Former Chicago police commander Jon Burge convicted in connection to torturing suspects condemns victim reparations
For decades, Burge had been accused of running a "midnight crew" of Chicago Police officers who allegedly tortured African American suspects. In 2011, he was convicted of perjury for lying under oath in civil lawsuits connected to that torture.
This month, Mayor Rahm Emanuel agreed to create a $5.5 million reparations fund to compensate victims of police torture.
Burge, who maintained his Fifth Amendment rights when questioned under oath about the alleged torture, criticized the compensation program in an interview with writer and Chicago Police officer Martin Preib, which was published on "The Conviction Project."
Burge directed his remarks at politicians, the media, and alleged torture victims Anthony Holmes and Darrell Cannon as well as the plantiffs' attorney Flint Taylor.
"These private attorneys grow rich because the city of Chicago is afraid to defend the lawsuits filed by these human vultures," Burge said in the interview. "Ask the mayor and City Council members how many relatives of the victims of these crimes they spoke with before deciding on their 'Reparations.' "
Taylor responded to Burge's words.
"He is clearly a serial human rights violator, who has committed racist crimes against humanity too numerous to count. And this attack on the men who have so bravely stood up to him — and who a jury and a federal judge relied upon to send him to the penitentiary — only underscores how disgraceful and cowardly his unsworn statements... slandering me, my fellow lawyers and these clients are.
"I stand ready to go anywhere, any time, any place to place him under oath and to ask him point-blank whether he tortured Anthony Holmes and whether he was responsible for the torture of Darrell Cannon and 115-to-120 other African-American men who have documented proof that he and his co-conspirators tortured them," Taylor said.
The plantiffs also responded to Burge's comments.
"The city is trying to help us because he put us in this position," Holmes said. "If he hadn't, we wouldn't need no help. All of us are mentally unstable. We're not ourselves.... He's trying to cover up for himself and saying he did everything right. He didn't do everything right. He tortured us. He's saying what he did to us was justified to get information. We can't stand torture. That's how he broke all of us.
"I was a gang-banger out on the street. True enough. But, I didn't deserve what he did to me. He did what he wanted to do and now, he's got to pay for it. But, he still won't admit that he did it."
However, Burge believes that he will eventually be vindicated.
He said "evidence is slowly emerging that clearly shows what happened to the dedicated Chicago Police detectives who fought, as best we could, the worst, most violent predators on the South Side."
Burge had been sentenced to four-and-a-half years for lying under oath, but got time off for good behavior. He was recently released from a halfway house in the Tampa, Fla. area.
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