried to link him to Wilson. Davis worried for her son’s safety—and rightly so. Larry came home with bruises on his back and abrasions on his legs from being brutalized by police officers.
And then there was Roy Wade Brown, who also eventually testified against the city in one of Wilson’s suits. I’ve saved his story for last because his experience mirrored the way the police treated Andrew Wilson when they finally caught him. According to Brown, the officers who interrogated him grew so frustrated when he would not admit to killing their colleagues or to knowing who did that they placed a plastic bag over his head, cutting off his air supply. One of the interrogators then put Brown’s index finger in a bolt cutter and threatened to cut it off. Brown was hit repeatedly with a paddle before being taken to the roof of the police station. “We’ll throw you off if you don’t tell us about the shootings,” the officers said.
As you can see, the cops broke their own laws systematically and thoroughly. They violated their own codes. I sometimes think they forgot they were cops at all, but of course, they only got away with this because they were cops: their uniforms gave them impunity. This was evident in the way they drew a gun on the Smith girl; their assaults on Doris Miller, William Phillips, and Larry Milan; and the threats they made to Roy Brown’s life.
If you find yourself getting angry while reading about how the police terrorized the Black community that is perfectly normal. In fact, it is to be expected. This manhunt reminded your peers of their own experiences with the police.
“Honestly, it’s disgusting,” Danielle said. “We’re supposed to be protected by our legal system. They’re there to protect us. But to have someone raid your house without a warrant, that’s messed up. Just because you were a past felon,” she continued, referencing Larry Milan’s story, “what gives you that right? And who’s to say that you haven’t changed?”
Isaac was taken by William Phillips. “Just by standing on the corner? Because of the color of his skin?” he said. “He didn’t deserve it. And I know there are more people out there that have gone through the same thing. Trying to make a living for himself and his family, and just to be taken away for something like that. It’s messed up.” Isaac shook his head.
“It’s almost sickening,” Sharon said, “to read about everything that they did. OK, they were looking for a criminal, but that doesn’t give them the right to do what they did. I just feel like, I feel like that could have been any one of us.”
I mention what these teenagers said in case you share their sentiments. It’s my experience that it can be comforting to know that other people have the same feelings as you do.
During the manhunt, many people living in Wilson’s neighborhood were just as angry as you may be feeling now and just as disgusted as your peers. Wilson’s neighbors wanted the police to know that just because someone killed two police officers doesn’t mean that an entire community should be treated as if all its members were murderers. This is, of course, understandable.
However, I’m asking you to take another, more difficult stance, and to insist that not even a murderer should be treated the way Andrew Wilson was after he was captured. Adopting this more difficult stance is vital if we truly want to understand how police torture found fertile soil to grow in your beloved city of Chicago, and if we want to prevent it from happening again. After all, the same racist assumptions that made it possible for the police to torture Andrew Wilson made it possible for them to terrorize his entire community.
•••
While the police held hostage Black residents of the West and South Sides, Wilson was still at large but getting weary. The night of February 13, he was hiding in the home of Garnett Vaughn, an acquaintance who had agreed to shelter Wilson while he fled the police. In Vaughn’s apartment, Wilson abandoned his grand scheme of fleeing the country for a remote island in favor of a more attainable goal: lying on the couch and getting some sleep. He managed to get some rest, briefly. But on his fifth day as a fugitive, Wilson’s luck ran out. Around four in the morning on February 14, he was awakened by the sound of Lieutenant Burge and several officers, bursting into Vaughn’s apartment.
All the officers, including Burge, were white men in civilian clothes. They ordered Wilson and Vaughn against the wall. Once he was identified as the suspect, Wilson was thrown to the floor, his pockets were searched, and he was fitted with handcuffs.
This, Wilson later said, is when he heard Burge speak for the first time. “Handle him with kid gloves,” Burge said. “We’ll get him at the station.”3
The comments seemed innocent enough, if slightly foreboding. But Wilson could not possibly have known what they foreshadowed. When they arrived at Area 2 headquarters, the police took Wilson into a small room for questioning, where they punched him repeatedly in the abdomen and kicked him in the eye, which according to Wilson, tore his retina. One of the officers grabbed a bag out of the garbage can and put it over Wilson’s head.4 Near the end of the beating, Burge entered the small room and chided his officers for leaving bruises on Wilson’s face. “I wouldn’t have messed him up,” Burge said, meaning that the officers should have inflicted their punishments without leaving visible marks. The archive illustrates this mistake. In a postcard-size photograph taken after the beatings—and a hospital visit—when Wilson was finally placed in jail, he is bloodied and heavily bandaged. The photo leaves no doubt that Wilson’s abuse would have been visible to anyone who crossed his path. That means a lot of people knew what was happening. And that means that a lot of people stayed silent.
Next, Wilson was taken to another interview room. Detective John Yucaitis arrived carrying a brown shopping bag. In it was a device Wilson would come to know as the black box.
Like so many great inventions, the black box was most likely intended for a very different purpose from the one that made it infamous. In all likelihood, it originally served as a portable telephone for military personnel in the field. Jon Burge would have been familiar with these field telephones from his time in the army.5 Because Burge would never answer questions about it, we don’t know for certain if the black box was in fact a military-grade field telephone or a new hybrid torture machine. However, Wilson’s lawyers believed that it was exported from the jungles of Vietnam—where Burge likely knew about and probably witnessed the torture of suspected members of the Viet Cong—and dusted off for the streets of Chicago.
In the interview room, Yucaitis pulled two wires out of the black box and attached them with clamps to Wilson’s right ear and nostril. He cranked the handle. Wilson hollered because of the pain. Yucaitis stopped cranking when someone came to the door, at which point the detective put the instrument back in the bag and left.
Yucaitis then took his suspect to another room, where Wilson refused to give a confession to state’s attorney Larry Hyman and was promptly returned to the place where the detective had shocked him. Half an hour later, Yucaitis returned with the black box. This time, Jon Burge was with him. The lieutenant announced that it was “fun time.”
Burge reattached the box’s clamps to Wilson’s nostrils and ears and began to crank the handle again, which produced an electric current, shocking Wilson.6 Still handcuffed to the ring on the wall, Wilson had enough freedom of movement to rip the clips from his ears with his shoulders, but when he did this the clips left marks. Although only a few pictures survived from the interrogation, one shows tiny loop marks on the top of Wilson’s ears, the other depicts a scar in the middle of each ear.
Frustrated by Wilson’s constant squirming and his inability to endure the punishment the officers felt he deserved, Burge and Yucaitis uncuffed one arm and handcuffed him to another ring, as well. Wilson’s body was now stretched out so that he was facing a radiator located against the wall between the two rings.
The radiator, positioned just inches from his chest, burned Wilson’s flesh. His skin blistered and began to blacken. But this pain so paled in comparison to that caused by the black box’s persistent current that Wilson was not yet aware of the radiator. The heat from the radiator “didn’t even exist then,” Wilson would later testify. “The box existed.” Meanwhile, Burge stuck the clamps on Wilson’s fingers, and as Wilson was kneeling, with his legs, chest, and face making contact with the radiator, Burge shocked him. At this point, it seems that Burge just wanted to test how much pain Wilson could tolerate.
When he was finished singeing Wilson’s flesh, Burge revealed a second electrical device. Here’s how Wilson would later describe it: “It’s black and it’s round and it had a wire sticking out of it and it had a cord on it. He plugged it into the wall. . . . He took it and he ran it up between my legs, my groin area, just ran it up there very gently . . . up and down, up and down, you know, right between my legs, up and down like this, real gentle with it, but you can feel it, still feel it. Then he jabbed me with the thing.”
When Burge “jabbed” Wilson with the instrument, Wilson’s body slammed against the window grill near the radiator, and, spitting up blood, he fell to the ground.
The electroshock sessions had ended.
Wilson may have thought the worst was over, that he was now going to be subject to the normal booking process. But that was not to be. When the electroshock was finished, Burge placed his gun in Wilson’s mouth and cocked it. “He kept doing it,” Wilson would later testify, “he kept clicking it and he had it in my mouth and stuff.” Wilson was then taken to another police station and made to stand in several lineups. Around 6:30 p.m., Wilson signed a confession statement, which was taken by assistant state’s attorney Larry Hyman. Detective Patrick O’Hara was also present, as well as Burge.
Jon Burge, the lieutenant in charge of the high-profile manhunt, seemed satisfied that Wilson was destined for the electric chair.
“We’re gonna fry your Black ass,” Burge said to Wilson.
By the end of this thirteen-hour ordeal Wilson had been beaten and broken. The police had transformed him, had made that beaten, broken man into the embodiment of the anger that Burge felt toward Black criminal suspects.
In my previous letter I told you I was writing to talk with you about something that you have probably already glimpsed in your own lives—the hatred directed toward Black people in your city. I began to tell you the story of a confessed killer for a particular reason. As I alluded to in my last letter, I know, from talking with your peers, that some of you will assume that Andrew Wilson was falsely accused of these terrible crimes and turned out to be innocent. I’m sure you know that there are many such stories. They form the subject of nonfiction books like Convicting the Innocent, TV shows like Rectify, off-Broadway plays like The Exonerated, documentaries like Murder on a Sunday Morning, motion pictures like The Hurricane, and podcasts like Serial. But Wilson’s is not one of these stories. All available evidence suggests that Wilson was indeed guilty, that Wilson is a cop killer.
In my previous letter I asked you to take a moment and reflect on this question: If he is guilty, is his story any less valuable? The reason I wanted you to consider this question is because I know that this could change things, at least somewhat. Perhaps you feel a distaste now. Perhaps you find yourself wishing that we could talk about something else, now that you know this story won’t have a happy ending. Perhaps your first gut reaction is that if he is a cop killer, then he deserved what he got. All those feelings make sense. Whatever your thoughts, know that I am not here to judge those gut reactions. I am here to challenge them.
I already told you that, after more than a decade studying police torture, I believe Wilson’s guilt is irrelevant. In my last letter I tried to convince you that even if he is a cop killer, that does not make his story any less valuable. But in this letter I want to tell you exactly why his story matters so much. It matters because by hating and condemning people, we actually make them more vulnerable for torture. To see this, you only have to consider what happened after Wilson was arrested, tortured, and taken out of the interrogation room.
Around nine o’clock on the day that he was tortured, Wilson was taken out of interrogation, and Burge placed Wilson in the care of two officers, Mario Ferro and William Mulvaney. They were tasked with transporting Wilson to the Chicago Police Department’s downtown headquarters. But before leaving Area 2, the officers tormented Wilson some more. They hit Wilson and grabbed him by the genitals. When they left the interview room, they verbally abused him and physically beat him some more. Once finished, they realized they had a problem: Wilson was bleeding. Bruises were forming all over his body. Wilson had several large gashes on his forehead, and blood was dripping from his right eye, which was swollen shut. The officers feared these injuries would raise suspicion when he appeared in court for his booking the next day. Therefore, Ferro and Mulvaney decided to put Wilson in an occupied cell; if anyone asked, they could claim that other prisoners had beaten him up.
For their plan to work, Ferro and Mulvaney had to get Wilson past the intake officer downtown. They didn’t think this would be a problem, as Ferro and Mulvaney knew many of the intake officers personally. More than that, they knew what a day in intake was like. When those officers weren’t filing papers and processing suspects, they were picking up slack by helping answer emergency calls. They were also charged with breaking up fights between inmates. In other words, intake officers were overworked and perpetually busy, and it was unlikely they would notice another suspect with a few bruises, gashes, and cuts.
But when Ferro and Mulvaney arrived at CPD headquarters and tried to process Wilson, the intake officer refused admittance. He didn’t want to be held responsible for Wilson’s wounds, a refusal that suggests how grisly they must have been. Out of options, Ferro and Mulvaney decided at last to follow protocol and take Wilson to the hospital. At Mercy Hospital, a few miles away from CPD headquarters, the officers told Wilson that if he knew what was good for him, he would refuse to be treated. This intimidation tactic nearly worked. Wilson later said that he would have declined treatment were it not for a Black ward clerk, Thaddeus Williams, who noticed the signs of torture. Williams also overheard the policemen’s threats. When the officers weren’t looking, Williams told Wilson that he had the right to be seen by a doctor, and, after this reassurance, Wilson signed a consent form and was seen by Geoffrey Korn.7 Dr. Korn, the attending physician in the emergency room, would later indicate that as an emergency room doctor working in Chicago, he was accustomed to seeing criminal suspects entering the hospital injured and handcuffed. But Wilson’s wounds were unlike any he had ever seen.
Wilson responded hesitantly when Dr. Korn asked about his injuries. He stuttered, looking back and forth between the doctor and police officers before answering. Dr. Korn, like Thaddeus Williams, saw signs indicative of torture. The doctor understood that Wilson was scared, and he assumed that Wilson was checking if the cops were listening in on the conversation, as indeed they were. Eventually, Wilson told Dr. Korn that he had fallen outside the police station. Dr. Korn knew this was a lie. The injuries were so many and so varied that he found them difficult to enumerate. This is what Korn wrote in his report:
Patient claims that he fell outside the police station and incurred all the injuries in that fashion. The injuries include several small hemorrhages to the right eye, ecchymosis below the right eyelid, a one centimeter laceration above the left eyebrow with fresh blood, two eight-centimeter-long linear abrasions to the right cheek, numerous small abrasions under the right chin, a one centimeter laceration to the left occipital scalp, numerous abrasions and bruises on the anterior chest wall, several abrasions to the right deltoid, fifteen-centimeter-long linear by three centimeter wide freshly denuded area along anterior lateral aspect of right thigh with piled up superficial layers of skin at the edges, and erythema about both wrists.
All that means is that Korn reported that Wilson had several ruptured blood vessels in his right eye; a laceration, fresh with blood, above his left eyebrow; two gashes on his right cheek; numerous cuts under the chin; a laceration on the back of the head; radiator burns on his abdomen; several bruises on his chest and right shoulder; deep bruising along both wrists; and a second-degree burn—six inches long and more than an inch wide—on his right thigh.
As Dr. Korn attempted to suture a wound on Wilson’s head, Mulvaney took his gun out of its holster—a clear attempt, it seemed, to intimidate doctor and patient alike. Korn had been a doctor long enough to know that this was far from standard procedure. He refused to treat Wilson while Mulvaney’s gun was out of its holster and walked out of the examination room when Mulvaney would not put it away.
Only the three of them know what happened when Wilson was left alone with Ferro and Mulvaney. Did the officers remind him of what had been done to him a few hours previously: the black box, the electroshock? Did they remind him what might still occur in a police precinct behind closed doors? I imagine that for Wilson, the precinct was no longer a precinct; it was a building with dark, hidden passageways that led to places of pain, to secret rooms with unimaginably sinister purposes.
Thirty minutes after signing a paper agreeing to treatment, Wilson refused it. He was released after signing another paper, what’s known as an AMA, which confirmed that he was leaving the hospital “against medical advice.” Once Wilson declined to be a patient, Ferro and Mulvaney returned to police headquarters. This time, they met little resistance from the intake officer. After all, they had taken Wilson to the hospital and couldn’t be blamed if he did not want to stay.
Wilson spent the night in lockup. The following morning, he was transported to Cook County Jail and later to court. While he was at the courthouse, an assistant public defender, Barbara Steinberg noticed his injuries. They would have been hard to miss. His head was wrapped in a white bandage through which blood was seeping, and his face was “messed up,” Steinberg later testified. Wilson told Steinberg that he had been beaten and shocked. When she asked if he had other injuries, Wilson showed her dark vertical marks—presumably burn marks from the radiator—on his abdominal area. She spoke to the judge to request medical help for Wilson, which the judge granted, and she also telephoned her office to recommend that a photographer be sent to record his injuries.
Upon Wilson’s return to jail, photographs were indeed taken. Ordinarily, jail authorities take only mug shots of an arriving prisoner, but because of Andrew Wilson’s injuries, and perhaps because of the look of naked vulnerability he wore after his experience with Burge in the torture room, the Cook County authorities took pictures of Andrew’s body so as not to be blamed for his wounds. Wilson was then taken to Cermak Health Services, the Cook County Jail hospital facility, where the emergency room doctor detailed his many serious injuries.
Those details were important. Without that documentation it would have been difficult to prove that what happened to Wilson was, indeed, torture.
From the moment Andrew Wilson left the Area 2 police headquarters, the signs of torture were written on his flesh. They were visible to anyone with eyes in his head.8
On February 16, Wilson met Dale Coventry, the public defender appointed to represent him in his murder trial. Wilson told Coventry about the torture, and the public defender arranged to have more pictures taken, instructing the photographer to pay particular attention to Wilson’s ears, chest, and thighs, where the abrasions were especially raw.
That evening, the medical director at the Cook County Jail hospital facility, Dr. John Raba, examined Wilson’s injuries for two consecutive days. Afterwards, Raba sent a letter to the superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, Richard J. Brzeczek. This is what it said.
February 17
Re: Examination of Andrew Wilson
Dear Mr. Brzeczek:
I examined Mr. Andrew Wilson on February 15 & 16, 1982. He had multiple bruises, swellings, and abrasions on his face and head. His right eye was battered and had a superficial laceration. Andrew Wilson had several linear blisters on his right thigh, right cheek and anterior chest, which were consistent with radiator burns. He stated that he had been cuffed to a radiator and pushed into it.
He also stated that electrical shocks had been administered to his gums, lips and genitals.
All these injuries occurred prior to his arrival at the Jail. There must be a thorough investigation of this alleged brutality.
Sincerely,
John M. Raba, M.D.
Medical Director
Cermak (Prison) Health Services
What Raba documented in his letter would later become Deposition Exhibit 2 in Andrew Wilson’s court case. But the fact that it would eventually support his claims of torture did not mean much during Wilson’s first nights of imprisonment. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Wilson was scared. All his life, people had been afraid of him. Since he was an adolescent, Wilson’s teachers, counselors, and coaches had described him as a menace. But the black box had changed everything; his body was in shock, his spirit broken.
Almost a year after his torture, Wilson was tried and found guilty of the murder of the two policemen in January 1983. He was given a death sentence. That sentence was later thrown out, after the Illinois Supreme Court deemed that his confession had been coerced. Wilson was retried, again convicted of murder, and this time sentenced to double life in prison without parole.
While appealing his second murder conviction, Wilson filed what would be the first of several civil suits. Civil cases are different from criminal cases because they involve private disputes between people and organizations. (Criminal cases involve an act that is considered harmful to the whole society.) For example, you could file a civil suit against a business if you thought the company broke the terms of a contract you both agreed to. In that case, you would ask the court to tell the business to fulfill the duty. In this case, Andrew Wilson sued the Chicago police because he felt the government broke the terms of the social contract that he was guaranteed as a citizen of the United States. His civil suit was tried in a federal court because, he argued, the government (rather than another person or business) had violated his constitutional rights by torturing him.
In 1986, when the civil suit was filed, Judge Brian Duff assigned several different firms to act on Wilson’s behalf. Perhaps these firms did not have the resources to match the city’s, or perhaps they did not want to make an enemy of the Chicago Police Department. Whatever the reason, they all found excuses to evade their obligation until Flint Taylor, John Stainthorp, and Jeffrey Haas of the People’s Law Office entered the case on Wilson’s behalf in 1987.
The People’s Law Office had represented many unpopular political activists, including the families of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Black Panthers who were killed in a middle-of-the-night raid by the Chicago police in 1969. Still, Wilson was a convicted cop killer. Given that the manhunt for the killer of Officers Fahey and O’Brien had been the largest in the city’s history, receiving massive news coverage, the law firm, according to Taylor, had a seemingly impossible task.
Indeed, by this time, Andrew Wilson was well known to the public, who reviled him as a cold-blooded murderer. Much of Chicago had rallied around the Fraternal Order of Police, whose members argued that Wilson’s lawsuit had no merit and was no less than an attack on law enforcement itself. The People’s Law Office faced an increased level of scrutiny and harassment because of the decision to take Wilson’s case, but its lawyers persisted, motivated by a desire for justice that outweighed fears of reprisal.
I interviewed Taylor a few years ago. He told me that, by the time he met Wilson, Taylor was a veteran of cases that seemed impossible—“hopeless litigations,” he called them. When this civil suit came along, it was another case that just cried out for justice. It had the same issues of race and police violence and unpopular victims as the People’s Law Office’s previous case, where lawyers proved that the police had murdered members of the Black Panther Party. Of course, the Black Panthers, particularly in the white community, were demonized, “so we had experience with fighting against racism in the courts and in trying to educate people by getting the evidence out,” Taylor said.
Fortunately for his client, such challenges seemed to embolden Taylor. He would need all the confidence he could muster to convince a jury of six that Jon Burge, a “star” in the Chicago Police Department, had tortured Wilson. Beyond that, Taylor had to convince the jury that Wilson had the constitutional right not to be tortured.
Taylor had a very challenging task: persuading people that torture is unacceptable in any and all circumstances. On an abstract level, most of us would agree. Indeed, the principle is enshrined in the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment” and applies to both the federal and the state criminal justice systems. Yet in practice, many people find themselves on a slippery slope. They think certain criminals are more dangerous than others, and they concede that police officers must sometimes wield force to extract information or confessions from the most dangerous—force that may, on occasion, turn life threatening or lethal. Unfortunate as extrajudicial force might be, many Americans—perhaps even most of them—agree that there are certain circumstances that justify its use. I hope that this story demonstrates the problem with this belief, because it is this belief that allowed police torture to go unpunished for decades in Chicago, and who knows where else.
As you have already figured out, I have lots of opinions. But I don’t want to tell you what you should believe. Instead, I want to show you the parts of this story that have shaped my own thinking. I want to tell you about the black box.
A “black box” can be multiple things. For one, it references the name of a torture device used to send electronic currents through a person’s body for the purpose of punishing a criminal suspect or coercing a confession. We now believe that Burge destroyed this torture device. In any event, the machine he used to torture Wilson no longer exists; nor do we have pictures of it. The only image we have of the device is the replica that Taylor built, based on descriptions from Wilson. So the best I can do is try to describe it: the black box was cube shaped and had a handle attached to it like an antique music box. A generator inside the box produced electric current. Electrical wires extended from the generator to alligator clamps. When the handle was cranked, between ninety and one hundred volts of electricity passed through the clamps.
Perhaps the most popular idea of a black box in US culture is the device on an airplane that stores information in the event of a flight accident. But another, lesser-known meaning of black box is the tacit agreement, among a group of police officers, to stop trying to understand how and why torture is taking place in their very own precinct.
An analogy from the social science scholarship should make these twinned meanings clear. In his essay “What is an Instinct,” an anthropologist named Gregory Bateson uses the concept of the black box to explain the idea of gravity to his daughter:
“I can tell you what gravity is supposed to do,” Bateson says, “pull objects and things towards the ground. But I can’t explain exactly how it does it. It’s like a Black Box.”
“Oh,” his daughter says. “Daddy, what’s a Black Box?”
“A Black Box is a conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point. I guess it’s usually a temporary agreement.”
“But that doesn’t sound like a Black Box,” she replies.
“No, but that’s what it’s called,” he says. “Things often don’t sound like their names.”
“No. They don’t.”
“It’s a word that comes from the engineers. When they draw a diagram of a complicated machine, they use a sort of shorthand. Instead of drawing all the details, they make a box to stand for a whole bunch of parts and label the box with what that bunch of parts is supposed to do.”
“So, a Black Box is a label for what a bunch of things are supposed to do . . .”
“That’s right,” Bateson says. “But it’s not an explanation of how the bunch works.”
“And gravity?” she inquires.
“Is a label for what gravity is supposed to do. It’s not an explanation of how it does it.”9
I mention Bateson’s discussion because it fits so nicely with the standard definition of a black box, which Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines as “a complicated electronic device whose internal mechanism is typically hidden from or mysterious to the user.”10
Throughout Wilson’s ordeal, Burge and his henchmen agreed that their torturous activity should remain concealed. That is, in attempting to hide the grisly details of their torture operation, these officers together constructed a conceptual black box. Inside of it were sweeping, unexamined stereotypes about what’s good and what’s bad, about where and how “the bad” people live, about the skin color of those bad guys, and about what it is permissible to do to them. That black box is the racism that keeps torture hidden. It is the contempt for the criminal suspect that allows even those police officers not directly involved in torture to become complicit in their grim silence. They will look the other way when confronted with those who have been suffocated, beaten, and electrocuted, because those people “deserved” what they got. Would that same black box allow a jury of Wilson’s peers to condone torture?
I will answer that question throughout the course of this letter. To do so, I must pick up our story in 1987, when the People’s Law Office began preparing for Wilson’s first civil trial, which would take place two years later. The law office knew it needed to convince the jury of three things: Andrew Wilson’s constitutional rights had been violated after his arrest for the murders of Officers Fahey and O’Brien; the Chicago Police Department had a habit of abusing criminal suspects accused of killing cops; and Wilson’s abuse fell in line with that habit. If the jury agreed, the City of Chicago would be held financially responsible for torturing Wilson.
The odds were stacked against Andrew Wilson from the start. Indeed, his lawyers knew that many public officials in the police department chose to ignore evidence of torture. Consider, for instance, the fact that people in the state’s attorney’s and mayor’s offices had seen Wilson’s injuries during the twenty-four hours after he was beaten and tortured. Additionally, Dr. John Raba had never received a reply to his letter to Police Superintendent Brzeczek describing Wilson’s injuries and demanding a full investigation. For his part, Brzeczek did deliver Dr. Raba’s letter directly to State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley, albeit with a cover letter stating that he (Brzeczek) would not investigate Wilson’s alleged torture unless Daley directed him to do so. After consulting with his first assistant, Richard Devine, and another top-level assistant in the State’s Attorney’s Office, William Kunkle, Daley neglected to respond to Brzeczek and passed the inquiry along to the Special Prosecutions Unit, where, three years later, the investigation was “not sustained.” In the meantime, Daley and Brzeczek publicly commended Burge for the capture of Andrew Wilson. Worse, William Kunkle went on to serve as the prosecutor at Andrew Wilson’s trial.
By the time Andrew Wilson’s civil suit against the city and Burge was filed, Daley had become the mayor. And Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee retained the man who had prosecuted Wilson, William Kunkle, then a member of a prestigious law firm where the aforementioned Richard Devine was a partner, to represent Burge and his fellow officers. Clearly, Burge’s ties to the mayor’s office were so strong that city officials at the highest levels of the government, from Daley on down, were deeply invested in exonerating the police and discrediting Wilson.
A week before the civil trial was to begin, though, something miraculous occurred. A series of letters began arriving at the People’s Law Office. The author of those letters was a police insider, a source that Wilson’s lawyers dubbed “Deep Badge.” This is the first letter:
I understand you all are representing Andrew Wilson in his civil action against several police officers for brutality.
Check the following:
Several witnesses including the White’s were severely beaten at 1121 S State St in front of the Chief of Detectives, the Superintendent of Police and the State’s Attorneys. Mayor Byrne and States Attorney Daley were aware of the actions of the detectives. ASA Angarola told both of them and condoned the actions. Several of the officers named in the suit had been previously accused of using torture machines at complaints given to Office of Professional Standards (OPS) and in motions filed in Criminal trial.
The device was destroyed by throwing it off of Lt. Burge’s boat. Mayor Byrne and States Attorney Daley ordered that the numerous complaints filed against the police as a result of this crime not be investigated. This order was carried out by an OPS investigator named Buckley who is close to Alderman Burke. You should interview everyone assigned to Area 2’s Violent Crime unit at that time because some of them were disgusted and will tell all. The torture was not necessary. Russ Ewing of Channel 7 was investigating this matter and you should talk to him.
DO NOT SHOW THIS TO ANYONE. IF YOU WANT MORE PUT AN AD IN THE SOUTHTOWN ECONOMIST. YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO SHOW THIS TO ANYONE. IT IS PRIVILEGED.
They all knew, Deep Badge wrote in another of the four letters he eventually sent to Taylor. “They” included not just the chief of detectives, the superintendent of police, the mayor at the time Jane Byrne, and the state’s attorney Richard M. Daley, but also, as emerged in subsequent letters, many other lawyers from the state’s attorney’s office, as well as judges and lawyers in private practice. The insider said that “they” knew not just about Burge but also about the actions of the officers and detectives in his charge.
In other letters, Deep Badge suggested that Flint Taylor “check the taverns at the intersection of 92nd Street and Western” to locate people Burge had bragged to in the bars where he drank. Burge apparently felt so untouchable, so unassailable, and so above the law that he liked to boast about his harsh interrogation methods, and many citizens in the taverns liked to listen, all of which indicates the shameful fact that Burge’s torture of prisoners was an open secret not just in Chicago city government but also on the streets of the city.
Deep Badge named numerous of Burge’s “ass kickers” and also identified another torture victim, Melvin Jones. According to Deep Badge, nine days before torturing Wilson, Burge had tortured Jones with electric shock. Taylor found Melvin Jones. It turns out that while torturing him, Burge told Jones that he had also tortured “Satan” (Anthony Holmes) and “Cochise” (Roger Collins), two inmates who Wilson’s lawyers subsequently found in prison. Burge would have him “crawling on the floor” like them, he promised Jones. Taylor also met Donald White. In his interview with Taylor, Donald White claimed that Burge and other detectives had beaten him for several hours, suffocated, and shocked him. But if at first the letters Deep Badge provided seemed hard to believe, a stroke of fortune that could have broken open the case, when Taylor attempted to enter Jones’s and White’s affidavits into evidence, Judge Duff excluded their testimonies on the grounds that “evidence of a prior bad act” was inadmissible.
Judge Duff’s ruling provided a stark relief to the optimism Taylor felt upon receiving the letters, dashing his hopes and demonstrating how the institutions of city government would continue to protect those who were guilty of torture. No one can say whether this information would have influenced the jury’s decision. Clearly, however, Duff denied the jury information pertaining to the breadth of the unlawful actions that took place under Burge’s watch. This information would have established that what happened to Andrew Wilson was not particular to him. Rather, it happened to many other suspects, almost all of them Black men, who were unfortunate enough to have been brought into custody at Area 2.
As soon as the opening statements began, on February 13, 1989, it became clear that Burge’s legal team, predictably, wanted to make it as hard as possible for the jury to identify with Wilson. Throughout the case, Kunkle denied repeatedly that Wilson had been tortured, insisting that he had invented the entire scenario. Kunkle, known for eccentricity, put his showmanship on full display in the courtroom. He forced Wilson to show the jury a tattoo on his arm of a rose, two shovels, and a noose. A person willing to be mutilated in this fashion might also inflict a radiator burn on himself, or so Kunkle tried to imply.
Of course, Kunkle reminded the jurors that Fahey and O’Brien had each suffered multiple gunshot wounds, and that Fahey had been killed at close range with a bullet from his own revolver. Kunkle said Wilson had laughed about the murders. Additionally, Kunkle told the jurors that the Wilson brothers had stolen the dead officers’ guns and hidden them, along with a sawed-off shotgun used in the murder of yet another Chicago police officer, in a beauty shop.
Was it the brothers’ sawed-off shotgun? Did Wilson kill other police officers besides Fahey and O’Brien? Perhaps Wilson’s lawyers did not know. Perhaps they did. Or perhaps they held firm to the legal principle that his guilt or innocence was irrelevant to this particular case. Whatever their stance, they knew that if the state had sufficient evidence that Wilson had committed another murder, he certainly would have been charged, but if Wilson’s legal team tried explaining that to the jury or refuting any of these allegations, it risked opening the door to a review of Wilson’s entire criminal record, which was considerable.
Andrew Wilson took the stand seven days into the trial. His lawyers began by asking Wilson about his formal education, establishing that he had not graduated from elementary school. The goal of Wilson’s legal team, it seemed, was to depict their client as someone who had been failed by society at every turn. Only after this theme was established did they ask Wilson about the events of February 14, 1982, when he was arrested, taken into police custody, and tortured. According to reporters like John Conroy, Wilson’s portrayal of the events was as painful to hear as it was convincing.
Then the cross-examination began. The first thing that the city’s defense lawyer William Kunkle did was to make it known to the court that Wilson had long made a living by committing crimes. By way of contrast he told the jury that Burge was a US Army veteran who served tours in South Korea and Vietnam. He also informed them that he had earned a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and multiple Commendation medals for bravery in war. After returning to the South Side of Chicago in 1970, Kunkle told the jury, Burge began his career as a police officer, rising rapidly through the ranks and eventually becoming a commanding officer at Area 2.
With these biographical details, Kunkle painted an opposition between the criminal and the hero, implicitly asking the jury, Who do you believe? Then, after creating this contrast, he questioned Wilson about the day he was pulled over and his arresting officers were shot.
As Kunkle baited Wilson to respond to questions about his altercation with Fahey and O’Brien, Wilson did as his lawyers advised: he pled the Fifth. On the stand, Wilson did not talk about what he had or had not done before being arrested. Rather, he spoke about what happened to him afterward. Not without hesitation, he described the experience of being electrocuted with the black box.
“He put it on my fingers,” Wilson said. “One of the clamps on one finger and one on the other finger. And then he kept cranking it and cranking it, and I was hollering and screaming. I was calling for help. My teeth was grinding. Flickering in my head. Pain . . .”
This last word, pain, was a fading whisper. Wilson’s voice grew softer as he spoke. He paused for several seconds and, after reflecting on the horrifying spectacle of his torture, returned to his testimony.
“It hurts,” Wilson continued. “But it stays in your head, OK? It stays in your head and it grinds your teeth . . . it grinds, constantly grinds, constantly. The pain just stays in your head. And your teeth constantly grinds, and grinds, and grinds, and grinds, and grinds and grinds.”
Seven years after he was tortured, Andrew Wilson was still unable to recount what had happened at Area 2 without choking up. When describing the black box, Wilson grew so upset that he wanted to leave the courtroom. The judge declared a short recess to grant him relief. Once the court proceedings resumed, Wilson came close to breaking down again. John Conroy, a reporter who wrote about Wilson’s testimony that day, said that his lawyer urged him to “take a minute to compose himself.”
“It’s just like this light here like when it flickers, it flickers,” Wilson said before reminding the jury again of how the current from the black box made him grind his teeth. “All my bottom teeth was loose behind that. These four or five . . . and I tried to get the doctor to pull them. He said he wouldn’t pull them because they would tighten back up.”
In his closing arguments, Taylor reminded the jury that the case was not about the murder of two policemen. Nor was it about the quality of Andrew Wilson’s character. Instead, the trial was premised on an ethical question: was Andrew Wilson beaten, tortured, and deprived of his constitutional rights after his arrest?
Taylor argued that the city had done nothing to investigate Wilson’s allegations of torture. “Just because [a policeman] thinks that Andrew Wilson should get the death penalty,” Taylor said, “doesn’t mean that you can electroshock him and start the process.”
The stories Burge and Wilson told must have seemed worlds apart to the jurors. And in the end, the jury had trouble reconciling the different accounts. Wilson’s lawyers presented convincing evidence of Wilson’s torture. At the same time, the fact that he likely killed two police officers might have tempted the jury to disregard the brutality used to extract Wilson’s confession. Burge was swept away by an understandable desire to avenge the deaths of his fellow officers, or so the jury might have reasoned, and grief and rage got the best of him.
After days of deliberation, the jurors were not able to reach consensus. Four times they sent a message to Judge Duff indicating that they were deadlocked. Judge Duff declared a mistrial on March 30, 1989, and the ethical issue of Andrew Wilson’s alleged torture and the denial of his constitutional rights remained unresolved.
Now that you’ve learned about the circumstances of Andrew Wilson’s torture as well as his first civil trial, in this letter I’m going to give you a test—less like a quiz, though, and more like a challenge. In the pages to come, I will present the details of Wilson’s second civil trial and the circumstances that led up to it as well as what happened afterward. I’m discussing this new trial and its aftermath because I want to challenge you to see that a person can be convicted of a crime and still have a right not to be tortured. You should understand that many before you have failed this test—including the jurors and judge who presided over Wilson’s first civil trial.
My last letter ended at the point at which the jury could not decide whether Wilson had been tortured. The three people of color on the six-person jury believed that he had. The three white jurors believed that he had not. The result was a mistrial. But the mistrial did not end Andrew Wilson’s legal journey. He decided to go back to court and continue to fight. Doing so meant he would have to endure the excruciating trial process all over again. It is important to note that verdicts in civil cases have nothing to do with convictions in criminal cases. Wilson’s civil case would have no bearing on the crime for which he had already been convicted. Whatever the outcome of the new trial, Wilson would serve out his sentence, spending the rest of his days in prison.
What is more, our legal system has ways of making sure that convicted criminals do not profit from their crimes. For example, if someone is found guilty of a murder and then tries to enrich himself by writing a book about the person he killed, the family of the slain person can sue the convicted murderer for wrongful death, which means that they are attempting to hold him legally responsible for that death. That way, the family would receive the profits from the book—not the convicted murderer.
By the time Andrew Wilson was considering a second trial against the City of Chicago and the police department, the families of Fahey and O’Brien had already won a wrongful death lawsuit, meaning that they had a legal right to garnish any wages Wilson earned, including money awarded to him in a settlement. Wilson knew that any potential compensation he received would go to them because of that previous judgment. Given that he had no economic incentive to carry on, I’ve always wondered about Wilson’s motivations for continuing to fight. While it might have been the right thing to do, returning to court after the first ruling stood to cause Andrew Wilson more pain with no clear benefit to him, not even if he won.
When I first researched this case, I imagined Taylor and his associates persuading Wilson to testify again. This wasn’t some sick fairy tale that you dreamed up to evade responsibility for your crimes, I imagined them saying. This is your reality. And who knows how many other people have suffered the same fate? I assumed that they must have convinced Wilson that another trial could bring him a measure of the justice that had eluded him for so long and could help save other people and keep them from suffering what Wilson had.
Knowing what I did of Wilson’s mind-set from reading the courtroom testimony of his criminal trial, I assumed that he would have been weighing the potential for a largely symbolic victory against the inevitable legal ordeal he would again be subjected to, and that he would probably be hesitant to go back to court.
One of Wilson’s lawyers, John Stainthorp, was struck by the fact that when Wilson discussed being tortured, he always ended up crying. “He would be absolutely furious with himself,” Stainthorp said, “that it affected him that way.” And agreeing to another trial meant that Wilson would have to retell the experience of being suffocated, electrocuted, and beaten. He would have to again relive the horrors of that day in 1982. The black box was a psychological weight in Wilson’s life. In prison, miles and years away from Area 2, he still felt that electricity running through his veins.
Wilson felt these emotional aftershocks throughout his first civil trial, most noticeably when enumerating for the jury the gruesome events following his arrest. Now, Taylor and his legal team were asking him to once again dredge up dark memories—memories, I assumed, that Wilson would be desperately trying to forget. Why relive the grinding pain when the outcome was no more likely to be successful than it had been the first time?
But when I asked Taylor how Wilson felt about a second trial, he told me that my assumptions were wrong. Wilson wanted to go to court again, and seeing Wilson’s passion, Taylor would help advocate on his client’s behalf.
Taylor reminded me that Wilson had a first-grade education and was the most unpopular guy in the city on account of his being the subject of the biggest manhunt the city had ever seen. Yet, even before the People’s Law Office agreed to take his case, back when every other firm in Chicago refused to represent him, Wilson kept insisting that Chicago police officers tortured him. “No, Wilson wanted the second trial,” Taylor said. “We were the hesitant ones.” Taylor explained that the People’s Law Office was small and its more experienced lawyers had been pulled from all the other litigation going on to work on Wilson’s case. The office needed to make enough money to keep the doors open. To go on trial again, another eight weeks, “while I was getting held in contempt by a racist judge every other day,” Taylor said, was not appealing to him. He did not want to do it. Plus he knew the chances of winning were slim.
All of the lawyers in the firm had serious discussions where they asked themselves: Can we do this again financially and emotionally and in terms of our family? According to Taylor, “At the end of the day, we . . . decided to do it again. I’m glad we did. But we certainly paid a psychic price for it.”
Perhaps the “psychic price” that Taylor was referring to was the ridicule that supporters of the police levied against his firm for taking Wilson’s case. Perhaps it was just stress from working around the clock. I never got clarification on the matter. What I do know is that the toll the case took on Taylor was not evident from the vigor and effort he put into the case. Indeed, I’ve always been in awe of how Taylor maintained his resolve in the face of so many setbacks. Eventually, he came up with a way to use testimony from the other victims Burge had tortured: judges could exclude testimonies from Jones and White, but they could not prevent Taylor from gleaning insight from those testimonies. That is, instead of trying to prove that Wilson, Jones, and White were telling the truth, Taylor would simply believe them. And he would use what they said to find further evidence that Jon Burge had tortured before.
Letters play an important role in this story. The words of Deep Badge, the police insider informant, prompted Taylor to look at the evidence anew. After reading Deep Badge’s letters, Taylor remembered Burge saying during Andrew Wilson’s arrest that he would “get” him at the station. He remembered Burge complaining to the arresting officers that they should have injured Wilson without leaving marks, and Ferro and Mulvaney trying to place Wilson in an occupied cell so that Burge and his officers could not be held responsible for his wounds. Combined, these actions suggested forethought and routine.
Burge was not a man blinded by rage or driven by a self-destructive compulsion to torture. What the letters helped Taylor understand was that far from being a rogue cop, Burge had developed a set of procedures that all but codified the stages of a successful torture session. The procedures had become so commonplace in Chicago that many police officers knew the drill. Beyond that, many lawyers, judges, and politicians had developed, through prolonged exposure, tried-and-true ways of sweeping torture claims under the rug.
Wilson’s second civil trial began on June 19, 1989, and lasted almost eight weeks. For seven of those weeks, the jury heard from witnesses. Most of the witnesses had previously testified in Wilson’s first trial, but two were new and of material importance. Wilson’s lawyers called Willie Porch, who was serving thirty years in prison for armed robbery and attempted murder. As Porch explained to the jury, remorse for those crimes had not brought him in to testify. Rather, he wanted to document his torture in a US court of law. For Taylor, though, Porch’s testimony was critical in proving that Wilson was only one among a host of torture survivors. And this was not merely because he had been subjected to violence while in police custody. It had to do with the way he had been tortured.
Porch said that the police had handcuffed his arms behind his back and that one of the officers stood on his testicles. He said they hit him with a gun on his head. Then one of the officers tried to hang him by his handcuffs to a hook on the door.
But if Taylor’s new theory hinged on proving Burge had tortured many other men, Burge’s lawyer, once again William Kunkle, wanted the jury to believe that they could not be certain about whether Burge ever tortured anyone at all. After Porch’s testimony, Kunkle called William Coleman to the stand. Clearly, Coleman’s role was to support Kunkle’s claim that Wilson had fabricated his tales of torture.
Coleman and Andrew Wilson had crossed paths in 1987, at Cook County Jail. At the time, Wilson was awaiting his retrial for murder. According to Coleman, Wilson told him that he had killed the two police officers and that he burned himself on the radiator in the interview room.
“He wanted to make it look like his confession was forced out of him,” Coleman said from the stand.
Judge Duff did not allow Wilson’s lawyers to tell the jury the full extent of Coleman’s record, which included convictions going back ten years. Had he been allowed to do so, Jeffrey Haas, who crossed-examined him, would have revealed that Mr. “Coleman” had actually gone by ten different aliases, served prison time in seven different countries, and been convicted of eight different crimes in his lifetime. Fortunately, Duff did permit Haas to tell the jury about some of Coleman’s criminal offenses. They included blackmail, theft, fraud, cocaine possession, making a false statement to obtain a passport, and a jail escape. In other words, Coleman was a practiced liar. Besides the crimes Coleman had been convicted of, he was also a “jail informant,” which suggests that he had an incentive to cooperate with them.
In light of his background, the jury must’ve found Coleman’s claim that Wilson had invented his tales of torture less than convincing: on August 8, 1989, eight weeks after the trial began, and after three days of deliberation, the jury issued its verdict.
The verdict form read: “Do you find that Plaintiff’s constitutional rights were violated while he was in police custody,”
“Yes,” the jury foreman, Allen Gall, said.
“Do you find that in 1982 the city of Chicago had a de facto policy, practice, or custom whereby the police were allowed to abuse those suspected of injuring or killing another police officer?”
“Yes,” Gall said again.
“Do you find that plaintiff was subjected to excessive force as a direct and proximate result of this de facto policy, practice or custom?”
“No,” Gall said.
This last answer was perhaps the most important: because the jury found that Wilson’s “abuse” occurred outside of the police’s de facto policy, they felt that Burge should not be held responsible. He and his colleagues were cleared of all charges. The jury’s verdict acknowledged that Wilson’s constitutional rights were violated, that criminal suspects accused of killing cops had been systematically abused, and yet still categorized Wilson as an exception to this policy, therefore denying him any damages.
Shortly after the verdict, reporter John Conroy interviewed the foreman of the second six-person jury about their reasoning. This is what Gall said:
If anything, I believe it was an emotional outburst by them, and that was the reason why he suffered his injuries. I don’t think it necessarily had to be done under this policy. . . . We believe that he did sustain these injuries from the police, some of the injuries, but there wasn’t enough evidence to show that he got all of the injuries from the police. As to whether or not he was actually tortured, there is not enough evidence either . . . it just seemed to me they were just really mad at this guy for shooting one of their buddies, and you know a couple of these guys took the liberty of letting their emotional attitude toward this guy show. They were just acting out their anger toward this guy. That is something we agreed upon. . . . [But] it is kind of hard to find someone responsible for something so serious without an actual witness coming forward, a neutral witness coming forward and saying, “I seen him do it.” . . . We did agree that he got those injuries from somewhere, but as far as being specific as to who actually did this damage, there just wasn’t enough evidence. . . . You know convicts, a lot of these guys are streetwise and they’re pretty good at bullshitting.
Gall’s response offers a glimpse into the jury’s thinking, demonstrating how jurors overlooked the powerful evidence Wilson presented to them out of sympathy for the officers. The officers were simply “emotional” and “acting out their anger”—anodyne phrases that one might apply to a toddler having a temper tantrum. It is illegal for police officers to use excessive force against a criminal suspect, yet the jury both excused this behavior and refused to call it torture.
Members of the jury didn’t only question Wilson’s credibility. To Gall, a man like Porch could not be considered an “actual” or “neutral” witness, either, because he was a criminal—and criminals, according to Gall, are by definition untrustworthy, “good at bullshitting,” which is another way of saying that Wilson and the others were lying about torture. Perhaps this is why Coleman’s testimony did not carry much weight either. Even though he was a white man, Coleman was still a convict, and that fact might have made him unreliable. After all, despite Coleman’s testimony, the jury still believed that there was a “de facto policy” that encouraged police abuse at Area 2. This suggests that Taylor’s new theory about the systematic and routine nature of torture at Area 2 had, in fact, persuaded them to a degree.
To issue a verdict that Andrew Wilson was an exception to this policy meant that at least some of the jurors had to be innately suspicious of Wilson but at the same time identify with the motivations of a man like Burge. As a result, a torturer remained on the police force. Likewise, the police officers who joined Burge in committing acts of torture were also protected.
This is what I wanted you to see. Gall’s statement is exactly the kind of thinking that was pervasive across all levels of the city’s government. So, when the jury acknowledged this wrong but refused to compensate Wilson, they were merely parroting the point of many, many people, from citizens, to police officers, to the state’s attorney, to judges, to politicians in your city. It is this pervasiveness that allowed the black box to swallow up so much clear evidence of torture and that allows the City of Chicago to put justice on pause until the People’s Law Office appealed the verdict in Andrew Wilson’s second civil trial to the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.
•••
As you might imagine, Wilson’s legal team eagerly anticipated the outcome of its appeal. But just before hearing a decision, something important happened. The Chicago Police Board—a civilian body independent of the police department that hears disciplinary cases that involve Chicago police officers—held hearings for six weeks in February and March of 1992, to determine whether Jon Burge should remain on the force. Although the board refused to call him a torturer, members did conclude that Burge “did . . . physically abuse or maltreat” Wilson, and that as commanding officer he did not stop others from engaging in the abuse, nor did he secure medical attention for Wilson. It was on these grounds that, on February 10, 1993, the board finally fired Jon Burge.
Eight months later, on October 4, 1993, a three-judge panel from the US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued their decision on whether Andrew Wilson would be granted a new civil trial. In the decision, Chief Judge Richard Posner expressed awe and disbelief about what happened in Judge Duff’s courtroom. In ruling that Burge’s prior acts of police “abuse” were “immaterial” to Wilson’s case, Duff had stretched the concept of relevance “beyond the breaking point,” Posner said. He added that in a civil trial, it was Burge who had to defend himself, not Wilson. Kunkle should not have been able to introduce “inflammatory evidence” about Wilson’s character that had little or no relevance as to whether he had been tortured. Wilson’s lawyers should have been able to tell the jury that Coleman had a history of lying on the stand. Kunkle had been allowed to “turn the trial of the defendants into a trial of the plaintiff,” and Posner thought that Judge Duff was to blame. “Even a murderer has a right to be free from torture,” Posner said, “and the correlative right to present his claim of torture to a jury that has not been whipped into a frenzy of hatred.”
Because Posner agreed with Flint Taylor that Judge Duff’s actions in the trial prohibited him from proving that Wilson’s constitutional rights had been violated, he sent the case back to federal district court. US District Court Judge Robert Gettleman replaced Judge Duff as the case’s arbiter. Wilson’s attorneys asked Gettleman to adopt the findings of the police board rather than go through a third federal trial that would largely repeat the hearings held by the board. There was legal precedent that allowed Gettleman to act on the police board’s findings regarding Burge’s guilt and then hold a hearing to address the question of damages. That’s just what Judge Gettleman decided to do.
In the summer of 1995, Judge Gettleman granted Wilson’s motion of summary judgment, ordering the city to pay more than $1 million in damages. According to Gettleman’s ruling, $900,016 was to be paid to Wilson’s attorneys. Jeffrey Haas, John Stainthorp, and Flint Taylor had represented Andrew Wilson at every stage throughout his civil case. The tireless lawyers from the People’s Law Office had recorded more than six thousand hours of work on the case, and until that point had not received any compensation. (By contrast, over the same period, the city had paid almost $850,000 to William Kunkle.) Gettleman also ruled that $100,000 was to be paid to Wilson, which would actually go to the families of the slain officers because of the judgment I mentioned earlier.
It is important to note that the knowledge that torture had occurred did not translate into any organized attempt to provide relief for the Area 2 victims. Nor did the verdict mean that the City of Chicago would begin indicting or investigating other police officers in Area 2 who had also been accused of torture. The only legislation that emerged after Wilson’s second civil suit was a bill signed by Governor Jim Edgar in 1992. The bill was meant not to help torture survivors but to protect the torturers of the future. It established a five-year statute of limitations for police brutality. The rationale? The police board had disciplined Jon Burge nine years after he tortured Andrew Wilson, and the supporters of the bill believed it was a tragedy they were able to do so.11
What I personally consider a tragedy, however, is this: after Burge was dismissed by the Chicago Police Board for “physical abuse,” after the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times called for a judicial inquiry into cases involving prisoners on death row who had confessed at Area 2, after Amnesty International investigated the allegations that Chicago police officers had tortured criminal suspects, after the Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards reported that police violence included “planned torture,” and after the jury in Andrew Wilson’s second civil trial noted a de facto policy of “police abuse”—after all of these things, Jon Burge would never face criminal charges for torture. Without such a public airing of the truth, the full knowledge of Burge’s torture operation has disappeared, just like Burge’s torture device, buried at the bottom of a body of water, never to be seen again.