Find UFOs, The Apocalypse, New World Order, Political Analysis,
Alternative Health, Armageddon, Conspiracies, Prophecies,
Spirituality, Home Schooling, Home Mortgages and more, in:
Reading John Conroy's article about how the judges in Cook County have covered up years of police torture, I wonder if I have any chance of getting a fair trial in a Cook County court.
The prosecutors who sent police torture victims to prison are now the judges who keep them there.
By John Conroy
Chicago Reader
December 1, 2006
LAWYERS WHO DEFEND police-torture victims in Chicago long ago reached a harsh conclusion about Cook County’s criminal judges: most have a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge police brutality.
Now these lawyers can point to a case so extreme it’s almost funny: a judge who apparently ruled on his own performance as a prosecutor, deciding there was no taint to a confession that the judge himself had written. Judge Nicholas Ford passed judgment on assistant state’s attorney Nick Ford. Ford had no problem with Ford’s work.
It’s a case that’s unusual only in degree. Four years ago a group of 17 attorneys whose 12 clients alleged they’d been tortured submitted a remarkable petition to chief criminal court judge Paul Biebel. They wanted Biebel to disqualify the Cook County judiciary from any further involvement in their cases—in essence, to grant them a change of venue to some other county.
The attorneys argued that 50 of Cook County’s 61 criminal court judges had ties to institutions or individuals who’d benefit from there being no investigation of torture cases.
SNIP
This July, special prosecutors Edward Egan and Robert Boyle released the report of their investigation into alleged police torture by Burge and his detectives in the years 1973 to 1991. Boyle said he believed torture had occurred in “about half” of the 148 cases their staff examined during their four-year investigation. If he was right, detectives committed hundreds of acts of torture, because in abusing a victim they almost never stopped with a single act. And as no officer ever admitted to any coercion, those detectives presumably committed hundreds of acts of perjury.
SNIP
...not a single judge publicly recommended that any officer be prosecuted for giving false testimony under oath.
Nor did the state’s attorney’s office prosecute a single officer for perjury, misconduct, or assault. And it’s from the ranks of those prosecutors that most of today’s criminal court judges have come.
