Andrew, you passed away on November 19, 2007, in a prison hospital, while serving out your life sentence in Menard Correctional Center. But I am writing you because in Chicago—and, I suspect, in worn-out neighborhoods and overburdened cities all across the United States—your memory is very much alive. I don’t know where your soul or spirit resides, but in this world, your name will be forever linked to that of Jon Burge. I have to imagine that this connection is a painful one for you, given that your relevance is tied to the horrors you endured and the man who created them. So I want to shift the narrative in which Burge is the villain and you are the victim. Instead of focusing solely on you as a victim, I want to emphasize another aspect of your life: you were the first person to have the courage to act decisively against him. You filed the civil suit that marked the beginning of the end of his reign of terror in Chicago’s Area 2. It’s equally important to note what you were not. You were not merely a symbol of what to avoid. You were not merely a criminal. You were someone who displayed great courage and bravery, even if that courage is remembered by only a few.
In contrast, Burge’s name has become widely known, at least in Black communities across Chicago, a symbol of all that is wrong with the police force. Some even use it as a derogative verb, saying that someone they know was “Burged”—tortured or brutalized by the police or another vigilante. Everyone in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods, it seems, knows what the term means.
Many of the details about Burge’s horrific crimes have become public. And yet even though you endured the worst of those crimes, I still don’t know how much you knew about their extent. I don’t know what information you had access to in Menard. I don’t know if you read the newspaper or talked to other prisoners about Burge. Did you ever realize the scope of your tormentor’s torture operation? Your lawyer, John Stainthorp, stayed in touch with you until just before you died, so you must have been aware, to some extent, of the evolving mass of evidence that was becoming part of the public record. Even so, and although it might be difficult to hear, I think you deserve to know what has happened since you died. I want you to understand the magnitude of the evil you helped to thwart, at great personal cost to yourself, considering you suffered that torment all over again each time you took the witness stand.
Likewise, I think people all across the United States deserve to know what happened to you and people like you—so-called Black menaces—under Jon Burge’s regime.
I’ll admit that when I first read about your case, I had a hard time separating the fact that you were a confessed cop killer from the violence Jon Burge inflicted on you. Like those white jurors in your first and second civil trials, I let myself believe that because you had confessed to killing two of Burge’s fellow police officers, he and his A-Team had tortured you out of rage, a terrible but understandable emotional outburst. But Flint Taylor made me see the issue differently; your lawyer, as overworked as he was underpaid, revolutionized my understanding of police torture. The legitimacy of torture is separate from the question of guilt, because even the guilty have the right not to be electrocuted. Even the guilty have the right not to be suffocated and beaten within an inch of their lives.
That belief—that every human being has the right not to be tortured—has changed my life, animated the past decade of my professional career, and convinced me to write to you. That belief, though, is not easy to come by. Those jurors could not accept this belief. Judge Duff could not accept it either. Even the most liberal of Chicagoans had a hard time, during those weeks of relentless press coverage of your first civil trial, of actually looking at what happened to you—and of actually seeing the black box as a violation of your most basic human rights.
And then you had to endure all that disbelief again, years later, in your second civil trial. Presented with overwhelming evidence that Jon Burge and officers in his charge tortured you, the jurors in that trial also concluded, just as I once had, that the abuse you suffered amounted to a temper tantrum on the part of the police. As far as those jurors were concerned, the fact that you had been convicted of murdering two cops justified that abuse.
Now, many people in Chicago have come to understand how false this justification was. In the end, your trials set the stage for an airing of the truth that would never have happened without you. People at virtually every level of Chicago city government spent decades trying to cover up the truth of Burge’s torture ring, and despite the impressive number of investigations that confirmed its existence, it persisted, sometimes abetted by the same people who were supposed to be investigating it.
I don’t know if it would sadden you or bring you relief to know that your brother, Jackie, who was arrested with you in 1982, was recently released from prison after thirty-six years. He was finally granted a new trial on the basis that he had been tortured. Jackie is now part of the ever-expanding community of torture survivors.
As the history of police torture illustrates, it doesn’t matter what a given criminal suspect did or did not do: for the rule of law to have any meaning, no suspect—whether innocent or guilty—should have to suffer what you suffered. That’s why your case led to a profound transformation in my thinking about torture. Your story taught me the unlikeliest of lessons: finding empathy for you, and others who’ve endured torture, was a test of my own humanity. In the process I stopped thinking of you as merely a cop killer or merely a victim. I began to think of you as a survivor.
•••
I recently reread the famous letter that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to his fellow clergy from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. I thought of it because it was quoted in a court ruling that I came across in an archive years ago. The ruling described the scene of a Black boy’s torture.
In 1991, that boy, Marcus Wiggins, then thirteen-years-old and only sixty-five pounds, was one of a group of children brought into Area 2 for questioning about a murder. A few hours later, Wiggins was electrocuted with a silver device, the size of a toaster that had wires coming out of it, akin to the black box: “They started—my hands started burning, feeling like it was being burned. I was—I was shaking and my—and my jaws got tight and my eyes felt like they went black. . . . It felt like I was spinning. . . . It felt like my jaws was like—they was—I can’t say the word. It felt like my jaws was sucking in. . . . I felt like I was going to die.”1
After the torture, Wiggins confessed. Several years later, his case was dismissed in juvenile court. He subsequently sued Burge, a number of his detectives, and the City of Chicago. In 1996, Wiggins’s lawsuit was settled for $95,000.2
After the trial, the police lawyers wanted evidence related to the Wiggins case kept confidential. They maintained that “the police officers’ privacy interest is a factor weighing against disclosure.” Judge Ruben Castillo disagreed; he ordered the public release of numerous police disciplinary files containing allegations of torture. His rationale was that the files “must be exposed to the light of human conscience and the air of natural opinion.”
In making his case, Judge Castillo referenced King’s letter: “Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
I could not agree more with King’s sentiment, or with Castillo’s application of it. And yet comparing the torture of a thirteen-year-old to a boil does not do justice to the suffering that people like Wiggins experience. A boil can be “cured” relatively easily. The mental and physical scars left by torture—and by the racism that justifies and enables that torture—can last a lifetime. Moreover, because torture is so deeply rooted in the culture of the Chicago police force, and in the legal, judicial, and political system that have allowed it to thrive, we require another, more apt metaphor. Police torture is a tree—a hideous and disfigured tree, a tree that blooms death rather than life, a tree that casts a long and dark shadow.
•••
As I was finishing this letter, I found out Jon Burge had died, and his death prompted me to think about all that has happened as a result of the torture he inflicted and oversaw. As a consequence of the four inmates on death row being pardoned by Illinois’s former governor George Ryan, who concluded that Burge had tortured them, a moratorium on capital punishment was declared in Illinois in 2003. Six years later, in 2009, the state established the first Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission in the United States. Two years after that, in 2011, Illinois became one of twenty US states to abolish the death penalty, partly because of the way torture has been tied to forced confessions. After all of my research, I’m convinced that none of these legal milestones would have occurred without the political activism that sought to hold Burge accountable for torture.
Upon hearing about Burge’s death, John Conroy, the first reporter to write extensively about torture in Chicago, said, “Greater transparency has resulted from the abuse here.” Likewise, when speaking about the landmark reparations judgment for victims of police abuse, the outgoing mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, referred to Burge’s tenure on the police force as a “dark chapter” in the city’s history.3
For me, these reflections on police torture, occasioned by Burge’s death, suggest that a diseased limb of the torture tree has fallen. That limb was so massive that, upon its falling, it shook the earth beneath it, injuring countless people who were in the vicinity, bringing attention to the tree from which the limb once sprouted. We are now aware of the torture tree unlike ever before. But the fact that we now know about its existence does not mean that the tree has stopped growing. To the contrary, it is still firmly planted in Chicago’s soil.
I want you to know that it is because of this—the way that torture is still so deeply entrenched in your city—that I did not write Jon Burge a letter like the one I’ve written you. All of my open letters are written to people who have expressed a genuine interest in addressing the legacy of police torture. Burge remained defiant and unremorseful until his death. In the last interview he granted to Martin Preib, a representative of the police union, he exclaimed: “I find it hard to believe that the city’s political leadership could even contemplate giving ‘reparations’ to human vermin.” Burge might be gone. But his ideology of hate persists, and it’s always in danger of further infecting the police.4
Speaking of the racial violence in the United States that spreads like a disease, Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael once said: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude, it’s a question of power.”
In telling the world about your torture, I want everyone to know that if a person holds an unfavorable attitude toward someone who has committed a crime or has been suspected of committing a crime, that is that person’s prerogative. But if that person wears a badge and has the power to torture a criminal suspect, then that is everyone’s problem.
Perhaps the greatest testament to your legacy, Andrew, is that many people now recognize that what you endured is their problem, too.