Torture Cop Found Guilty in Chicago

The Rove Republican Racket targeted Democrats and put them behind bars for crimes they didn't commit. In Chicago, a rogue top cop tortured young black men and put them behind bars for crimes they didn't commit.

 Now comes justice.

The Associated Press reported this week:

A decorated former Chicago police lieutenant accused of suffocating, shocking and beating confessions out of scores of suspects was convicted Monday of federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges for lying about the torture of suspects. Jurors deliberated for parts of three days before finding former Lt. Jon Burge guilty. Burge, who did not react as the verdict was read, faces 45 years in prison when he's sentenced by U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow.

Burge's name has become synonymous with police brutality and abuse of power in the country's third-largest city. For decades, dozens of suspects — almost all of them black men — claimed Burge and his officers tortured them into confessing to crimes ranging from armed robbery to murder. Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan released four condemned men from death row in 2003 after Ryan said Burge had extracted confessions from them using torture.

Shocking Choking Chicago Public Defender

We end the week with a unbelievable but true story that happened yesterday in Chicago.

From the ABA Journal:

An Illinois prosecutor was hospitalized today after an assistant public defender allegedly choked him in a court hallway in Chicago following a courtroom dispute over setting a hearing date in a post-conviction murder case. Police said an unidentified assistant Cook County public defender put a 50-year-old Cook County prosecutor into a "choking headlock" this morning at the criminal courthouse at 26th and California, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. "He had his hands wrapped around his throat and was just kind of riding him down the wall," an unidentified source told the Chicago Tribune.

Another unidentified source said the public defender "just lost it and shoved him against the wall" and put his stunned opposing counsel into a headlock after the prosecutor responded unsympathetically to the public defender's complaint about a status date, the Tribune says. An unidentified bystander told the Sun-Times the public defender said he was sick of being mocked by the prosecutor. The public defender, who sources said handles appellate matters, is being held as a suspect in a misdemeanor simple battery case, the Sun-Times states. Accounts differ concerning how seriously the unidentified prosecutor might be injured; however, it appears that the prosecutor may have been taken to Mt. Sinai Hospital simply for observation.One of two Cook County sheriff's deputies who broke up the fight in the courthouse's first-floor main hallway sustained a minor back injury, the Tribune reports.