c
			 Amnesty phones home
			 ===================

Amnesty International has called on the attorney general of Illinois
to investigate charges by 14 black men that they were tortured while
in the custody of a Chicago police commander. The men claim that
Commander Jon Burge, a former military-police interrogator in Vietnam,
brutalizes his suspects with electroshock, suffocation, Russian
roulette, burnings, beatings and threats of mutilation and death. The
claims date from 1972 to 1990, and, in several cases, the Illinois
Supreme Court has rules confessions taken by Burge and his detectives
to be inadmissible. Amnesty workers picked up the case from an article
in the Chicago Reader that chronicled Burge's 1989 civil-rights trial
in which he was accused of torturing Andrew Wilson. The presiding
federal judge refused to allow the testimonies of other alleged Burge
victims who came forward during the close of the trial, and, despite
overwhelming physical evidence, the commander was acquitted. A local
coalition that formed during the trial also is demanding the
investigation and dismissal of Burge

[From In These Times, April 11-17, 1990]

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