Ex-Chicago Cop Convicted in Police Torture Case

(June 30) -- The conviction of a former Chicago police lieutenant accused of torturing suspects will likely inspire a wave of new litigation from up to 100 convicted felons who say they were burned, beaten and choked into confessing to crimes they didn't commit, prosecutors said.

Testimony from five convicted felons helped a federal jury find former Lt. John Burge, 62, guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice. Jurors determined that Burge was lying in a 2003 civil case when he denied ever witnessing or participating in the torture of suspects from the 1970s through the 1990s.

He wasn't charged with the torture itself because the statute of limitations has run out.

Fired from the force in 1993, Burge moved to Florida on his pension, which could now be revoked. As Burge, who is free on bond, awaits sentencing on Nov. 5., legal officials said they will press to investigate cases of alleged torture during his tenure.

"A message needs to go out that that conduct is unacceptable," U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said after Burge's conviction Monday, vowing an investigation into torture allegations from more than 100 victims is ongoing.

Reports said most of the alleged victims who say they were tortured by Burge or officers in his command are African-American men who were detained at police stations in the city's south and west sides beginning in the 1970s and 1980s.

Dozens of victims have said they were beaten, suffocated, shocked with electricity on sensitive parts of their bodies and subjected to games of Russian Roulette. They say they were tortured into confessing to crimes ranging from robbery to murder.

Lawsuits filed by those men could results in tens of millions of dollars in civil judgments and potentially prompt the filing of criminal charges. Burge is currently the only police officer who has been criminally charged in the torture allegations.

"I'm confident that as an attorney in any of these cases I would be raising hell," Bernard Harcourt, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, told ABC News.

Dozens of the men who say they were tortured into giving confessions could still be living with the consequences, according to ABC.

"There are most likely dozens, maybe even a hundred people, still in Illinois prison who were convicted pursuant to confessions they say were obtained through torture when Burge was still head of that police district," Jonathan Masur, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, told ABC.

Attorney Flint Taylor, who represents some of the men who have alleged police torture, said he plans to file a federal lawsuit on behalf of one Burge accuser, Ronald Kitchen, whose murder conviction was overturned.

"This is just one phase in the long struggle against police torture," Taylor told The New York Times.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan says her office will investigate the decades-old torture allegations to determine a legal course of action, including retrials for alleged torture victims.

"We've always taken the allegations of torture seriously in these cases, but we start from the beginning in terms of a re-investigation of those cases, interviewing of witnesses and proceeding appropriately so that justice is served," she told Chicago Public Radio.

Madigan said two cases are pending before a judge.

Burge's conviction has elicited hope from alleged victims, including David Bates, who served 11 years in prison after he said he was coerced into confessing to murder by officers under Burge's command.

"To tap him out was easy, he's been marketed as the torture person," Bates told The Associated Press of Burge. "But it goes so far beyond Jon Burge."