In the last month, I’ve discovered anew, notwithstanding my advanced and advancing age, that I really do still care about a lot of stuff. About, say, how the politics of our time could evolve. Or how much higher might grow the mountain of human suffering. Or how my garden might grow. And, here’s the thing, I could tend my garden, but I’m really not that good at it. Nor would that activity solve much of anything. I could water my garden until the water runs out--we might all run out of water eventually, or the power to pump it, or the resources to clean it--if we don’t do more to hold back climate change.
But I’m not a researcher. I’m not a manufacturer. I’m not a business owner. I can do my best to green up the block I live on, but who am I kidding? The climate fix we’re all going to need will take a movement.
But, much to my regret, to the point.
Some two weeks ago, I posted “Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct in Chicago, we are all implicated.” The event that provoked that piece was a hearing in the Will County Courthouse for Devon Daniels, who has been in prison for the last 27 years for a double murder he did not commit, but to which he confessed after being tortured by now retired Chicago police detective, Kriston Kato. Devon’s claim that his confession was coerced and that no other evidence exists that ties him to the murders has recently been investigated by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC), which found that his claim was credible, and that he was entitled to full judicial review. Hence, the hearing, part of a slow and painful process of court appearances that hopefully may end with Devon’s conviction thrown out, and his release from prison. Ideally, soon. But maybe a year from now. Given the grindingly slow pursuit of justice in these parts and elsewhere, maybe two.
I wrote about Devon and his mother, Paula, more than 20 years ago, but fell out of touch afterward. Late last fall, I renewed contact with Paula, and was shocked to discover that Devon was still in prison, still trying to get his account of his arrest and torture heard.
What first happened to Devon and his mom and others in their family almost three decades ago, and has followed a continuously traumatizing path since then is horrifying. Still worse, it is not unique. The larger context with which to think about the injustices that Devon and Paula and their family are experiencing includes noting that Chicago is notorious (or ought to be) for the frequency with which scandals develop around groups of cops who are linked, or rumored to be linked, to dozens, if not hundreds of wrongful arrests and detentions, torture and coerced confessions, followed logically by wrongful, if not malicious, prosecutions, arbitrary judicial rulings, and ultimately by long sentences for individuals innocent of the crime for which they were convicted.
It follows that I personally need to work harder to develop a more complete grasp of how many individuals may be included in the sum of “dozens, if not hundreds…” of people battered and abused by a justice system which does not reliably pursue justice. Moreover, in framing that bigger picture, it should be clear that the still larger context within which to understand wrongful conviction, coerced confessions and innocence, is that the incidence of such things would be far less frequent if it were not for the fact that underlying such convictions is the endemic brutality of police misconduct on the streets of minority and poor neighborhoods, and a system of justice that encourages prosecutors to prioritize convictions, and judges, by and large, to ignore the constitutional rights of defendants who are routinely presumed guilty.
In other words, for every high-profile discovery of wrongful conviction and decades-long prison sentences for individuals later found to be innocent, there must necessarily be tens of thousands of wrongful stops, wrongful detentions and brutal beatings by police that never, ever, get to a hearing in court. Wrongful convictions do not come easy. A whole system must be in place and working relentlessly to make that happen.
I am not plowing new ground here. John Conroy, formerly an investigative reporter for the Chicago Reader and now senior investigator for the Chicago Justice Center, did incredible work throughout the 1990s, writing story after story about former Chicago police commander John Burge, and his “midnight crew,” whose investigative and interrogation techniques led to the convictions of more than 100 people who were tortured and, not infrequently, innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced. Many of those individuals, who were fortunate enough to get their convictions overturned, subsequently filed lawsuits against the Chicago police department, and the city, and won millions of dollars in damages. Conroy’s work and the multi-million-dollar payouts by the city were the principal impetus for establishing the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission.
According to the Innocence Network, “Since 1989, over 3,320 wrongful convictions have been revealed across the nation with individuals collectively losing 29,500 years serving time for crimes they did not commit. We cannot know exactly how many innocent people remain in prison today, but experts estimate that 2% to 5% of the nearly 2 million people in prison in the US were wrongfully convicted, meaning that anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 people are wrongfully incarcerated at this moment.”
The National Registry of Exonerations lists 12 people convicted of murder in Cook County since 1998 who were later exonerated. One was exonerated in 2003. Two others were exonerated in 2011. One in 2012, one in 2014, and two more in 2015. The pace of exoneration has picked up in recent years. So, also, has the cost risen to the city of Chicago for settling lawsuits with individuals tortured into confessing to crimes they didn’t commit by the Chicago police. According to a Chicago Sun-Times story (“Taxpayers shell out $250M in police-related settlements; new report slams city efforts to learn from those mistakes,” Sept. 29, 2022), 19 cases of “reversed conviction” settled in 2018, 2019 and 2020, cost the city $72.2 million.
Last month (June 2023), the Chicago city council approved a $7.25 million settlement with Arthur Brown who was sentenced to life in prison for a double murder and arson in 1998. The three detectives implicated in Brown’s coerced confessions are now deceased. Whether or not they would feel any guilt for the fact that Brown served almost 20 years in prison if they were alive today is a question that will go forever unanswered.
But the costs to cities everywhere don’t begin to approach the cost to communities from police misconduct beginning with simple harassment in all its many forms, and proceeding through false arrests, brutal interrogations and, eventually, coerced confessions and wrongful imprisonment. “Depending upon the size of the neighborhood and the method of counting, studies have estimated that up to 25 percent of adult male residents in particular neighborhoods are locked up on any given day, up to 13 percent of adult males enter prison or jail in a given year, and up to 2 percent of all residents enter prison in a given year,” writes Todd R. Clear in “The Problem with ‘Addition by Subtraction’: The Prison-Crime Relationship in Low-Income Communities” (from Invisible Punishment, The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. By Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, pg. 184).
“The dynamics of growing concentrations of the residents of certain neighborhoods going to prison (and jail) are not insignificant for these locations,” Clear continues. “Imagine, for a moment, living in an area where one in eight parent-aged males is removed for confinement each year, and one in four is locked up at any given time. It is not difficult to see that this social process, over time, would be one of the truly important aspects of community life. The question is, how does this level of coerced mobility affect public safety through its impact on the building blocks of social order?”
Clear’s language is emotionally neutral, as befits an academic reporting the results of research and asking additional questions in follow up. But the facts about how we police in Chicago and across the country, how we prosecute, how we judge and how we sentence, are anything but neutral.
If we connect the dots, and listen to the stories of people whose lives are under relentless attack by a system that spreads injustice, and devastates families and communities, we have to conclude that the enormous sums we spend in the name of public safety makes everybody less safe, angry about the taxes we pay, and angry about how badly our government performs its essential role.
And if we continue to pay those taxes without also clamoring for a justice system that works for all, then we are siding with the system that devastates some communities more than others and, by design, protects those of us who live with privilege that we do not deserve.
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