Time for Daley to talk about brutality

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Updated: November 9, 2011 11:19AM

Michael Tillman becomes emotional easily.

Who can blame him?

He’s 45 years old now, but in his mind, he’s like a newborn.

“I’m still adjusting. Everything is new to me,” Tillman said as he sat in the law office of G. Flint Taylor. It’s the same space in which Taylor had hoped to depose former mayor Richard M. Daley on Thursday. But that won’t happen now.

Daley, through his city-paid attorneys, sent Taylor a letter saying “no.” Under no circumstances will he sit for questioning by lawyers representing men who claim to have been tortured by Chicago Police.

Earlier this summer, Federal Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer delivered a bombshell. The former mayor, she ruled, could be added as a defendant in a civil case brought by Tillman that argues the City of Chicago for years covered up cases of torture under the command of then-police Lt. Jon Burge and his Midnight Crew.

That ruling opened the door for the Daley deposition — until his city-paid attorneys slammed the door shut.

“Yes, I’m disappointed,” Taylor said, “but good things come to he or she who waits.”

Tillman waited almost 24 years to be released from prison for a 1986 murder he did not commit.

He was working maintenance in the South Shore building where he lived when Betty Howard was killed.

Tillman said his nightmare began when he voluntarily went to Area 2 Police headquarters for questioning.

“I was hit with the fist, the phone book, I had a plastic bag placed over my head repeatedly,” Tillman recalled. “I had a gun put to my head while I was on my knees. I had a 7-Up poured down my nose. I was hit in the leg with a flashlight. I felt like a slave, tied to a tree, that couldn’t do nothing ’cause I was always bound.”

More than 100 men claim they were tortured, dating back to the 1970s. Today, Jon Burge sits in a federal prison, convicted just last year of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Prison uniforms are color-blind. But all those tortured and locked up were black. The officers, with one exception, all white.

Why does the city keep paying huge legal fees to fight these cases?

As I wrote a month ago, U.S. District Court Judge Elaine Bucklo, in a separate case, took notice of all the high-priced lawyers representing an array of ex-cops and city officials and bluntly stated, “I don’t understand . . . why you don’t settle . . . [the defendant] was declared innocent. Burge is in jail. Have you tried to settle this?”

Just after the news broke that Daley was going to be deposed for the first time in any of these lawsuits, the Rahm Emanuel administration hinted that settlements might be in the offing.

Beyond the $43 million the city already has spent on legal fees and settlements, the Burge era remains an open wound in the African-American community.

And if justice delayed is justice denied, then Michael Tillman is still being denied a full recognition of his innocence.

Even the man who convicted him in a bench trial in 1986, Judge Kenneth Gillis, admits to second thoughts. Knowing now what he did not know then about Tillman’s torture, Judge Gillis stated in a June deposition, “I’m ashamed I convicted him.”

It’s time, at long last, for Daley’s deposition.