Vol. 78/No. 28      August 4, 2014

“I’m here because police brutality and police torture affects all of us even if we’re not directly the victims of it,” 17-year-old Madison Moore, one of the speakers at the rally, told the Militant. Moore, a senior at St. Ignatius High School, came along with half a dozen other members of the Amnesty International chapter she recently helped organize at her school.

Amnesty chapters at several area schools organized the rally, which drew support from survivors of police torture and family members of prisoners who are incarcerated based on “confessions” extracted through torture and are fighting for new hearings.

Mark Clements and Darryl Cannon, both survivors of police torture under Lt. Jon Burge and his subordinates in the 1970s and ’80s, participated in the rally, as did Jeanette Plummer and Anabel Perez, the mothers of Johnnie Plummer and Jaime Hauad, both of whom are still fighting for new hearings on their claims of torture.

Burge, convicted in June 2010 on federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges for lying during a civil lawsuit about torturing suspects, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He began serving his sentence in March 2011.

“It takes two things to change society,” Cannon told the crowd, “persistence and the power of people in the streets. Too many times officials have turned a blind eye to cop torture in this city. This city needs to be held accountable.”

“More than 110 men, mostly African-Americans, were tortured by Burge or men under his command, Joey Mogul, one of the attorneys representing Plummer, told the rally. “They used torture to secure … false confessions in order to frame these men and secure their wrongful convictions, sending 11 to death row. Now 40 years later we are still fighting to undo this injustice.”

Mogul urged support for legislation pending before Chicago’s City Council that would grant reparations to survivors of police torture and their families — including financial payments, a public memorial, an official apology and free admission to city colleges.

“We have to show support for all efforts against police torture,” Anabel Perez told the Militant. “Police torture in Chicago did not begin with Burge and it did not end with him either.”

Framed on murder charges, Hauad was convicted in 1999 based on a confession elicited through torture and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Hauad was 19 years old.

At its June 18 meeting, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission approved the recommendation of Commission Executive Director Barry Miller to decline to rule on Hauad’s claim of torture based on a jurisdictional technicality. It referred the matter to the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez. The commission had ruled in May 2013 that Hauad’s claim of torture was credible and was entitled to a new hearing.

Miller noted in his report to the commission that Hauad and his legal team had presented a compelling case that he was tortured into confessing. That claim, Miller noted, was buttressed not only by the evidence presented but also by the fact that one of the alleged cop torturers was Joseph Miedzianowski, a notorious Chicago cop sentenced in 2003 to life without parole for organizing an interstate drug ring and arming his street gang affiliates.

“About 130 of the alleged torture cases, including Hauad’s, are not connected to Burge,” according to an editorial in the June 25 Chicago Sun-Times.

“If we have to, we’re prepared to fight this all the way to the state Supreme Court. Police torture is police torture, whether it was under Burge or not,” Perez told the Militant.

Most recently two more men, Lewis Gardner and Paul Phillips, framed and wrongfully convicted along with Daniel Taylor for a November 1992 double homicide, were exonerated on the recommendation of Alvarez’s State’s Attorney’s Office. Taylor was cleared in June 2013 after prosecutors finally acknowledged his claim that he could not have committed the murders because he was in jail at the time. Like Taylor both men spent close to 15 years in prison while prosecuting attorneys sat on exculpatory evidence.

In a related development, the same day that Gardner and Phillips were exonerated, Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn announced that the state would pay $40 million to the Dixmoor 5 — Jonathan Barr, James Harden, Shainnie Sharp, Robert Taylor and Robert Veal — wrongfully imprisoned for the November 1991 rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl.

“It could be that Cook County will do the right thing by Jaime [Hauad], or it could be just another delaying tactic,” Mark Clements told the Militant. “But one thing is for sure, they won’t do the right thing unless we keep the pressure up.”
 
 
Related articles:
Staten Island march protests police killing of Eric Garner
Working people of Ga. town: ‘Sack cop who brutalizes us’
 
 
 
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