A group of United Nations experts is calling on the US federal, state and local authorities to take “immediate and comprehensive” action to resolve a long-standing scandal where people are languishing behind bars after being allegedly tortured by Chicago police to extract false confessions.
The group of UN special rapporteurs, who specialize in addressing the scourges of contemporary racism and torture, has released a report detailing a long history of brutal and racist police misconduct.
They became involved at the behest of an activist mothers’ organization in Chicago that was exasperated at what they saw as the patchy response of the authorities over the years to shocking injustice.
Numerous cases are highlighted in the 26-page report and there are many more regarded as unresolved for decades. The group of special rapporteurs cited “information we have received regarding historical and continuing allegations of the systemic corruption and use of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by law enforcement officials in the Chicago area”.
The report says that such treatment has resulted “in wrongful convictions and unjust incarceration of affected individuals, who are disproportionally of African and Latino/Hispanic descent”. The names of individual police officers accused of mistreatment have been redacted.
The six special rapporteurs from the UN human rights division who produced the report are KP Ashwini, Barbara Reynolds, Bina D’Costa, Tlaleng Mofokeng, Claudia Mahler and Alice Jill Edwards.
They said they had contacted the US government “to address these allegations and clarify its obligations under international law” and were calling for “further action to remedy racialized police violence and misconduct within Chicago’s law enforcement and criminal justice system”.
They submitted their report to the US government in May but have now released it publicly.
Allegations of injustice stretch from the 1970s and 1980s to the present day, with people still in prison whom the UN report says signed confessions after allegedly being tortured for hours or even days by being beaten and bones broken, kicked, given electric shocks, suffocated and burnt, among other violence, and deprived of sleep, food and water, all while racist insults were shouted at them.
Chicago is notorious for a sadistic policing culture arising under the command of the late Jon Burge. He was accused of heading and training a rogue band of police personnel nicknamed the midnight crew between 1972 and 1991 that systematically tortured and abused Black men and women. Burge was suspended in 1991, but violent detention methods continued.
The UN group, in sending out its report this month, said some Chicagoans affected who have been released after serving long sentences, are nevertheless “unable to rebuild their lives” because they have no support to establish their innocence officially and no access to redress.
“Many people of African and Latin American descent, some of whom were children at the time, were reportedly arrested without reasonable cause and tortured to sign confessions to very serious crimes, including homicide,” the special rapporteurs said.
In one example, the UN report cites Darrell Fair who is currently still serving a 50-year sentence in an Illinois prison despite evidence of torture established previously by the Illinois torture inquiry and relief commission, a state agency.
Fair was charged in 1998 with murder of a man shot during an armed robbery. The report said that during 30 hours of detention, Fair was beaten and denied access to food and medicine during interrogation, without a lawyer or being read his rights.
A confession was written by the state’s attorney implicating Fair but he never signed it and there was a lack of evidence connecting him the crime, while a co-defendant gave a contradictory account of the crime.
The UN committee against torture has repeatedly condemned the US government and the city for failing to resolve cases.
In 2013 Rahm Emanuel, who was then the mayor of Chicago, after serving as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, and is currently the US ambassador to Japan, apologized for a “dark chapter” in the city’s history. In 2015 the city agreed to a package of reparations for victims.
But many promises remain unfulfilled. And an investigation by the Guardian in 2015 found that Chicago police kept up a tradition of brutal interrogations in the post-Burge era, including thousands being detained in a secret warehouse.
The UN experts echoed much of what the Chicago campaign group Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (Mamas) has been saying for decades.
The Mamas campaign reached out to Ashwini, UN special rapporteur on racial discrimination, in 2019 about unresolved cases, which helped the UN conduct its latest investigation.
“These individuals have all this evidence of torture, and for many of the cases, it’s already been determined that they’re innocent,” said Dr Nadine Naber, Mamas founder and a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
The UN group concluded that many individuals who remain imprisoned were detained on the basis of torture and ill treatment by the police following flawed and unlawful criminal proceedings.
“They risk dying in prison if adequate action is not taken,” the report said.
In response to the UN report, the US government wrote back, via Michele Taylor, the US ambassador to the UN human rights council, that a federal investigation in 2017 had found “a pattern or practice of using force, including deadly force” by police in Chicago, in violation of the constitution, and the city agreed to federally enforceable compliance with the law and independent monitoring.
However the UN group concluded in its new report that “significant gaps” remain in measures taken and authorities are “acting too slowly”.
Naber said the US government’s response was “pretty horrible”. She added: “It just basically says, ‘we’ve already dealt with this issue’.”
The Guardian contacted the city of Chicago and the Cook county state’s attorney’s office for comment, but did not receive responses.
“A just society must address past wrongs and put in place all measures to prevent recurrence,” the UN experts said in a statement.
