Phoebe Cuthbertson
June 10, 2018
WRIT 1733
Two Decades of Torture
Andrew Wilson died November 19, 2007 of natural causes after serving a life sentence for the murder of Chicago police officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. While murder is certainly unjustifiable, torturing people using outdated or barbaric methods such as electroshock is also unjustifiable, and while murderers do deserve punishment for what they have done, torture is often a violation of human rights.
Chicago is one of my favorite cities - it’s where I was born and lived for the first four years of my life. I still visit frequently when I’m at home. But today, the Windy City often gets a bad reputation for being a huge crime center, and is sometimes even used by gun rights advocates as “proof that gun control doesn’t work”. Being somewhat of a native of the city, I can personally say that I have barely, if ever visited the south side of the city and have not experienced or witnessed any crimes taking place in the areas I have lived in or visited. This is not to say that the crime doesn’t exist - just that crime is heavily concentrated in the south and west sides of the city, and crime is low in the areas I have lived in and visited. Nevertheless, it’s still a serious problem, even though in recent years homicide rates have continuously been dropping.
The city’s bad reputation isn’t only a recent thing though - in the 1970’s and 1980’s there was an enormous scandal with the Chicago police department, and records from this incident were recently released online to the public. The Chicago Torture Archive, which was made available to the public quite recently, documents cases of torture from 1972 to 1991, a full 19 years. There are 111 known victims of torture over the duration of these years.
In May of 1972, Jon Burge, the name associated and the man usually held responsible for these torture cases, was promoted to Police Detective and assigned to serve in Area 2 the South Side of Chicago, which is known for its gang violence and many gun-related crimes. The first allegations of torture were made later that year in August, when three African-American men were arrested and tortured. The names of the victims were Rodney Mastin, Lindsey Smith, and Clarence Hill. According to the report of all 111 torture victims, and a statement from Mastin in July 2004, the three men were beaten viciously, including with an ashtray, and kicked in the groin. Over the next five years, there were several more torture cases reported, and in 1977 Burge was promoted to the rank of Sergeant in Area 2. The third reported torture incident was that of a man named Anthony “Satan” Holmes. In late May of 1973, Holmes was reportedly tortured by being “repeatedly bagged, beaten, electric shocked with black box, called (the n-word)”. At the time of his attack, Holmes was reportedly very strongly built, like a “champion weightlifter. According to Holmes himself, when he testified in late May of 2010, 37 years after he had been tortured. He said
“He took the box and plugged it into the wall. He put one wire on my ankle, and I assume he put the other one on my handcuffs. He said (n-word), you’re going to tell me what I want to know”.
While there were many victims of torture, one of the better-known victims of the systematic torture was Andrew Wilson. Wilson had been arrested for the murder of police officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien.
The Chicago Reader details Wilson’s life story. Wilson had a troubled childhood. He was the third of nine children. He had to redo kindergarten after scoring 73 on an IQ test, and was placed in a program for the mentally handicapped. Tests he took in the sixth grade had him functioning at first or second grade level. He was also illiterate. A tutor from his days in prison concluded that he had an undiagnosed learning disability. At age 14, he got a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant his mother worked at. However, he was sent to juvenile court due to truancy. He committed to the Chicago Parental School, a residential program from the Board of Education, but ran away after only six weeks. In 1967 he burgled his neighbor’s house and was sent to a correctional facility in Joliet. There he was diagnosed with seizure disorders. He was given medicine for his seizures along with medicine for “emotional disturbance and hyperactivity”. He took very well to the medicine and came off it before his release in 1969. He was arrested later that year for burglary.
In 1975, Wilson committed an armed robbery, targeting a suburban police officer and a Sambo’s restaurant. (Sambo’s was a restaurant chain that was popular at the time. The restaurant was considered racist by some because the restaurant’s mascot was named after a book called Little Black Sambo). He was arrested and sentenced 8 to 16 years in prison. In October of 1981, he was paroled, but he did not stop committing crime after this, and returned to a life of crime with his younger brother Jackie. In February of 1982, after having robbed a clothing store and a camera store, the Wilsons robbed an old woman. Five days after this, they robbed another house, and after leaving were pulled over by officers William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. Andrew stole Fahey’s gun from him and shot both of the officers, who both died shortly after being shot.
On Valentine’s Day, five days after the brothers had shot and killed the two officers, Burge and his men arrested both Andrew and Jackie Wilson. Jackie had previously asked a man named Solomon Morgan to paint his car and fix the grill, and when Morgan saw that this particular car matched the description of the criminals’ car, he called the police.
After his arrest, Wilson was tortured using electric shock to his genitals, suffocated, and burned by a radiator, by Burge. He was also apparently shocked on the back using “a device that resembled a curling iron” and kicked in the eyes. Three days after this happened, Doctor John Raba examined him. After examining Wilson, Raba called for an investigation.
Nothing happened. On February 25, eight days after Raba called for the investigation, the Police Superintendent sent the request to Richard Daley, who was at time the State’s Attorney. He took no action on it. Three years later, in 1985, there was still no investigation being done, the OPS () dismissed Wilson’s reports of torture. Seven years after his arrest, Wilson finally had a trial in 1989. He sued Burge and the police for violations of civil rights. During the trial process, Wilson received anonymous letters from a police where the sender claimed to have worked with Burge and revealed the names of other torture victims along with the names of the people who were behind the torture besides Burge. Thes sender also revealed that the Chief of Detectives, Superintendent of Police, and State’s Attorneys were aware of the torture from 1982. After the case’s judge reviewed this evidence, the trial ended as the jury was unable to reach a verdict. The trial ended in March of 1989.
Five months later, in August of 1989, a different jury picked up the trial. While this jury did determine that Wilson had his human rights violated, they did not give him any money or compensation despite that. In autumn of that year, the case was reopened along with other cases that had been recently discovered in an effort to solve if torture was systematic. On November 2 of 1990, about a year after they began this investigation, the OPS filed two reports. In the first one, the Sanders Report, they recommended that Burge be fired for his torture of Wilson, and determined that torture was indeed systematic. The second report, the Goldston Report, had a list of 50 names of torture victims and their cases. A year later in November of 1991, the Superintendent and former Commander of Area 2 approved the requests to fire Burge and two officers under him, but did not agree that the torture was systematic and did not want the Goldston report to be published. From February to March of the next year (1992), the City of Chicago held a six week hearing. A year after this hearing, on February 11 of 1993, Burge was finally fired. The two officers under him who had been charged, John Yucaitis and Patrick O’Hara, were suspended for 15 months and completely let off, respectively. Andrew Wilson was also granted a retrial that same year. In his retrial in 1996, Wilson was awarded with 1.1 million dollars. While the City of Chicago tried to appeal this decision, saying that they were not responsible for Burge’s actions, the Federal Appeals Court disagreed with him and confirmed that the City had been responsible.
Some of the other victims of the Chicago police torture cases were in very disturbing ways. Besides Wilson’s claims, some of the other unrelated incidents from a list of more than one hundred victims included being handcuffed to a hot radiator, being electric shocked with a black box, being called racial slurs, “held incommunicado without food or bathroom for several days”, threatened with Russian Roulette, being beaten with hands and with various objects to various parts of the body, electric shocked to various parts of the body, being bagged, and being threatened in various ways . One rather disturbing entry on the list was “beaten, Russian Roulette, noose around neck”, and some entries included hanging. According to John Stainthorp, a lawyer who represented Wilson during his trial, said that “whenever he talked about being tortured it would really upset him and it would make him cry. He would be absolutely furious with himself that it affected him that way. He would hate it, hate it, hate it”.
While certain victims arguably tortured in worse ways than Wilson, probably being more painful or more disturbing, Wilson’s case was pivotal and considered extremely important. The reason why Wilson’s case is considered so important is because it exposed the systematic torture that was occurring. As it turns out, this was partly because of the anonymous letters detailing other incidents of torture within the Chicago police.
There are many topics in America that are important and popular to talk about right now, including white supremacists, the alt-right, gun control, and police brutality. While police brutality is not as popular an issue as it was from 2014-2016, it still is a pressing issue. In August 2014, an 18-year-old African American man named Michael Brown, who had graduated high school very recently, was shot and killed in Ferguson, Missouri. This shooting was really what sparked the police brutality debate in the United States and brought it into a new light.
Of course, police brutality is nothing new, as we can see from the torture incidents by the Chicago police. In this day and age, topics such as social justice and racial inequality have become increasingly prevalent - especially with the state of the government and the current president.
The overall history of civil rights, especially those of black people, in America is one that is long and storied, and one could write potentially endless material detailing it. Police brutality has become somewhat of a hot topic in the past four years, specifically after a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August of 2014. There have been multiple cases of police shooting and killing black men since then, many of which have received massive media attention. Additionally, a lot of the time that these cases do happen the police officer who did the killing receives an unfair amount of jail time/consequences, or possibly no consequences at all. While police brutality has been a popular subject in the past four years, it has been a subject and an issue for much longer than that. In fact, the overall theme of the justice system favoring white people has been a popular subject recently, and one that has a lot of history.
Not only have there been complaints that police are very eager to kill black men and that a black man would be shot and possibly killed for doing something that a white man would get no punishment for, but there have also been complaints that the justice system heavily favors white people and gives non-white people, specifically black people, unfair punishment while letting white people off with less-than-necessary punishment. Of course, there will always be some exceptions to this, such as the recent case sexual predator and former Team USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar receiving what will likely be the rest of his life in prison, but there have also been some recent cases of ridiculously low jail time or inadequate punishment, such as in 2013 when Ethan Couch killed four people with his car and in 2016 received only 2 years in prison, from which he was released very recently. The reason he did not receive a longer sentence was supposedly because of “affluenza”. Another even more recent case like this is when Stanford University student swimmer Brock Turner raped a girl, and initially received only six months in prison, which was later brought down to a mere three months. This case and sentencing is widely considered to be an example of white and male privilege.
I took a criminology class first quarter, where I learned that America has a ridiculously high number of people serving prison sentences compared to other developed countries, and that a large portion of these people are disproportionately male and black. (Note that it is much more disproportionately male than it is black, however). This reflects the bias within the justice system greatly
While some of the aforementioned events are recent and while they do provide some context, there are past events preceding the Chicago incidents that provide more context than recent events could, as police brutality has been around for a long time. This placard from a protest during the Civil Rights Era illustrates that. (Smithsonian). Aside from the old-timey appearance of it, this poster would not look out of place today. Despite the fact that it would have topical relevance today, the poster is actually from the March on Washington in 1963 - nine years before the first case of torture under Burge and almost 55 years ago. Police brutality has always been relevant, but in the age of the Internet and social media most of its relevance comes from the past four years.
The police became a real organized institution in the 1830’s and 1840’s, and most commonly targeted European immigrants. After the Civil War, many former slaves and African-Americans started migrating to northern cities, and the police had a new target. As it turns out, Chicago has had high crime rates for a long time - a crime survey published in 1929 trying to find the causes of high crime rates in Cook County and Chicago found that despite making up only 5 percent of the population, African-Americans constituted 30 percent of all people killed by police in the area.
Police brutality against African-Americans became much more prevalent after World War II. One reason for this was the perception of increased freedom and democracy after the war - African-Americans were expressing their rights more and demanding more equality, which was likely seen as a threat by certain police officers.
The Chicago torture cases started about 27 years after the end of World War II. 111 black men were tortured by the police from 1972 to 1991 - the years Burge was working with the police. The idea of African Americans being tortured may bring to mind some disturbing things - many relating to slavery and the time period following it. One thing that came to mind was the gladiator-style fight from the movie Django Unchained, where a slave owner forces his two slaves to fight to the death in a rather disturbing scene. There is no historical evidence that these types of fights actually happened though.
However, some disturbing things that actually did happen also came to mind. I have heard stories of slaves trying to escape their plantations and having one of their hands or feet cut off as punishment. Other stories tell of slave owners forcing their slaves to have sex with them, sometimes resulting in having children who would also work as slaves. The list of disturbing things done by slave owners to their slaves is not limited to only these, of course.
In the case of the Chicago torture, an investigation was not done until 17 years after the first report of torture within the police system, and Andrew Wilson did not get a trial until 7 years after he was tortured. To add more salt to the wound, he initially did not receive any money in damages after the trial, despite the jury having determined a violation of his human rights had taken place. However, he eventually did prosper in 1996.
Of course, this story comes loaded with many moral and ethical questions, one of them being if police brutality, and by extension (in the context of this story) torture, are ever justified. The answer is actually quite complicated. The many highly publicized cases that have occurred in the past four years have made police violence and potentially deadly force a prominent issue in the United States.
Perhaps a more specific question is if it is justifiable to use deadly force or even torture when someone is an actual threat. If there is an armed person with any type of weapon who poses a threat to one or more people, is it okay to use deadly force then? Homicide can be justified in the justice system if used in self defense - if somebody is trying to rape or murder you and you kill them, this is not usually considered murder and will not warrant you the same punishment than if you had killed someone who posed no threat to you. In this case, if somebody poses an extreme threat - such as a school shooter or any shooter with intent to kill people, or a bomber or any form of terrorist, then deadly force may be okay - killing one person to save the lives of multiple innocent people is certainly better than letting those innocent people die. Despite this, the police killings that receive media attention usually do not consist of people posing real, severe threats. Police officers are also not good at shooting and aiming, and they rarely ever successfully hit moving targets.
The many cases of police brutality that have happened during the past four years can be said to be unethical and unjustifiable, for the most part. While Michael Brown’s death sparked a lot of debate and made police brutality a popular issue, the first killing in this chain of events was that of Eric Garner. Eric Garner was killed on July 17 of 2014, less than a month before Brown’s shooting. Garner had been approached by the police several times earlier that year for selling cigarettes. This time, an officer held Garner in a chokehold for several seconds before he died. Garner did not pose a threat to the police and did not pose a threat to any civilians. Since then there have been many police brutality cases that have made national headlines.
I believe using deadly force is only acceptable when a person is posing a real threat to other people and the only way of stopping that person is shooting them. Something like this happened about a year and a half ago when a police officer shot and killed a man who was armed and posing a threat - in this one case I think it was acceptable for the officer to use deadly force since more people would have died had the officer not intervened.
There is also a theme of torture behind this story and not just police brutality - the men involved in the story were tortured by the police, usually after they were in custody. It is harder to find a justification for torture than it is for deadly force. This is an example of police brutality, but most of the police brutality we hear about today is deadly force, which involves the police killing the person involved, often when that person does not even pose a threat. The reason why I used torture as a theme for this part instead of police brutality is because I already focused on police brutality and its history in another part.
Not every victim of police brutality has posed a threat, and in the Chicago cases brutality was used even after the victims were in custody. The main reason for this is because the police wanted answers and confessions. Of course, this is not the only time that people have been tortured to obtain information - trying to obtain information or get people to confess is in fact a well-known usage of torture. When you have someone in captivity who will not give you information - some people decide to subject them to torture until they find out the truth. Obviously the method is not foolproof - the suspect could lie, or possibly not have information and be telling the truth. There are much more humane and painless methods of interrogation, of course - one of these is a polygraph test, or a “lie detector test”. This method is not a violation of human rights, and it theoretically solves both the problems presented.
There is little reason today why torture should be used in interrogations - along with not being an effective method and sometimes being excruciatingly painful and seen as a violation of human rights, it can also leave the victims with trauma. The following is the United Nations’ definition of torture, through the CAT (Convention against Torture):
“Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”
Whether or not you agree with torturing people, the cases of torture with the Chicago police are completely morally and ethically unjustifiable. As I said earlier, many of the victims were tortured in very disturbing ways, and the majority of them were being interrogated when this happens, which makes the torture even more cruel.
However, interrogation is not the only reason that torture is used. Certain groups and people, such as ISIS, will sadistically torture and murder people who they consider their enemy. Historically, torture has been used for numerous reasons, including punishment for committing certain “crimes”. These torture methods were a variety of disturbing, horrific, and possibly even nauseating punishments that are definitely considered barbaric by today’s standards, at least in the Western world.
The ethicality of torture is made more questionable by the justice system - locking people in prison for their entire lives, even sometimes having the government kill them - while the latter is questionable, the former is agreed upon by most people. What makes this even more confusing is the idea of solitary confinement. When a prisoner is disobedient, at least by prison standards, he may be put into solitary confinement, which is a tiny, completely dark room, and will only be let out for the toilet, showering, and possibly exercising. A prisoner’s time in solitary confinement can possibly last for up to months - and some people consider solitary a form of torture.
The other factor that makes the ethicality of torture questionable is the prisoners or suspects themselves. Many of these people have done absolutely unforgivable things - no matter how long you sit in prison or how much you regret what you did, you will never “make up for it”. Other crimes, such as rape/repeated sexual assault and certain types of abuse can be compared in morality to murder. Do these types of people deserve to be tortured for what they have done? Does somebody who has murdered another person deserve to be put to death? Again, many people are fine with criminals being put in jail for the rest of their life or even being sentenced to death. This is a topic to be discussed another time.
While torture, prison, solitary confinement, and death penalty are all ethically and morally debatable cases, the torture was absolutely unjustified in the Chicago cases since the police were only trying to get answers, and again there are other, more effective methods of interrogation.
There are extreme cases where some people think torture is justified - such as terrorism. After the September 11 attacks, many Americans’ viewpoints on torture changed. In a poll of 1000 Americans taken after the attacks, 70% said torture was justified in some cases. There is a “necessity doctrine” stating that an illegal act may be performed to prevent something worse from happening - the example given in the Northern Illinois University Law Review involved a kidnapping where the police held the defendant in a choke hold until he revealed the location of the kidnapping victim. While torture is known to be an ineffective method of interrogation, some may argue that it may be necessary in time-sensitive cases like this - the kidnapping victim may have been killed had a different method of interrogation been used.
One popular argument over the ethicality of torture is called the ticking bomb scenario. The ticking bomb scenario usually involves a threat much greater than the example given with the kidnapping. The ticking bomb scenario involves a time bomb being set to detonate in the center of a large city, and will kill a large number of people if it goes off. There is a suspect in custody, who has only said that the bomb will go off in twenty four hours if it is not found and defused. The debate is whether or not this suspect should be subjected to torture to obtain more information. There are arguments against this scenario, however. Critics claim that it is extremely unrealistic that something like this would actually happen. The United Nations itself disagrees with using torture during a “ticking time bomb” scenario. According to the same law manual, the most common argument against this scenario is the “faulty assumption” of utilitarianism that human lives and rights have any economic value. According to critics, “there is no inherent value in saving a thousand lives at the expense of one” (Hoffman 389), and “torturing even one individual would have a deleterious effect on human dignity regardless of how many are saved”. This argument contradicts the earlier statements about deadly force being justified in certain cases. I disagree with the argument about taking one life to save thousands of others - the first thing to note is that in this scenario, the suspect does not necessarily have to be killed. However, this presents the trolley problem - a well-known thought experiment. The thought experiment involves a trolley that is on the path to kill five people. If you flip the switch and the trolley switches tracks, it will kill one person. Do you let nature take its course or do you change things so fewer people will die? This problem ties into a lot of aspects of both police brutality and torture.
Ethics is a very broad topic and can be applied to a lot of different subjects. The overall theme of ethics can be applied to murder
While I do believe murder is never justifiable and Wilson deserved a lifetime in prison after shooting two police officers, he did not deserve to be tortured. He was already in custody and did not pose any larger threat.
Overall, the issue of police brutality and deadly force, and the issue of torture is extremely complicated and there are many positions one can have on all the aspects of police brutality and torture.
Comments
Post a Comment