It's not somenthing that just cropped up with the invasion of Iraq. And perhaps there it was presumed that Americans would accept it. After all, it's been going on for a very long time even within our own borders - in our "justice" system. Recently, a trial in Chicago brought that police department's torture practices to light.
U.S. District Court Judge Joan Lefkow began her sentencing of former Chicago police commander Jon Burge last Friday by asking the commander to stand directly in front of her. From a distance of about ten feet, the slightly-built judge faced the massive commander, whose attorney had just praised him as “a man’s man,” so tough that even at 63 and in ill health he’d be a formidable foe in a fight.Lefkow told Burge she thought he had lied in her witness box, that he had defiled the system of justice, and that he had undermined its administration irreparably.
She said she had received letters from people who described treatment at his hands that was more horrible than what she’d heard in court (considering that she’d heard men describe being shocked in the genitals and suffocated until they thought they would die, she probably did many in the courtroom a favor by not describing the content of those letters in detail).
[...]
Burge’s acts of torture were beyond the reach of prosecutors, the statute of limitations having expired long before U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald took up the case. Lefkow’s sentence was for perjury and obstruction of justice, offenses committed in response to questions about torture in a civil suit filed by Madison Hobley.
[...]
More than 100 men have complained of torture, beatings, and other forms of coercion and abuse at the hands of Burge and detectives who served under his command.
[...]
More than 20 men remain in prison on the basis of suspect confessions taken by detectives under Burge’s command. Other African-American men spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit.
[...]
In her sentencing remarks, Judge Lefkow lamented the lack of supervision in the police department (the department allowed the torture gang to operate for decades). [...] State’s Attorneys Richard Daley, Jack O’Malley, and Dick Devine have had successful careers in the law and politics without being held to account by any authority for the fact that they had ample evidence that torture had occurred and nonetheless chose to do nothing, even as innocent men awaited a date with the executioner.
[...]
Though the state’s attorney’s office’s role in the torture cases has been denounced for years, the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission has not sanctioned a single prosecutor or former prosecutor for looking the other way, for putting on perjured testimony, for seeking convictions instead of justice in the Burge cases.
[...]
[The Independent Police Review Authority] received 5,541 complaints of excessive force and 11 complaints of coercion between September 1, 2007 and August 31, 2010. They referred 202 cases to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office for possible prosecution between July 1, 2007 and June 30, 2010. [...] In response to a BGA inquiry last fall, the State’s Attorney’s office reported that of those 202 cases, 9 had resulted in prosecutions and 32 cases were pending “excluding police shootings and death in custodies.” [...] None of the cases prosecuted involved excessive force in the context of a suspect or witness being brutalized.
From Judge Joan Lefkow’s sentencing statement:
The freedom that we treasure most of all in this country is the right to live free of governmental abuse of power. Those who represent the government and hold power over other citizens are the embodiment of the principle that we live by — the rule of law.[...]
When a confession is coerced, the truth of the confession is called into question. When this becomes widespread, as one can infer from the accounts that have been presented here in this court, the administration of justice is undermined irreparably
....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.
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