Police and prosecutorial misconduct in Chicago

We are all implicated

In 2002, working with the women of Sankofa Community Outreach and Restoration (SCOR), I produced a pamphlet that shared the stories of four women from the south and west sides of Chicago who all had sons who were imprisoned, some of them convicted on thin evidence for crimes they did not commit.

 

Paula Daniels was the force of nature who envisioned and organized SCOR and recruited me to work with her. Paula’s son Devon was first jailed in 1997. Paula and I expected the 36-page pamphlet, Silent No More: Chicago-area women talk about the criminal justice system, to build connections between SCOR and other Chicago-area families crushed by sustained involvement with the criminal justice system and to “broaden public awareness of the effect the…system has on families.” That may have happened on the margins, but it did little to further SCOR’s organizational development and even less to help Devon Daniels (and other wrongfully convicted people).

 

Though I moved on to other work, and even left Chicago between 2007 and 2017, Paula continued struggling with the system that sat like a gargantuan weight on her, on Devon, and on the rest of her family. Finally, late last year, Paula and I reconnected.

 

Paula has various chronic ailments now that she didn’t have 20 years ago. She has neuropathy and a vaguely diagnosed autoimmune disease, and significant mobility problems. And Devon is still in prison. If there’s one tiny piece of good news in all this, it is that the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC) has investigated Devon’s case and has concluded that he is entitled to a judicial hearing that will fully assess his claim that he was convicted solely on the basis of a coerced confession.

 

But special prosecutors assigned to “represent the people of Illinois” in these matters have consistently behaved as though their exclusive focus is on defending the original conviction, no matter how flawed it may be. As those prosecutors file motion after motion that result in long procedural delays, Devon, and others whom the commission has referred for full judicial review, find themselves enduring still another form of torture. 

 

Devon himself is one of an estimated 50 or more inmates who were tortured and brutally interrogated by a Chicago police team led by former Detective Kriston Kato. I will write more about Devon over the next few months. But here is some of what we wrote about his story in “Silent No More”: “Devon is serving a life term for two murders committed on the west side on February 7, 1996…Devon saw the murders. He was leaning up against a car, talking to the two men inside, when two gunmen got out of another car and came up the street shooting. Devon ran, but the whole thing was over quickly and it wasn’t long before Devon morphed from witness to accused. Paula says that even the basic facts of the case should have exonerated him. ‘It was physically impossible for him to do what they said he did, because the boys were shot with two different guns, yet they charged my son with both homicides. Two different guns from two different directions; this is what we get from the criminal justice system in America…His confession was coerced…[Kato] beat it out of him…he was a witness to the crime, but by the time they were done, Devon was the victim to go down for that particular crime.”

 

The  legislation that created TIRC was originally passed in 2009 to create a review process that would fully investigate the claims of torture, coerced confessions, and wrongful convictions that developed out of more than 100 arrests by “the Midnight Crew,” a team of police officers and detectives led by Chicago police commander Jon Burge during the 1980s. In still another series of egregious police misconduct, former Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara has been accused of torturing arrestees, coercing confessions, and fabricating evidence in more than 50 instances where people served or are continuing to serve time in prison. Guevara has never been charged for his terrorism. Perhaps worst of all, Sgt. Ronald Watts and his crew have been implicated in coercing confessions and framing arrestees in more than 200 cases on the south side of Chicago in the 1990s and early 2000s. Watts, now retired, lives in Arizona.

 

After working with Paula, I moved on to other challenges, essentially taking a twenty-year break from worrying about what happened to Devon Daniels. People just like me have also had the luxury of not worrying about Devon or Kevin Murray or the thousands of others that have been harassed, wrongfully arrested, brutalized, tortured or worse by a system that routinely works to create injustice in Chicago. That is the kind of privilege that defines the border between the lives of people like me and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others living mere miles away in this most segregated of major American cities. Paula, and Devon, and his sister and brothers and his own children and his nieces and nephews have no experience of “justice” as it is commonly understood. Despite the weight, the details of all that she has endured, which is a story that I will write more about soon, Paula has responded to my return from a long absence with a loving welcome. 

 

They bear up under what should be properly understood as unbearable. They live with injustice. They live with no opportunity to thrive. The system that denies them benefits us. And we tolerate that system. And our taxes pay for it. When will the rest of us acknowledge the fundamental indecency, the immorality, of all that?

Time To End the Left's Long Losing Streak

It's going to take a while and it's going to take a strategy

The shutdown and debt ceiling fight had me thinking hard about exactly where in the wilderness the American Left might be and what the map back to relevance might look like. I blogged about that a bit in "A few thoughts about the debt ceiling and a call for a Left political strategy." In the process, I started outlining a blogging/writing challenge for myself that goes something like this: Outline the elements of a comprehensive strategy and make the case for a Left unified around that strategy.

Ridiculous pipe dream, right? Still, I really do think the Left has been wandering through a desert of political irrelevance for almost 40 years now and it is past time for settling down and committing to something different.

Coming up with that strategy and some sort of stirring call to action must cover a range of important considerations. Among them:

Describe the wilderness. What has the Left devoutly wished for these last four decades and failed to accomplish? What has been lost? Who is it, exactly, who has been doing all that wandering? What were the Left's achievements during that period and why weren't they the path to larger political success? Other than its appeal as part of a metaphor, why make 40 years the period of concern?

Compare the Left's decades-long failure to the political success of the extreme right-wing, which never should have achieved the influence it has, given both the cruelty and the lunacy of most extreme-right policy positions.

The list goes on, of course. What are the main causes of the Left's failure? What are the strategic perspectives that ought to shape the development of a new Left strategy? Who should be a part of a newer, bigger Left and why should they bother? What should be the goals and objectives of that strategy? What tools, resources and institutional structures are necessary to support a struggle for political relevance?

There are other important questions, I know. Every time I sit down to think about the whole idea (or get up to wander and noodle the idea), I come up with a different list. But I'm pretty certain that I'm not going to reach any kind of clarity about the project until I start it.

So that's what I'm going to do. And I'm hoping this blog will help me move the project along. This post isn't really the beginning of that discussion--it's more like the introduction, but the discussion, maybe, starts here, if others will weigh in. I don't really care if I end up with any ownership of the idea, what I care about is that all of us who have been wandering in the alleged wilderness come out of it together, more aware of what we need to do and how we must work together to do it.

I'm rereading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland right now. The book focuses on the years 1964-1972, a period bookended at the start by Lyndon Johnson's overwhelming victory over Barry Goldwater and, at the other end, by Richard Nixon's smashing defeat of George McGovern. Perlstein writes that between 1964 and 1972, "...the battle lines that [currently] define our culture and politics were forged in blood and fire."

What struck me most in the early parts of Nixonland is the sense of how close the country came in 1964 and '65 to establishing a policy and politics that would serve the best interests of the vast majority of Americans.

As Perlstein puts it:

"Johnson kept on rolling out his Great Society: preschool for poor children. college prep for poor teenagers, legal services for indigent defendants, economic redevelopment funds for lagging regions, landmark immigration reform, a Department of Housing and Urban Development, national endowments for the humanities and arts--even a whole new category for the liberal agenda, environmentalism: a Highway Beautification Act, a Water Quality Act, a Clean Air Act..."

There was also the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, but then Watts burned, and LBJ expanded the war in Vietnam, and the wheels came off the Great Society. It all seemed to run into a wall almost at the moment the ride began. The losses and compromises litter the road since and now, from exile, we watch the Tea Party, the mother-ef'n Tea Party, for gosh sakes, exercise a power that eludes the rest of us. That's why we need a strategy.