Cops Who Obtained Confessions By Using Torture STILL Working On Chicago Police Force

By Sarah Macaraeg and Yana Kunichoff
On a breezy June evening in 1995, twenty years before the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald would envelop Chicago in scandal, Derrick Flewellen hobbled into St Bernard’s Hospital on the south side of the city, seeking care for an open wound on his right foot. As the night progressed and Flewellen’s girlfriend kept him company, the 31-year-old was treated with antibiotics and pain medicine before being bandaged up and discharged around 2am the next morning.

But soon after his departure from the hospital, Flewellen would again be in pain. Two Chicago police detectives, Francis Valadez and Steve Buglio, had arrived to St Bernard’s in search of Flewellen and allegedly intimidated the couple into heading straight to violent crimes unit headquarters from the hospital, for questioning. According to testimony from the criminal trial that eventually saw Flewellen’s acquittal for two murder charges, based on DNA evidence, he was heard screaming from inside a police interrogation room, in the hours that followed, after Valadez – now one of 22 district commanders leading the Chicago Police force – stomped on Flewellen’s injured foot and proceeded to crush the wheels of a metal chair into his wounds.

In all, Flewellen says in his lawsuit that seven detectives beat him over the course of 36 hours, ignoring his pleas for a lawyer, sleep and pain medication while threatening that the department of children and family services would take his girlfriend’s infant son away from her. Following the barrage, he “confessed”.

“My life totally changed,” said Flewellen, speaking to the Guardian by phone from the Chicago suburb where he now lives with his sister. “Being falsely accused of murder and having three, four detectives slapping me around to get a confession … It wasn’t pretty, I got beat up, tortured. I have been beaten up by inmates, I’ve been beaten up by Cook County sheriff’s police. I almost got stabbed in there after they posted my picture on the news.”

Unable to afford bond, Flewellen languished for four and a half years in Cook County jail before a judge would find him not guilty, even after each of the officers who interrogated Flewellen testified against him. Six months after he was set free, Flewellen filed a civil complaint against the detectives. Although the officers denied his accusations, the City of Chicago eventually settled Flewellen’s claims of false arrest and malicious prosecution for $250,000 in 2002.

Despite the evidence that Flewellen’s confession was false – corroborated further by the assertion of a medical examiner that one of the murders of which he was charged would not have been deemed a homicide absent his statement – five of the detectives who Flewellen said tortured him remain on the force today. Three, in fact, have ascended ranks: Commander Francis Valadez, Lieutenant Luke Kelly and Sergeant Daniel McDonald.

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Millions in Reparations for Victims of Police Torture Gets Backing in Chicago — City Has Paid Millions to Victims of Local Maniac Cop

The city has already paid out $100 million in settlements in lawsuits related to the infamous police commander.

Commander Jon Burge filled prisons with innocent men he tortured into confessing.

By Hal Dardick, John Byrne and Steve Mills
The city of Chicago on Tuesday sought to put to rest one of its most persistent scandals, proposing a $5.5 million reparations fund for dozens of torture victims connected to former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge and his so-called midnight crew of rogue detectives.


The proposal, negotiated with a key plaintiff's attorney and supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, would offer free city college tuition for victims and their families, free counseling for psychological issues and substance abuse as well as other assistance to more than 50 potential victims. The city would also issue a formal apology, create a permanent memorial recognizing the victims and ensure that eighth- and 10th-grade students attending Chicago Public Schools would be taught about the Burge case and its brutal legacy, cementing the scandal's role in city history.

But as much as the proposal seeks to end a painful, controversial era — Emanuel said it would "close this book, the Burge book on the city's history" — it is unlikely to stanch the flow of torture claims from victims. A Loyola University Chicago law school dean appointed by a Cook County judge has identified some 20 additional cases in which inmates may have been Burge victims. Other inmates who have made torture claims continue to fight to overturn convictions and win their freedom. And one lawsuit over the torture is pending.

Already, this stubborn scandal has cost taxpayers about $100 million in lawsuit settlements, judgments and other legal costs, according to lawyers.

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Victims of Police Torture Fight for Reparations

The Homan Square facility, exposed as a CIA-style "black site" where police detainees would be brutalized without access to lawyers or relatives, is nothing new to those familiar with the violent legacy of police commander Jon Burge.

Photo by Dennis Jarvis.

By Caroline Siede
Mark Clements was 16 years old when Chicago police officers took him to an interrogation room and beat him until he falsely confessed to setting a fire that killed four people. Though his past was checkered, Clements hadn’t set the fire and he told as much to the attorney who came to oversee his confession. After the lawyer left the room, the officers returned and beat Clements again. They grabbed his testicles and squeezed until Clements once again agreed to confess. This time around he signed his name to it.

RELATED STORY: How Torture Ended Up Being Used in a Chicago "Black Site"

While it might sound like a story from Homan Square, Chicago’s police “black site” recently unearthed by The Guardian, Clement’s arrest took place over 30 years ago. On June 25, 1981, he joined the ranks of more than 100 black men and women who were tortured by police commander Jon Burge or his “midnight crew” of detectives on Chicago’s South Side from 1972-1991. Though the Homan Square reveal shocked the country, many local activists were unsurprised to hear that Chicago’s old police torture tactics had found a new home.

Based mostly on his coerced confession, Clements became the youngest person in the history of Illinois to get a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He spent nearly three decades in prison. Only a month before his arrest, Clements had become the father to a baby girl. The next time he greeted her in public, she was 28 years old. It was the day she picked him up from prison in 2009.

I first saw Clements on a rainy December morning at a protest in front of the Chicago Police Department Headquarters.

Now 50 years old, Clements is a civil rights activist who works to free those wrongfully convicted (he earned both his GED and his Bachelor’s Degree in prison). He’s congenial, with the air of a showman. When I arrived he was strolling up to strangers to introduce himself.

Called the “Holiday Action To Pass Reparations For Chicago Torture Survivors,” the protest began with a five-mile march from the Police HQ to the Mayor’s Office in City Hall, where we would deliver the signatures of 45,000 supporters.

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Yet Another Innocent Man Is Freed After Spending 29 Years In Prison — Police Pressured A Confession From A 16-Year-Old With No Lawyer (Video)

Tragically, Willie Stuckey, who was wrongly convicted along with David McCallum, died in prison.

David McCallum responds to news of his freedom.

Mentally Disabled Brothers Who Spent 30 Years In Jail For Murder Were Falsely Convicted — DNA Tests Set Them Free

Henry Lee McCollum (left) and Leon Brown.

By Jonathan M. Katz, Erik Eckholm
Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and released Tuesday by a Robeson County court.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man with a history of rape and murder.

The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, now 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential for false, coerced confessions and also of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a superior court judge, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and ordering their release.

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