2
0
The United Nations has called out Chicago’s history of “racialized police violence” and says the city needs to do more to remedy past wrongs.
United Nations human rights investigators said in a statement: “These heinous alleged human rights violations appear to a significant extent to be rooted in systemic racism and have disproportionately affected people of African and Latin American descent.”
Investigators went on to decry reports of arrest without cause and the use of torture to coerce confessions — including from minors.
“These confessions, as well as broader systemic racism and police misconduct in Chicago’s criminal justice system, have reportedly resulted in many wrongful convictions and wrongful incarcerations of individuals, often for extremely long periods of time and without adequate access to healthcare, including for older persons and survivors of torture,” the U.N. experts said.
“Lives have been stolen, with a significant ripple effect within communities,” the U.N. investigators added”.
University of Illinois Chicago professor Nadine Naber has been working with MAMAS, a group of Chicago-based mothers of police torture survivors, for the past four years to get the United Nations to investigate Chicago police misconduct.
Nadine Naber said the U.N. is demanding that the state of Illinois “help remedy the ongoing problem of individuals who have been coerced into concessions and are incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit through police violence and torture.”
While the state did establish a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission that began operating in 2011 in response to historic allegations of torture by former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge, according to Naber it is not fit for purpose.
“The whole system is so backed up that there are hundreds of people whose documents are just sitting on a desk and haven’t been reviewed by the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission because it’s understaffed and it doesn’t have enough resources,” Naber said.
April Ward, mother of Micheail Ward, who in 2018 was convicted of killing 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, is hoping that the attention and call for remedial action by the United Nations will ultimately help bring her son home.
Ward’s conviction was overturned by the Illinois Appellate Court and remanded back to the lower court last year. The appellate court said his confession — which his lawyers and family say was coerced — should not have been considered at trial.
April Ward said police would not tell her where her son was being held for 44 hours after his arrest and that detectives forced her son into a false confession.
“He kept saying, ‘I don’t have nothing to say, I don’t want to talk,’ and they just kept badgering, badgering, badgering, you know, they even I think went upside his head a couple of times,” April Ward said. “They finally asked him, ‘Well, how would you have done it if it was you?’ … and they called that a confession.”
Mark Clements is a survivor of police torture and spent 28 years behind bars before his conviction was overturned. Now a senior community organizer at the Chicago Torture Justice Center, Clements has been working with MAMAS to help collect evidence of police misconduct for U.N. investigators.
Clements said that despite numerous previous inquiries “no one seemed to want to do anything. So when Nadine (Naber) gained some attention from the U.N., we were told to prepare little profiles on cases which we believed were wrong and where the person was still incarcerated inside of the Illinois Department of Corrections,” Clements said.
“Some of these individuals that are a part of MAMAS are Burge victims fighting for some of the same individuals to be at least provided with their day in court,” Clements said.
“I just think that basically if we’re stating that innocence matters, how can innocence matter when a police officer collects maybe 30 or 40 or 50 different torture allegations for framing individuals to be sent to prison and there’s no form of justice? Justice has never been served in hundreds of these cases, which have men and women still languishing behind prison walls.”
Average Rating