Top state court gives convicted rapist hearing on Burge torture claim
BY ANDREW MALONEY Sun-Times Springfield Bureau amaloney@suntimes.com February 2, 2012 10:18AM
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Updated: February 3, 2012 2:18AM
SPRINGFIELD — A man who claimed he was tortured by officers working for former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge into giving a false confession to a 1982 rape will get another chance to prove his innocence after nearly 30 years behind bars. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Stanley Wrice, who was sentenced to 100 years in prison in connection with the 1982 gang rape, should get a new hearing because the use of physical coercion to extract a confession “is an egregious violation” of the justice system and “is never harmless error.” The state’s high court cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have found the use of a coerced confession “aborts the basic trial process and renders a trial fundamentally unfair.” The court ruled that Wrice should be appointed legal counsel and allowed his post-conviction case to proceed, over prosecutors’ objections. Prosecutors had argued that even if Wrice was physically coerced into confession, it was a harmless error because there was enough evidence to convict him even without the confession. But the Supreme Court said “the state advances no other argument” why Wrice shouldn’t get the new hearing he was seeking. “This is a big step toward justice for Stanley Wrice and for the other men who were tortured by Jon Burge and his men,” said David Protess, head of the Chicago Innocence Project, who’s been an advocate for Wrice’s freedom. “It’s a powerful precedent because the court has ruled that torture is never acceptable.” The decision potentially could lead to freedom for 14 other prison inmates who claim to have been victims of the “Midnight Crew” — officers who, working under Burge’s command, allegedly beat, suffocated and electrocuted crime suspects to get them to confess. Burge was never charged with torture, and a special prosecutor who was appointed years later to investigate torture claims found that the statute of limitations had passed for filing any charges. But Burge was convicted in federal court in 2010 of lying under oath in a civil case about the torture tactics he and his subordinates were accused of using during the 1970s and 1980s. He began serving a 4 1/2-year prison sentence in January 2011. Witnesses initially put Wrice at the scene of the gang rape in which a hot clothing iron had been used to burn 70 percent of the victim’s body. But the lone remaining eyewitness and Wrice’s two codefendants recanted their testimony, saying they were also beaten and threatened by Burge and his officers. Special prosecutor Myles O’Rourke argued before the Supreme Court in November that, although there was no DNA evidence to implicate Wrice, the physical evidence and witness accounts had been enough for an appellate court jury to have upheld his conviction.
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