Mayor Richard Daley told special prosecutors that he could not remember much about the police torture case that ultimately got Cmdr. Jon Burge fired.
Though Daley was state’s attorney in 1982, his staff did most of the work on the Andrew Wilson case, he told the special prosecutors when they interviewed him in recent months.
Nobody informed him of key pieces of information, and he couldn’t specifically remember what happened to a letter about the Wilson abuse addressed to him, according to the report issued Wednesday.
Though the question of Daley’s knowledge has been a persistent theme in the scandal surrounding police torture under Burge, the special prosecutors devoted just three of their 290 pages to what Daley knew.
And they limited themselves almost exclusively to reporting his answers, without any broader assessment of his role.
The four-year investigation found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to prosecute any member of the state’s attorney’s office, with the exception of one prosecutor who claimed to have held off questioning murder suspect Andrew Wilson for reasons of strategy.
In the ensuing hours that day in 1982, Wilson was tortured at the hands of police and confessed to the murders of two Chicago police officers.
Daley told the special prosecutors he has no memory of a letter that year in which Police Supt. Richard Brzeczek passed along allegations of abuse in the Wilson case.
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In their report the special prosecutors reported Daley’s responses without comment. They also berated Brzeczek for trying to shift responsibility to Daley in the letter, instead of launching an investigation into the claims himself.
“Daley thought all procedures were properly followed,” said Robert Boyle, deputy to the special prosecutor, at Wednesday’s news conference. “We suggest that perhaps some mistakes were made through a delegation of duties. A more faithful search of the facts by the police and by the state’s attorney would have led, we think, to some action which would have prevented any further misconduct.”
In identifying possible missteps, Boyle touched only obliquely on the performance of Daley’s team.
“We reflect in the report on what we believe was a bit of a slippage in the state’s attorney’s office at the time of the Wilson case,” he said.
One lawyer for a former Death Row inmate who has sued over the torture blasted the special prosecutors’ findings.
“You’re telling me Mayor Daley didn’t know?” said attorney Frank Avila, who represents Aaron Patterson. “I could have done this report in a weekend. … It’s a whitewash to protect Mayor Daley and State’s Atty. Richard Devine.”
Daley spokeswoman Jodi Kawada said the mayor, in San Francisco on city business, would not comment Wednesday on the report.
The report was most critical of Lawrence Hyman, the then-assistant state’s attorney who took Wilson’s confession, suggesting there was sufficient evidence to charge him with wrongdoing if the statute of limitations hadn’t long passed. Hyman was the only one of dozens of former prosecutors who declined to cooperate with investigators for Wednesday’s report.
Attorney Ralph Meczyk, representing Hyman, said his client denied any wrongdoing. Wilson didn’t complain of police brutality to Hyman and didn’t show any evidence of a physical beating other than a red mark on his face, according to Meczyk.
Meczyk also said Hyman delayed taking Wilson’s written confession because he had other witnesses to question. “He wasn’t prepared to take the statement,” Meczyk said. “All the information wasn’t in yet.”
The report also was critical of former higher-ups in the state’s attorney’s office under Daley for failing to interrogate officers who transported Wilson despite their suspicions of officers’ involvement in Wilson’s beating.
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mo’connor@tribune
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Excerpts from the report
ON RICHARD DALEY
“He did not recall that Andrew Wilson was supposed to have made an oral statement and approximately eight hours later the state’s attorney decided to take a written statement. He was never advised of the conversation Larry Hyman allegedly had with Andrew Wilson in which Andrew Wilson told Hyman he had been beaten. He didn’t recall whether anybody ever brought to his attention the fact that the wagon men had committed a crime. Nobody ever brought to his attention the fact that the lock-up people would not accept custody of Andrew Wilson because of his condition. He did not recall any conversation with any of the supervisory personnel with regards to any statement being made.”
ON RICHARD BRZECZEK
“Thus, we now have the spectacle of a Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, a lawyer, who received and believed evidence that a prisoner had been brutalized by the Superintendent’s subordinates; that the prisoner had confessed; that those subordinates had testified under oath on a motion to suppress and before a jury and, he had to believe, they testified perjuriously; that the prisoner had been sentenced to death and that that Superintendent still remained silent. For over twenty years. He not only remained silent, but he approved a unit citation for all the Area 2 personnel, including Burge, on September 1, 1982, for their work on the Andrew Wilson case; and, more egregiously, he kept Burge in command of Violent Crimes at Area 2 as long as he remained Superintendent . … Our judgment is that this investigation we have conducted would never have been necessary if Richard Brzeczek had done his sworn non-delegable duty on reception of Dr. Raba’s letter.” (News, Page 16.)