I mean damn, he was only the state's attorney in the 1980s when most of these cases were being prosecuted. He was almost like an innocent bystander.
Oh, wait a minute...
Don
Not the greatest source here maybe (?) but they lay it out pretty much as it was:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/49/torture.shtml N E W S & R E P O R T S
CHICAGO TORTURE
A $7 million whitewash By JULIEN BALL
DURING THE two decades between 1973 and 1993, a ring of dozens of white Chicago police officers under former Commander Jon Burge rounded up African-American men on the south side and used such tactics as electroshock to the genitals, suffocation with plastic typewriter bags, and Russian roulette to elicit confessions. The torture scandal reaches into the upper echelons of Chicago politics. Current Mayor Richard M. Daley made his career as a “tough-on-crime” state's attorney in the 1980s based on high-profile convictions-many of which we now know to have been secured through torture. The current state's attorney, Richard Devine, was an assistant under Daley and subsequently went into private practice, where he defended Burge in a civil suit stemming from the torture allegations.
After years of organizing and protesting, a coalition of activists and attorneys finally won their demand for a special prosecutor in 2002 to bring Burge and his minions to justice. In June of this year, they organized pickets and press conferences in front of the courthouse to demand that the special prosecutors release their report, in the face of a tenacious effort by some police officers and prosecutors to squelch it. After all of this-a four-year, $7 million investigation-special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle finally unveiled their 292-page report in July. The report is a big disappointment, concluding that the statute of limitations on the Burge torture cases precludes any prosecutions. Burge, who was fired in 1993 for the torture of Andrew Wilson, still resides in Florida on a $3,400 per month pension. For the moment, he and his followers are still safe from prosecution, as Egan and Boyle have let them off the hook.
The special prosecutors said they found evidence of abuse in as many as seventy-five of the 148 cases they investigated and conclude that since Burge engaged in prisoner abuse, it “necessarily follows that a number of those serving under his command recognized that, if their commander could abuse persons with impunity, so could they.” The report states that there is enough evidence to “establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” that Burge and fellow officers Anthony Maslanka, Michael McDermott, James Lotito, and Ronald Boffo engaged in torture in only three cases-those of Andrew Wilson, Philip Adkins, and Alfonso Pinex.
These findings break no new ground. Michael Goldston, who prepared a report for the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), the Chicago Police Department's own internal investigative body, concluded the following in 1990:
{the} preponderance of evidence is that abuse did occur and that it was systematic...that the type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beatings, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture...and that particular command members were aware of the systematic abuse and perpetuated it, either by actively participating in some or failing to take any action to bring it to an end.
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