Report of the Special State's Attorney Appointed and Ordered by the Presiding Judge of the Criminal

292 Pages·2006·2.88 MB·English

OF THE
SPECIAL STATE’S
APPOINTED AND ORDERED BY
THE PRESIDING JUDGE OF THE
CRIMINAL DIVISION OF THE
CIRCUIT COURT OF COOK
COUNTY IN NO. 2001 MISC. 4
Edward J. Egan
Special State’s Attorney
Robert D. Boyle
Chief Deputy Special State’s Attorney
Table of Contents
Page
I. Introduction 3
II. Conclusions 16
III. Statute of Limitations 18
Iv. Pejury Trap 37
V. Andrew Wilson 43
VI. Richard Brzeczek 67
VII. Allegations of “Cover-Up” 112
VIII. Relationship between OPS and Cook County State’s Attorney 157
IX. Report of Investigators
1. Leroy Orange and Leonard Kidd 169
2. Madison Hobley 183
3. Stanley Howard 217
4. Aaron Patterson 242
5. Phillip Adkins 266
6. Alfonzo Pinex 275
INTRODUCTION
When we accepted this Court’s request to serve as Special Prosecutors, we
examined the pleadings filed in connection with the Petition for Appointment of a Special
State’s Attorney and particularly the Order of Appointment. The petition asked that a
Special State’s Attorney be appointed “to investigate allegations of torture, perjury,
obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and other offenses bv police officers
under the command of Jon Burge at Area 2 and Area 3 Headquarters in the city of
Chicago during the period from 1973 to the present.” (Emphasis added.) (Petition for
Appointment, p. 1.) That part of the petition was referred to specifically by this Court in
the Memorandum Opinion and Order. (p- 1.) In the “conclusion” of the Memorandum
Opinion and Order we were appointed “to investigate the facts alleged by the petitioners
and to determine if any prosecutions are warranted.” (Emphasis added.)
We were aware that we, and no one else, were invested with the same powers and
charged with the same duties that the elected State’s Attorney was, but in a restricted
area. (See Aiken v. Will County, 52 N.E.2d 607.) As the petition for appointment of a
Special State’s Attorney recognized, Standard 3-3.9 of the American Bar Association
Criminal Justice Standards “provides that the institution of criminal charges (at the
conclusion of the investigation) is warranted only where the charges are supported by
probable cause and where there is sufficient admissible evidence to support a conviction.
The purpose of the precharging investigation is to develop evidence and to determine at
the conclusion of the investigation whether the evidence is sufficient to support charges.”
(Emphasis added.) (Reply in Support of Petition for Appointment of a Special
Prosecutor, ~~-9-10) Under the law prosecutors are quasi-judicial officers. That means
they are like a judge. That means also that they are to be open-minded and even-handed
to those accused as well as to the accusers-
We began to perform our first duty - to investigate - and we were determined to
do so independently. We were also determined that that power to investigate would be
used with an open-mind and even-handedly; and we would not permit anyone to tell us
whom we must hire or how we must proceed or what legal theories we must adopt. Nor
would we be influenced by threats, implied or othenvise.
It became obvious to us after a review of the principal cases we were investigating
that the results of our investigations, like almost all investigations made by a prosecutor,
depended on the credibility of the accuser. We would not be bound by previous
conclusions on credibility made by other persons or agencies. To illustrate, WC would not
be bound by the findings of the Chicago Police Office of Professional Standards, either in
favor of or against police officers; and we would not be bound by statements made by a
trial judge, Federal or State.
After completing our investigation it would then be our duty to determine whether
the admissible evidence available would justify our seeking an indictment against any
person. Our next duty would be to determine, assuming the sufficiency of the evidence,
whether prosecution would be time-barred. That issue was raised in the petition for
appointment of a Special Prosecutor but was not passed on. We concluded that, even if
we determined prosecution was time-barred, this case was of such social importance the
results of our investigation should be made public.
Our first task was to create a working law office; that required funding, space and
personnel. We are heavily indebted to the cooperation we received from the Cook
County Board and this Court in helping us to acquire what we needed. We hired three
full-time administrative personnel. They are Keith Liston, the Chief of Staff, Rose
Trevino, our secretary, and Daniel Neville, our paralegal. For a time we also had the
services of Dorothea Nawara as a secretary. All of them have served us admirably.
We were fortunate to be able to retain the services of nine experienced lawyers,
all but one of whom was a prosecutor. They are Donald Hubert, Gordon Nash, Judge
Earl Strayhorn, Robert Weber, George Murtaugh, Ronald Neville, Thomas Reed, Terence
Mahoney and Patrick Calihan. For a short period of time we also had the services of
Thomas Durkin and Tommy Brewer, both former prosecutors. All served on a part-time
basis; and all served well. (George Murtaugh is now deceased.)
We express our special thanks to retired Illinois Supreme Court Justice John J.
Stamos. Justice Stamos served on the Illinois Supreme Court for three years. For twenty
years before that he was a member of the Appellate Court, which he joined after serving
as the Cook County State’s Attorney. While so serving, he was named the nation’s
outstanding prosecutor by the National District Attorney’s Association. He began his
prosecutive career in 1952 and was a trial assistant, Chief of the Criminal Division and
First Assistant State’s Attorney before being appointed State’s Attorney in 1966. Justice
Stamos has reviewed material at our request and has expressed his opinions to us. We
are deeply appreciative of receiving the benefits of his scholarship and long and
distinguished years in the judicial and prosecutive offices.
For our investigative staff we retained Quest Consultants International, Ltd., an
agency consisting almost completely of retired agents of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. They also served on a part-time basis. They too have served us well.
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Because credibility was the primary test, it was our decision that we must, if-
possible, personally interview all principal witnesses, beginning with the claimants. But
before we interviewed those witnesses we wanted to know whether they had said at
another time something different from what they were telling us. If they had, this would
be the most fundamental form of impeachment. Because many years have passed since
the alleged acts complained of occurred, it was also of utmost importance to determine
what the witnesses remembered. Under no circumstances would we seek an indictment
unless we first had personally interviewed the person making the allegation of police
mistreatment and we had been assured that the person was willing to testify.
Needless to say we had to determine the location of the claimants as well as their
lawyers. Some of that information was readily available through the lawyers who are
presently of record in pending matters; but much of it was not. We subsequently learned
that severa of the claimants were deceased and several were incarcerated, some on new
charges and some in other jurisdictions. Last, we wanted to learn the identity of, and to
talk to, any person who could corroborate or contradict the claimants or the officers.
We also had to locate police officers against whom allegations of wrongdoing
were made as well as other officers who were listed as witnesses. Several of the officers
were deceased and most of them were retired. Several officers were residing out-of-state.
It was necessary to cohect as much relevant written material as we could. This
would include, but not be limited to medical reports, police reports, State’s Attorney files,
Public Defender files, the records of the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), and
records, including transcripts, in the State and Federal courts, in civil as well as criminal
cases arid, in one case, the report of proceedings before the Chicago Police Board. We
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also sought the records of the Chicago Police Pension Board and some records from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Attorney and the United States
Attorney General. Acquiring those reports and court records, which had been in several
courts, was a very difficult and time-consuming effort. To this date, we have been unable
to locate some of the records. Many important exhibits are still missing. Many police
records, OPS records and medical records are no longer available.
We have been assisted by the Clerks of the Circuit Court, the First District
Appellate Court, the Illinois Supreme Court, the Federal District Court and the Seventh
Circuit Court of Appeals. We have had to seek the assistance of this Court in acquiring
some of the Circuit Court records. We have also received records and other information
from some of the attorneys representing the claimants.
It has been and is our position that we should use the Grand Jury after we had
completed our investigation and had made a judgment in good faith that there was
sufficient evidence to present to the Grand Jury and seek an indictment or when we
needed Grand Jury process to require the appearance of a witness who refused to co-
operate or to require the production of evidence.
It was also our general position that witnesses should be interviewed under oath
and their statements be recorded by a court reporter. We knew that some witnesses
whose cooperation we were seeking would balk at giving written statements at all, let
alone under oath; but we saw no reason why persons who were alleging they were
brutabzed would take that position. We took many statements folIowing that procedure
with several witnesses, including some claimants and former assistant state’s attorneys
who are presently IIlinois appellate court judges. No one made an issue of that procedure
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until October 10, 2003, when one of the attorneys for some claimants and later, at his
instigation, several other attorneys for claimants expressed objections. We were told that
there really was no need to interview the claimants at all, certainly not under oath. After
some rancorous exchanges, we agreed to dispense with the necessity of an oath, but we
insisted that the interviews would be conducted in the presence of a court reporter. That
procedure was agreed upon. We have interviewed hundreds of persons. Near the end of
our investigation we had to be involved in proceedings in the Illinois Supreme Court to
compel a former assistant state’s attorney to testify. We were unable to interview him
because his lawyer informed us that his client would invoke his 5th amendment rights.
He was the only assistant state’s attorney that did not agree to be interviewed by us.
We initiated our investigation with the cases of the men on Death Row, several of
whom had post-conviction petitions pending in the Criminal Court. An investigation of
those cases involving pending post-conviction petitions was in part delayed because a
petition had been tiled seeking the appointment of still another Special State’s Attorney
in those cases and a motion to recuse all Circuit Court judges in Cook County. We had to
limit investigating those cases until we learned what lawyer would be appointed to act as
Special State’s Attorney in those cases, because that lawyer would be the one that we
would be dealing with. That petition and motion were decided almost ten months later.
At the beginning of our investigation we received the names of 64 persons who
alleged acts of brutality. From various sources we received additional potential
“complainants”. Although some of the additional complaints came from citizen groups,
the majority of complaints came as a result of our efforts. We established a protocol,
which allowed us to review complaints, to determine whether the complaints were within
our authority as established by Judge Biebel’s Order of Appointment and to proceed to an
investigation of the facts. We have submitted 148 complaints to such an investigation.
The results are set forth in individual reports contained in the Compact Disc which is part
of this report. Those reports are identified as Special Prosecutor Investigation Reports.
We have pursued 98 additional complaints which we discovered during our
investigation or which were referred to us either through communications with the
complainants or by groups. In gathering data concerning these complaints we determined
that we could not pursue them in depth, because our preliminary investigation disclosed
that, among other reasons, they did not involve Jon Burge or his officers, the alleged
complainant would not cooperate with us, the alleged complainant was dead and the facts
could not be established without his or her testimony, or the purported complainant stated
that he or she was not a victim of physical abuse by Chicago police officers. Further,
some of the matters referred to us involved complaints for wrongful convictions having
nothing to do with police brutality, the denial of inmate library time at Illinois
penitentiaries, medical neglect at Illinois penitentiaries, the quality of food at IIlinois
penitentiaries and the denial of the use of the telephone at Illinois penitentiaries.
Our initial investigation required our ascertaining the location of the alleged
mistreatment of the claimant, that is, whether it occurred at Detective Areas 2 or 3; the
date of the mistreatment, that is, whether it occurred while Jon Burge was the commander
of the unit involved.
From time to time we received complaints by letter from persons in the
penitentiary, alleging that they had been mistreated by the police. Very often, those
letters gave us only the name of the person making the complaint. Like the procedure
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used for names submitted by the organization referred to above, we had to investigate to
determine whether the complaint came within the jurisdiction imposed on us by our
appointment order. Even the investigation to determine whether we had jurisdiction took
time.
In those new cases over which we determined we did have jurisdiction, our
investigation involved the same time-consuming processes as those used in the original
64 cases: requests for State’s Attorneys’ records, subpoenas for OF’S records and police
reports, searches for court records, subsequent examination of all transcripts and
opinions, contacting lawyers representing claimants, locating claimants and potential
witnesses, subpoenaing any medical records, and, in most cases, interviewing the
claimants and witnesses willing to be interviewed by us. In some cases we were able to
make a determination that an interview of a claimant would not be necessary; but that
determination was never made until we had conducted a meaningful investigation.
A relatively recent experience will illustrate some of the problems we faced: we
had been assured by the State’s Attorney’s Office that we had received all material
pertinent to our investigation. On January 20, 2006, we received a box full of various
documents from the State’s Attorney’s Office. There was no cover letter explaining the
relevance of the information. We were simply informed that the material had just been
discovered. The documents contained typed and handwritten matter, including the names
of 17 individuals (apparently as potential claimants) who had not previously been
included in our list of claimants.
Receipt of the January 20, 2006 material required still another series of
investigative steps covering the 17 new names. Subpoenas were served on the
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