Vol. 75/No. 6      February 14, 2011

Less then a week after the sentencing, a police pension board in a 4-to-4 tie voted that Burge will continue to receive his $3,039-a-month pension while in prison. Burge began receiving the pension in 1997, four years after he was fired for the torture and abuse of Andrew Wilson.

Burge ran a gang of detectives known as the “Midnight Crew” that for decades used beatings with pistols, suffocations with plastic bags, electric shocks to genitals and other body parts, and further methods of torture to force confessions from suspects. Most of those abused and framed up by Burge and his crew were Black males.

“This is a significant step in the process to bring some justice to all of those people who were tortured,” Flint Taylor, an attorney who has represented many of the men brutalized by Burge, told the media following the sentencing hearing.

According to the Illinois Coalition against Torture, 24 prisoners who are believed to have been tortured at the hands of Burge’s police gang remain in jail.

During the two-day hearing torture victims and their family members, and the many fighters who have been part of the decades-long struggle to convict and jail Burge, packed the courtroom.

Anthony Holmes told the court, “That man tried to kill me.” Holmes testified that Burge shocked him three times and then put a gun to his head saying, “I’ll blow your black head off.” Under that pressure Holmes signed a murder confession that led to a 30-year prison sentence.

Appealing to federal judge Joan Lefkow, Burge said that he was sorry for bringing “disrepute” on the Chicago police department. He never apologized to any of the men or their families. In response to Burge saying that he was “deeply sorry” and that he was a “broken man,” Judge Lefkow told Burge she did not believe him. Lefkow doubled the sentencing guidelines in pronouncing the four-and-a-half-year prison term.

Mark Clements, a torture victim and a leader of the fight to convict and jail Burge, told the Militant that this is “a victory in the sense a lot of hard work went into bringing down Jon Burge. The judge gave him an extended sentence because he refused to acknowledge his wrongs.”

“I believe that Jon Burge receiving his pension is an insult to all humanity,” continued Clements. “It is an outrage that he only received a four-year sentence, but it is a victory that he even received a sentence.”
 
 
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