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| Water Torture. (Illustration by J. Damhoudere) |
In May of 1973, then-Chicago Police Detective Jon Burge allegedly suffocated and electric-shocked Anthony Holmes until Holmes confessed to a murder he says he didn’t commit. Holmes then spent the next 30 years in prison. In 2010, after his release, he testified in the government’s successful prosecution of Burge for perjury and obstruction of justice.
While Burge serves his 4 1/2-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Complex in Butner, N.C., he’ll continue to collect a pension; by contrast, Holmes says his time in prison left him with no health insurance and no long-term means of survival. And Holmes wasn’t the only person whose life was devastated by the former police commander's alleged tactics—Burge allegedly supervised the torture and wrongful imprisonment of as many as 120 people.
Now, though, anti-torture advocates are pressing the city to make reparations that might go some way toward allowing survivors like Holmes to get back on their feet.
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