Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is being called to testify at a hearing for a rape convict who claims he was tortured by police detectives in 1982, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
Daley, who served as Cook County's top prosecutor from 1980-1989, was served with a subpoena on Friday.
“This is not a witch hunt,” Heidi Lambros, one of the attorneys for Stanley Wrice, told the Times. “Daley was the boss. His prosecutors took the lead from him. Maybe he truly didn’t know, but he should have.”
Stanley Wrice, 59, is serving a 100-year prison sentence after his conviction on charges that included rape.
According to Wrice,after he was arrested, he was taken to the police station and interrogated about a sexual assault. When he denied his involvement, one detective apparently told him he was "fixing to do some police brutality."
Two detectives, under the direction of then-Cmdr. Jon Burge, allegedly beat the confession out of him.
Burge was later convicted of perjury and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison in a civil case that alleged he and his "Midnight Crew" of detectives forced murder confessions through smothering, beatings, and electric shock, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Wrote Annie Sweeney at the Tribune:
Lawyers for some of Burge's alleged victims have long criticized Mayor Richard Daley for not investigating Burge when Daley was state's attorney in the 1980s. A Cook County Jail doctor had sent a letter to then-police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek complaining that accused cop killer Andrew Wilson had been beaten and tortured. Brzeczek passed the letter on to Daley.
Wrice won the opportunity for a hearing on his possible innocence in 2012, according to HuffPo. In her decision, Justice Mary Jane Theis said, "the use of a physically coerced confession as substantive evidence of defendant's guilt can never be harmless error."
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