Reparations paid in Chicago police torture case
The city of Chicago has paid $5.5 million in reparations to 57 people whose claims that they were tortured by police decades ago were found to be credible.
The money was paid Monday to victims of a police unit commanded by disgraced former police commander Jon Burge from the 1970s through the early 1990s, the Chicago Sun-Times reported (
http://bit.ly/1INETKY ).
More than 100 men, mostly African-American, have accused Burge and officers under his command of shocking, suffocating and beating them into giving false confessions, some of which landed them on death row. Burge has never been criminally charged with torture, but he served a 4 ½-year sentence for lying about the torture in a civil case and was released from a halfway house last year.
The $5.5 million adds to more than $100 million that has been paid in court-ordered judgments, settlements of lawsuits and legal fees — most of it spent by the financially strapped city of Chicago and some by Cook County — over the years related to the torture scandal. The $100,000 payment most victims received Monday is a fraction of some previous settlements.