Lawyers who defend police-torture victims in Chicago long ago reached a harsh conclusion about Cook County’s criminal judges: most have a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge police brutality. Now these lawyers can point to a case so extreme it’s almost funny: a judge who apparently ruled on his own performance as a prosecutor, deciding there was no taint to a confession that the judge himself had written. Judge Nicholas Ford passed judgment on assistant state’s attorney Nick Ford. Ford had no problem with Ford’s work.
The core of the attorneys’ argument—that judges with law enforcement or prosecutorial backgrounds cast a blind eye in police brutality cases—was made against a fluid judiciary. Judges retire and are replaced. New ones are hired to relieve caseloads. Yet it would seem the blind-eye infection alleged by the defense attorneys has persisted despite the changing cast of characters. This July, special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle released the report of their investigation into alleged police torture by Burge and his detectives in the years 1973 to 1991. Boyle said he believed torture had occurred in “about half” of the 148 cases their staff examined during their four-year investigation. If he was right, detectives committed hundreds of acts of torture, because in abusing a victim they almost never stopped with a single act. And as no officer ever admitted to any coercion, those detectives presumably committed hundreds of acts of perjury. In how many of those cases did a skeptical judge suppress a confession because he or she felt it had been coerced? Zero. (Judge Earl Strayhorn once suppressed a confession for the “oppressive atmosphere” in which it was given, but he didn’t conclude that physical abuse had taken place.) And not a single judge publicly recommended that any officer be prosecuted for giving false testimony under oath.
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Many PC petitions are submitted by prisoners who can’t afford attorneys to help them, and some arrive handwritten. Circuit court judges review the filings. Irritation with the number and quality of the petitions has led to the courthouse joke that “anyone with a pencil can write one,” and in dismissing petitions judges often fall back on the boilerplate language of the statute, calling the motions “frivolous” or “patently without merit” or both.
It may be true that Ford paid the case that little attention—though the idea seems damning on its face. It may also be true that the name Keith Walker meant nothing to Ford—though the case had yet another memorable aspect: Walker somehow managed to slip out of his handcuffs and disappear. He was rearrested after any injuries he might have suffered in his interrogation had had a month to heal. Ford did not return calls for comment.
Judge Frank Gembala told McBride she was “on notice” to investigate Patterson’s story, but the state’s attorney’s office has never produced documentation proving that any investigation took place. Patterson was convicted and sentenced to death, and Governor Ryan pardoned him in 2003.
