Our policy and practice cases gave us another avenue to pursue additional torture evidence and to expose the Police Department’s continuing coverup and failure to discipline many of the officers who were implicated with Burge in torturing suspects. In the Wiggins and Santiago cases we were able to obtain the Chicago Police Department Office of Professional Standards (OPS) files of the torture investigations which were opened in the early 1990s in response to the OPS findings of systematic torture and abuse. Additionally, we were able to get court orders in those cases which permitted the files to be publicly released, and which directed the officials involved, including the Police Superintendent and the OPS Director, to testify about these investigations. This evidence and testimony established that OPS investigators had sustained charges of torture during interrogations, including electroshock and simulated suffocation by baggings, in six cases, including several where the victim was in the penitentiary or on death row because of a tortured confession, and that the officers against whom the cases were sustained included one influential lieutenant who was still on the force. This evidence further showed that the Director of the OPS and the Superintendent’s Office refused to accept these findings, suppressed them for more than four years, then summarily reversed them because they were stale. The release of this evidence brought widespread public attention and demands by community groups that these cases be reopened and that more than 30 other torture cases be investigated for the first time, and aided several death row inmates in their pursuit of evidentiary hearings on their claims of police torture.
HISTORY BY SECTION
Early Days
The Murder of Fred Hampton
Government Surveillance
Representing the Panthers in Downstate Illinois
Attica New York Prison Riots
The Fred Hampton Murder Trial
Prisoner Rights Work
Puerto Rican Independence Movement and the Puerto Rican Community
Fred Hampton Appeal
George Jones Street Files and False Imprisonment
Representing Demonstrators, Protestors, and Activists
Greensboro
Puerto Rico Work Continues
Police Brutality and Torture
Continuing to Represent Demonstrators and Activists
The Attica Prison Civil Case
Continuing Work in Solidarity With Puerto Rico
Fighting the Death Penalty
Sexual Abuse Litigation and Illegal Strip Search
Back to the Supreme Court
The 1996 Democratic Convention
Policy and Practice Cases
False Arrests and Convictions
Continuing to Defend Dissent
Continuing the Fight for Justice in the Chicago Police Torture Cases
Criminal Defense for Civil Rights Abuses
Jail Suicide
Opposing the Criminalization of the LGBTQ Community
People’s Law Office and The National Lawyers Guild
