By The Editors

For nearly two decades now, it’s been clear that the once-exalted reputation of Jon Burge, a former Chicago senior police official, was not deserved. That was confirmed last June by a federal jury’s decision to convict him of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury for lying in a civil suit brought against him.

But the passions unleashed by that conviction, and his being sentenced by a federal district judge January 18 to 4 ½ years in prison underscore the far broader scope – and meaning – of Burge’s criminality.

By the time Burge, now 63 and in ill-health, stood before U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow earlier this month, four decades’ worth of evidence – -“a mountain of evidence,” the judge said – had accumulated that the allegations are true that Burge oversaw a police goon squad which used torture and the threat of torture to force confessions out of suspects who were innocent.

Burge could not be tried on any of those allegations, which were said to have occurred between 1973 and 1991, because the statute of limitations prevented him from being directly charged with those crimes. However, the fact that Judge Lefkow sentenced him to twice the time called for under federal sentencing guidelines spoke volumes, said an attorney who’s represented several men who claim to have been tortured by Burge or his men.

Flint Taylor, who was at the sentencing, described it as “a significant step in the process to bring some justice to all of those people who were tortured, and to get not only Burge, but all of the people who tortured our clients and all of the others, to bring them all to justice.”

It has also long been clear that the sordid activities of Burge’s unit were known about and tolerated by those at the highest levels of the police department and the Mayor’s Office and federal and state prosecutor’s offices. They knew, and did nothing as Burge and his men sent dozens of, overwhelmingly, black men, to years of imprisonment (and some to death row) for crimes they didn’t commit or had not been proven to have committed. As journalist John Conroy points out in an important analysis of Burge’s trial, “[m]ore than 20 men remain in prison on the basis of suspect confessions taken by detectives under Burge’s command. … Families have been torn apart. And it is impossible to total the number of felonies committed by the ‘right’ man while the wrong man was in prison.”

The Jon Burge scandal is distinguished by the number he and his band of dirty cops victimized and that their operations were in no way a secret from those with the power to stop them. But the continuing shame of America’s

criminal justice system is that police misconduct which leads to the incarceration of innocent men and women cannot be said to be an “exception.”

For proof, read the story of the “Beatrice Six,” the current installment of the joint publication project of TheDefendersOnline.com and The Innocence Project, and visit The Innocence Project website to read the more than 250 other cases where DNA evidence has exonerated men and women unjustly imprisoned, including 17 that went to death row.

Read these stories and you will say: This sounds familiar.