A Cook County judge bucked years of court rulings when he appointed a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney as special prosecutor in cases where new trials are sought due to alleged police brutality under disgraced former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge, defense attorneys said in a court filing this week.
Attorneys for the People’s Law Office are asking Judge Thomas Byrne to rescind his April appointment of Robert Milan, a former top Cook County prosecutor who has publicly backed a Burge-era detective linked to numerous wrongful convictions.
“We feel that it is imperative, given the sordid history of the Cook County State’s Attorneys’ Office … in the Burge torture cases — failing to hold Burge accountable let alone acknowledge people were tortured — that the Special Prosecutor in these scandal-tainted cases be completely independent from that history,” attorneys G. Flint Taylor Jr. and Joey Mogul said in an emailed response to Tribune questions.
Milan, who now works for a corporate security firm, told the Tribune he was “disappointed” by the filing, which he said fails to acknowledge his work on wrongful convictions.
Under former State’s Attorney Richard Devine, Milan said, he launched a training program for prosecutors to help recognize wrongful convictions and was instrumental in charges being dropped in at least a half dozen Cook County cases.
Milan also said he has never been involved in any way with the 38 Burge-era cases now pending before the special prosecutor.
He was appointed special prosecutor last month after Stuart Nudelman, a former Cook County judge, stepped down from the post late last year. Nudelman’s law firm will still litigate cases that come before the special prosecutor, Taylor and Milan said.
In rulings from 2002 to 2013, former criminal division presiding judge Paul Biebel repeatedly found that the state’s attorney’s office had an inherent conflict of interest in handling post-conviction cases tied to Burge and his subordinates, according to the defense motion. Milan was with the state’s attorneys’ office for over 20 years.
When the Tribune in 2005 reported on questions about Chicago police Det. Kenneth Boudreau, a Burge underling who took confessions in more than a dozen cases where criminal charges were dropped or thrown out, Milan voiced his support for the detective. “This detective has had a long career, a good career,” Milan told the Tribune.
More recently, Milan has proposed calling for thousands of National Guard troops to saturate violent South and West side neighborhoods this summer to quell persistent violence. While not part of the defense motion, Taylor wrote in his email that the proposal “is hardly reassuring, to say the least!”
Milan said his beliefs about improving safety in the city’s most violent neighborhoods are irrelevant to his work as special prosecutor. “People try to paint me as racist,” he said. “But I would do it in my own neighborhood. … people shouldn’t be living in fear.”
The city and county have paid out more than $111 million in settlements, judgments, reparations and legal fees in cases stemming from the Burge era, according to a tally kept by Taylor, whose law firm has brought numerous such suits. Included in that figure are $5.5 million in city reparations approved in 2015 to compensate victims of abuse from the Burge era.
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