Vol. 78/No. 44      December 8, 2014

Struggles by prisoners from Chicago, for example, led to revelations about a reign of terror led by Chicago Police Lieutenant John Burge on the city’s South Side in the 1970s and ’80s. The frame-up victims, mostly African-American males, were waterboarded, beaten, tortured with electric shock and other brutal measures to elicit confessions.

Burge was fired in 1993 as the revelations piled up. In 2006 a Cook County prosecutors’ investigation concluded that Burge had tortured people, but because the time passed exceeded the deadline in the statute of limitations, he could not be prosecuted. In 2010 Burge was convicted on federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges for lying about the torture gang.

More than 110 people imprisoned through the cop frame-ups have pressed for exoneration. Dozens have succeeded. One of them, Mark Clements, tortured by the Burge gang and framed up at the age of 16 for the deaths of four people, served 28 years behind bars.

“As the number of torture cases under Burge has come out along with evidence of broader police misconduct, the bill to the people of Chicago to pay for settlements with people who were wrongly sent to jail has jumped,” Clements told the Militant. “This torture couldn’t have happened without other cops and higher ups covering their backs.”

More than four dozen convictions in Brooklyn, New York, dating back to the 1980s and ’90s are being reviewed amid evidence of a frame-up operation by former Brooklyn Detective Louis Scarcella.

Those exonerated include David Ranta, who served 23 years for the murder of a rabbi; Jeffrey Deskovic, imprisoned for 16 years for rape and murder; Derrick Hamilton, who served 20 years for murder; and David McCallum, jailed 28 years for murder. A number of murder convictions were based on the testimony of the same police informer.

“The disturbing thing is the way they are making this look like a rogue detective,” Joel Rudin, a lawyer who won the exoneration of Jabbar Collins, who spent 16 years behind bars for murder, told the Times. Prosecutors “knew what was going on and took advantage of it to get convictions.”

The way plea bargaining is used to deny the constitutional right to trial by one’s peers was thrown into sharp relief by federal Judge Jed Rakoff in an article in the Nov. 20 New York Review of Books titled “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty.”

Protests by workers and farmers at the time of the American Revolution won the right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of your peers” in the Bill of Rights as a shield against tyranny, Rakoff says.

But today it is a mirage. Some 95 percent of all those charged “agree” to plea bargains when given the “choice” of pleading guilty or facing even stiffer charges and sentences by taking a chance on a trial where the state has all the advantages.

Traditionally, before considering release, parole boards demand that prisoners “own their own crimes” and admit guilt. Workers who maintained their innocence had little chance of parole. But the growing revelations and fights against frame-ups are changing this.

A Nov. 12 article in the New York Times titled “A Claim of Innocence is No Longer a Roadblock to Parole” points to four Brooklyn men who “won their freedom despite not admitting guilt,” among them Sundhe Moses, framed up in 1995 on charges of killing a 4-year-old child. He won parole in 2013.

On Nov. 20, a federal appeals court overturned the conviction of Albert Woodfox, one of the Angola 3 prisoners who joined the Black Panther Party in prison and was framed up for the 1972 death of a guard at the state penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana. Woodfox has been in solitary confinement ever since.

The next day the Times ran an editorial urging Woodfox be released, calling his four decades in solitary “barbaric beyond measure.” The editors said Woodfox “would most likely have been released from solitary many years ago if he had pleaded guilty.”  
 
 
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