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- [00:01]
James Gibson
I go to the side of the house, to the door. Who is it? Open the door. Then I come to the front. I'm like, man, open the door. Like, who it? I'm like, it's me. Who is me?
- [00:11]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
It's the night before New Year's Eve, Dec. 30, 1989, south side of Chicago. James Gibson stands in the freezing cold in the alley next to his mom's house and bangs on the door. He's 23, home from college for the holidays, but clearly something's wrong. He's been beaten up, and he's in pain.
- [00:33]
James Gibson
They finally opened up the door. I stumbled in the house. My sister went to hug me, and I collapsed. I know I was kicked in the chest, but I didn't know my rib had been cracked. And my sister said, what's wrong with you? And I'm like, man, they been in there doing something to me.
- [00:51]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
They were police officers, detectives in the Chicago Police Department. They say they'd picked James up because they told him they believed he had something to do with a double homicide. He remembered being cuffed to a chair, slapped, punched, kicked. He'd blacked out at least once. And then, for reasons he doesn't fully understand at the time, they let him go. They put him in the back of a police sedan and dropped him off in the alleyway next to his mom's house, bruised, aching, confused. Now he's standing in his mom's living room. His family's all around him.
- [01:28]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
My kids running down the stairs. They hugging him, and he's, like, cringing. I knew something was wrong with him.
- [01:34]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
James, big sister Lorraine remembers that day clearly.
- [01:37]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
My mother was over him like a wet towel. You all right? What happened to your face? You know, she just going on and on and on. He said, they beat me. They beat you?
- [01:49]
James Gibson
And then my mom was pale out, and she started hollering and screaming, and they. Oh, they done beat him. And they started taking my clothes off, and they got. Oh, my God. They started crying.
- [01:59]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
I said, you can't beat nobody when you arrest them. I said, that's against the law.
- [02:07]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
What James Gibson didn't know at the time was that what happened at the police station would completely change the course of his life. He would end up wrongfully convicted of that double murder. He would spend nearly 30 years in prison. Today, to people in the US, the image of a black man being beaten by the cops, You've seen that before. It's almost too familiar at this point, which means it would be easy to write off James story as just another personal injustice. But this is different. On Chicago's south side, there was a group of police officers who came to be known as as the Midnight Crew, who used torture regularly to get confessions for decades. And by torture, I mean they beat suspects, shackled them to chairs for days with no food or bathroom access. They electrocuted suspects with homemade devices, burned them on radiators. They suffocated suspects with plastic bags, made them play Russian roulette. And it's all documented in a series of reports and lawsuits dating back to the 80s. And there was one man at the center of it. Chicago Police Commander John Burge accused of lying.
- [03:16]
James Gibson
Police Commander John Burge. John Burge. John Burge and other officers may be settled.
- [03:21]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
A police commander named John Burch Burge was at the center of a pattern and practice of police torture that resulted in at least 130 documented victims. Many have spent years, some decades in prison for crimes they were later cleared of.
- [03:38]
Audie Cornish
He served 23 years before he was granted clemency. 15 years in prison.
- [03:43]
James Gibson
A quarter of a century to four.
- [03:45]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
Men who spent a combined 73 years in prison.
- [03:48]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Chicago taxpayers have paid nearly $120 million to the victims of John Burge and the Midnight Crew trying to make up for what can really never be recovered. A $5.5 million fund for reparations, $14 million to settle $100 million to exonerated former prisoners. And the tab is still running today. The City Council finance committee approved two new settlements. I'm Omar Jimenez. I've known about this story for a long time. All my journalism career before it, really back to when I was a student in Chicago. There are still people today untangling themselves from the disaster this era created. Arguably one of the darkest chapters in American policing history. We're going to lay out that history and we're going to ask what should justice look like when it's been twisted by coercion, abuse, torture? Is that something you can fix? From CNN Presents this is torture Justice.
- [04:59]
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- [05:27]
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- [06:28]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
James Gibson's story starts in Chicago in the late 60s.
- [06:32]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
James was hyper.
- [06:34]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Lorraine Brown is 10 years older than her little brother James.
- [06:37]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
He liked to play, he liked to go out, he liked to adventure, he liked to do kids stuff. He would just run around and have fun.
- [06:45]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
She was his protector from the beginning, a second mom.
- [06:48]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
And I always been there for him because my mom, she was going to put him up for adoption. And when the people came, I told her that she changed her mind. He wasn't going nowhere. So I kind of made my mom keep James because he became my child, not hers.
- [07:03]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
In so many ways, that story is essentially family lore that Lorraine and James joke about now, but the fact was that Clara, their mom, was the heart of the family. James's dad was around, but he and Clara weren't in a relationship and she'd been deaf since her childhood, which, as you can imagine, complicated a lot.
- [07:23]
James Gibson
At that time. They didn't have a prognosis, a diagnosis from it. They had labeled my mother mentally retarded. She built her own home from the ground and she tried to do everything she possibly could with the cost that was dealt to her. She made sure that all her kids went to school and high school and graduated out of high school and went off to college.
- [07:42]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Clara worried about her kids getting caught up in the drugs and gangs that were everywhere in the neighborhood. The Chicago James was born into was pretty much at war with itself. And the history is important here. It's the backdrop to everything that happens later. So we're going to get into it a little. Chicago was one of the most segregated cities in the country around this time, still is actually. In the 50s and 60s, urban renewal efforts and redlining essentially trapped black and other minority residents in tightly defined neighborhoods and, and public housing, high rises that then started seeing less investment. And then in the 60s, it seemed like every summer, tensions with the cops policing mostly black and brown neighborhoods boiled over on the west side of Chicago.
- [08:30]
James Gibson
In 96 degree temperatures at 5 o' clock last Tuesday afternoon. Chicago's slum kids wanted some relief from the heat.
- [08:37]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Like in July of 1966 when black kids opening fire hydrants on the west side clashed with police.
- [08:43]
James Gibson
Rocks were thrown at police. And then the real trouble began.
- [08:48]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
It escalated into looting and shootouts. More riots followed again in 1966 after a March for open housing went through an all white neighborhood. There was as much gunfire on the.
- [09:02]
James Gibson
Corner of Wood and Lake last night as a Vietnam battlefield.
- [09:07]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
And in 1968, after Martin Luther King Jr. Was assassinated. And then came 1969.
- [09:16]
James Gibson
Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We're going to have to struggle.
- [09:23]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Fred Hampton was 21 years old and a leader in the Illinois Black Panther party when he was shot to death by police in his bed in his Chicago apartment. During the pre dawn raid, Officers fired almost 100 shots. Two were fired point blank into Fred Hampton's head. They claimed it had been a shootout. Some now refer to it as. As a shoot in. It took decades to learn that Hampton and the Panthers had been the target of a covert FBI operation and that the feds and the Chicago police had orchestrated the whole thing. But for black Chicago, the bloody raid spoke for itself. We are dedicated that all our sorrow will be turned into action. People in Chicago's black neighborhoods often saw the police as violent, volatile and dangerous to be mistrusted and avoided. And law enforcement often treated the people as violent, volatile and dangerous in need of a heavy hand, all in pursuit of safety in their minds. And that was James Gibson, Chicago. He grew up in Inglewood on the south side. Even when he was coming up in the 70s, his neighborhood was still an at times chaotic, violent place. Competing gangs sold heroin and cocaine. The murder rate in the city spiked in the 70s.
- [10:53]
James Gibson
We feared everybody, you know what I'm saying? That's why gangs was formed, because we couldn't go across 55th Street.
- [10:59]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
55Th street, just a couple blocks from the house where James grew up. It had become a dangerous border dividing Inglewood and the majority white neighborhood to the north.
- [11:09]
James Gibson
They used to hang up dummies with knives in their backs telling black people to go back across 55th Street. You know what I'M saying then we had the police, which we thought was supposed to protect us. They were terrorizing us.
- [11:21]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Police violence, gang violence, racist violence. It was a lot for young people to deal with. As James sister Lorraine put it, stay.
- [11:31]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
In the house, do what you got to do, go to work, go to school, whatever you got to do, and come back home.
- [11:39]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Into all of this walked a man named John Burch. He joined the Force in 1970, just 22 years old, fresh off a tour as a military police officer in Vietnam.
- [11:51]
John Conroy (Chicago journalist)
You know, new recruits were investigated, and so this detective was assigned with, you know, investigating with John Birch.
- [11:58]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
John Conroy is a longtime Chicago journalist. His coverage of John Burge and the Midnight Crew for the Chicago Reader. Pretty legendary. A lot of what we know about Burge comes from his reporting.
- [12:10]
John Conroy (Chicago journalist)
And he said John Burge would be a pleasure to deal with as a member of the public. He's polite, I imagine he can be firm. And it may seem like I've gone overboard in my description of this young.
- [12:25]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Men, but he is all man, however he was described. Burge had grown up on the south side, not far from James Gibson, just a little more than two decades before. But the Chicago neighborhood he came home to as a vet had changed during his years in the Army. All those riots of the late 60s, they'd happened while he was overseas. The streets looked different, felt different.
- [12:52]
John Conroy (Chicago journalist)
He just seemed like the kind of guy who, you know, he'd be at my family's fourth of July picnic and my elderly aunt wouldn't be able to start her car. He'd be the first guy out there trying to get the car started. That was the kind of guy he struck me as. And yet the other side was there, too.
- [13:13]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
The other side. That's what left its mark on Chicago. Byrd shot up the ranks in the years after he joined the police department. And soon he had a small group of trusted detectives who worked under him. That group came to be called the Midnight Crew because of their night shift hours. And it seemed like Burge gave those detectives wide leeway. Do what you need to do, close cases. And they sent a lot of people to jail. Whether it was legal or not, ethical or not, in many cases, Burge and his officers did it by torturing people into confessions. Many of them turned out to be false. None of this was on James Gibson's radar. In December of 1989, he was halfway through his sophomore year at Wiley University, a historically black Methodist college in Marshall, Texas, and. And on the train ride home to Chicago, he was thinking about his Mom's Christmas dinner spread. And about his girlfriend.
- [14:22]
James Gibson
I'm coming back for the holidays, I'm finna eat some of my mama good cooking, banana pudding and peace carvings. And that's all that was. I'm going to see my girl, I'm going to see my family. And that was it. I'm a rock star, you know what I'm saying? I graduated high school, I'm in college, I done left the hood, I'm coming back. Which was supposed to been a couple of days, you know what I mean? And it took 30 years.
- [14:47]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
30 years which starts three days before Christmas 1989. The crime that changed the course of James life happened not far from his mom's house. Someone shot and killed two men at a garage on the south side of Chicago. 56 year old Hunter Wash, who was black, and 61 year old Lloyd Benjamin who was white. It was a broad daylight double murder. Wash, nicknamed Smiley by the neighborhood, was a mechanic and Benjamin was his insurance agent. Police thought it was an attempted robbery even though the cash that Benjamin was carrying was found on his body. James meanwhile said he'd been running an errand on the other side of the neighborhood when the men got shot picking up a car battery charger he'd loaned out.
- [15:32]
James Gibson
I come back with the battery charger and I gone back in the house. A couple hours later I come back out. The dope boys was saying, man, white boy got hit on the corner.
- [15:45]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Police would later say James name had come up in the streets as being involved in the shooting. He did have a record as a small time dealer.
- [15:53]
James Gibson
The police called me and I was like, man, I don't know nothing about all that shit. I just got in town and I don't know nothing about what they doing on the block.
- [16:01]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Less than a week later on December 27, police said they got another tip. A call on their anonymous tip line saying James was the shooter. That same day police came and picked him up. What happened next has been investigated, litigated, told and retold for 35 years. After police picked him up two days after Christmas, they cuffed him to a chair at the station and left him there for a day.
- [16:37]
James Gibson
I asked him, I'm like, what happened? You know what I'm saying? Somebody lose something or something? How much money do you need? I was talking real crazy on December.
- [16:46]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
28, 24 hours later, James says he was still cuffed to a chair. He hadn't eaten or been allowed to use the bathroom. He had to pee on the floor. Police kept making him stand in lineups alongside some other guys they'd brought in. James says the police had each man in the lineup shout something a witness had heard at the crime scene.
- [17:06]
James Gibson
They made me say, what's up, motherfucker? Now? And then I. And I kept saying, what's up, motherfucker? Now they're like, no, say it like you mean it, motherfucker. Then one of them came, smacked me across the head like, motherfucker. I said, say it like you mean it. What's up, motherfucker? And then they took me back to the room.
- [17:24]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Then, he says, the beatings started. Two detectives at first, then four. They slapped him, called him the n word, told him they were through playing with him. And they started laying out narratives. In one, James was the shooter.
- [17:43]
James Gibson
One of them, they said, oh, don't look too good on you, boy. Don't look too good for the home team, boy. We got you picked out in the lineup.
- [17:52]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
They were throwing a lot at him. Names, scenarios. At one point, James says they told him somebody else. A guy James grew up with named Keith Smith, had told them James killed the mechanic and the insurance man while trying to rob them. Then they floated another theory. James murdered the men with a neighborhood drug addict named Fernando Webb, who went by the name Bodine. James told him none of that was true.
- [18:17]
James Gibson
He said that you and Bodine did it. I said, well, maybe him and Bodine did it. He said, well, me and you and did what? Maybe you and him did. I said, well, shit. He said, I did it. Maybe you and him did it.
- [18:25]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
The detectives kicked him in the chest, punched him in the side, the stomach, the groin. They beat him with their fists and feet, demanding he make a statement, backing up their story.
- [18:37]
James Gibson
I wasn't no kid. I graduated high school and college. I'm off. I don't care how much y' all beat up on me on this. I ain't kill nobody. I ain't sign that shit. I don't care what you say.
- [18:49]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Another night went by with him cuffed to a chair. Still no food, no water, no bathroom. The next day, day three, they kept beating him with blows to the back of his head and neck and slaps to his face. They pushed him again and again to tell them something very specific, that he had been there at the scene of the crime. Now, in other rooms in the same station, police were interrogating Keith Smith at the same time and subjecting him to the same treatment. They questioned Fernando Webb, too. They were trying to get each of the three men to point the finger at the Others. And Keith Smith, who was also getting punched and kicked, signed a statement placing Gibson at the scene. A statement he later said he didn't write or review and only signed because he was tired of getting beaten up and was told he could go home if he signed. I spoke to Keith Smith for this story. He said at the time of the murder, he was sleeping at home. I also tried to track down Fernando Webb, and based on what we believe is a close family member, he appears to have died decades ago. So we don't have his side of this story. But in the room where James was being interrogated, he says something weird happened. One of the detectives ran in, obviously worked up about something, and started whispering to the assistant state's attorney who had come to take James statement.
- [20:17]
James Gibson
All the time they don't know I'm reading lips and shit. Cause my mama deaf and I'm listening. Reading they lips. He tell state's attorney, brawl, man, this nigga got the military downstairs.
- [20:30]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
It was James sister Lorraine. She and her husband were both army. They were home in Chicago for just five days over Christmas. And she was getting ready to ship back out to Germany when she got a call from her mom about what happened.
- [20:44]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
So me and Steve, we dressed in sweatsuits with army down the leg. We go over there to the district office where he was at, and we come to find out what's going on with my brother. He comes out and he says that we're gonna let James go, let his mother know that he's gonna be released. So I leave.
- [21:05]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
James says the news that he had military family looking for him seemed to have an immediate effect.
- [21:11]
James Gibson
They grabbed me up and ran me literally down the back steps and throw me in the backseat of a Slick Boy car they used to call him back then, Slick Boy. They stole me in the back of the car and drove off like crazy. And I'm in the backseat rolling around this shit. I'm in pain. And I didn't even know my rib was broken. All this stuff was hurting. I had so much going on. Knots and shit all over my body.
- [21:33]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
That's when the police car dropped James Gibson off next to his mom's house. It was dark out.
- [21:38]
James Gibson
I like you motherfuckers, man. Y' all had me in there since yesterday all the time, man. They done had me in there four days.
- [21:47]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
James didn't realize how long he'd been gone. The torture lasted almost 98 hours. Maybe you don't think that torture is something that happens here in the US Maybe you imagine it as something that happens in authoritarian regimes and other times in other countries. But James Gibson was tortured. He was beaten, denied food and water and sleep and a bathroom for four days. Days in an attempt to get him to confess to something he says he didn't do. Torture happened here in Chicago. We're going to take a short break. We'll be right back.
- [22:41]
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- [23:12]
Audie Cornish
This week on the Assignment with me, Audie Cornish. These new online accents are shaped by algorithms. Like linguists are finding that we're using that weird AI vocabulary everywhere. Our language model just keeps iterating, prompting new output. So everything's getting optimized into one big collab. And even worse, the out of context generational slang, as in low key. We're just vibing and talking like actual memes out loud now. Internet Culture 1 no, Cap, we're talking about why this is happening with a linguist, a language detective. Listen to the assignment with me, Audie Cornish. Streaming now on your favorite podcast app.
- [23:56]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Lorraine was there when James came walking into his mom's living room after being held at the station. And she was shocked at what she saw. Her brother was clearly injured.
- [24:05]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
I'm getting ready to call the police department. I need to find out who I need to call call to get a get put in a complaint because this ain't right.
- [24:13]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Now. Lorraine was military. She told us her mind went straight to the Geneva Conventions, of all things. She knew what had happened to James wasn't allowed, not in Chicago, not anywhere, not even in a war zone. So she got on the phone and stayed on the phone until she got through to the Chicago PD's Office of Professional Standards Ops. But James couldn't believe she was calling the police on the police.
- [24:42]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
He was a little scared of that. Like, why you calling him? They just beat me up. I didn't know. I didn't know anything else to say. I didn't, you know, you not supposed to beat nobody. I called him and put in a complaint for my baby brother. Why y' all beat him up? I didn't understand that. I really didn't understand that.
- [25:02]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
What was on your mind when you said, I gotta call them. And what did you think was gonna happen?
- [25:09]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
That somebody would look into it. I just knew that somebody that cares. Somewhere, some way, I knew something told me that somebody was gonna look into it. Somebody was gonna look into it.
- [25:24]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
She wasn't wrong, exactly. But it took longer than any of them ever imagined. Because a day after police dropped James Gibson near his mom's house, officers showed up again. Now, we don't know for sure what changed since the day before, but this time, police came to arrest James for first degree murder.
- [25:49]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
They took him. I was in shock. Everybody was just standing there looking crazy. I know I was. And Steve was like, man, they just took your brother away.
- [26:04]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
It was December 31, 1989. It would be almost 30 years before James Gibson would be free again. For the first 10 months, James was held in the county jail trying to figure out what just happened, what was happening to him. There was no way he thought that the story he said police manufactured was gonna convict him.
- [26:37]
James Gibson
I said, man, that shit ain't gonna hold up in court. I ain't did nothing like, man, see, when y' all get through talking, they gotta let me go.
- [26:46]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
But he was getting the sense that the whole system was stacking the deck against him card by card. Everybody from the police to his own public defender. It seemed in his mind, they had already decided he was guilty. First there was the situation with his injuries. James says that when he first appeared before a judge, not long after, police came back to his house and arrested him after those days he spent cuffed to a chair, being beaten, that judge ordered him sent to the hospital to be treated and have photos taken of his injuries. I've seen the photos. They're dated January 2, 1990, with the description written as right chest swollen and left chest swollen. But James says the photos didn't make it into his case file.
- [27:32]
James Gibson
When I stopped having a dialogue with my attorney and he started playing like he didn't know what I was talking about. Like I was crazy. I said, the fix is in.
- [27:40]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
In October of 1990, ten months after he was arrested, James Gibson went before a judge in a bench trial, no jury. He says his attorney pushed him to take that route because there was no telling what kind of a jury he'd get. And James agreed to it because he was still sure that the lack of evidence against him made it impossible for prosecutors to make a convincing case.
- [28:05]
James Gibson
He said, you go in front of a jury trial with a white man murder and You African American, gang banging and all that shit, man, they gonna nail your ass. So I figured that I'd take the bench trial when that's where I up at.
- [28:18]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
He told me when I spoke to him this summer that if he could tell this past version of himself anything at this point, it would be to take a jury trial. But he didn't. The trial took just two days. He was found guilty largely on testimony from police who said he'd confessed under interrogation to being at the scene. James public defender never brought up the fact that James had been tortured at the police station. He was sentenced to life in prison.
- [28:54]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
When they sentenced James, they said he was guilty. I was there.
- [28:59]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Lorraine Brown had to go back to her overseas army job right after James was arrested. But she managed to get back to the States for his trial.
- [29:07]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
I was on bended knees a lot. I was in my room praying. I was in the shower praying. I was. I prayed every day. Every day.
- [29:24]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
She said when James got life, their sister almost fainted in court.
- [29:29]
Lorraine Brown (James Gibson's sister)
My sister was really afraid. She said, he's not gonna make it in jail. He's not gonna make it in jail. I was like, he gonna make it. I'm gonna do a lot of praying. He gonna make it. He gonna make it. He gonna make it. Cause this ain't right.
- [29:45]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Lorraine and Clara, her and James mom were sure about that, that it wasn't right what had happened to James, and that it might take time, but justice was eventually going to catch up with him. And here's the thing. James Gibson wanted me to know about his case.
- [30:07]
James Gibson
I never confessed to no murders or participating or seeing any murders.
- [30:14]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
James says he wasn't beaten into a confession because he never signed anything saying he was involved in the murders. Now, to be clear, the official record says that James gave a statement that he saw another guy from the neighborhood, Keith Smith, give a pistol to known drug addict Fernando Webb, AKA Bodine. And that reported statement put James at the scene of the crime. But James says when the detectives tried to get him to sign a statement, he refused because it wasn't true. The case against James relied almost entirely on the testimony of police who said James told them he was at the scene.
- [30:56]
James Gibson
If you said, I did sign a statement and show me the statement up under the proper chain of evidence, that I signed it and you said, I put my initial on it, showed me the initials where I put my initial on it, and you said, I said this and show it to me. How do you fight a case that don't exist? How do you Fight a case that don't exist.
- [31:16]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
He says the entire theory of who killed the two neighborhood men in 1989 was a Web of lies. But it convinced the judge what happened to James Gibson was more than violence at the hands of police. It didn't start with him being cuffed to a chair. It didn't end with him going to prison. It was, as civil and criminal trials have found, part of this system, a system in which police and the city that employed them, supported them and defended them, cleared cases with, as we've learned, not a lot of regard for truth and justice and less regard for human beings.
- [32:00]
Dr. Lawrence Ralph (Princeton professor)
It's very hard to talk about torture because on the one hand, if you listen to a torture survivor say what happened to them, it quickly becomes very hard to grapple with that pain emotionally, psychologically. But then, on the other hand, if you sanitize, almost takes away the purpose of talking about it.
- [32:28]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
That's Dr. Lawrence Ralph. He's an anthropologist and a professor at Princeton, where he studies and lectures on policing. He wrote a book about John Burge and the Midnight Crew called the Torture Letters. Now, I talked to him because we need to understand what torture actually is, because we're going to be talking about it a lot, and the way we talk about it matters. He says a good place to start is the United nations definition.
- [32:53]
Dr. Lawrence Ralph (Princeton professor)
It's pain inflicting pain, either physical or psychological, but it's with a purpose, to coerce, extract, punish people, or intimidate them. And people within a certain hierarchy of power are usually in the position to do that.
- [33:12]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Now, look, it might seem obvious to point out that torture is wrong. There are good reasons it's illegal. It's right there in the eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Cruel and unusual punishments shall not be inflicted.
- [33:26]
Dr. Lawrence Ralph (Princeton professor)
We've normalized torture a lot. I see it in cartoons, I see it in TV shows. We often give it euphemisms like, oh, it's just brutality or police violence. But no, it's torture, you know, definitionally. And that brings us to questions about law and justice. Because this violence, it's purposeful, but it's also in violation of what we know in terms of the law as due process. Innocent until proven guilty. Torture flies in the face of that.
- [34:06]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
Torture, used to force confessions to manufacture a solve for a crime, perverts justice. Innocent people end up jailed, which means the guilty go free. And as we'll come to see, convictions built on torture, even ones that might have been won by other means, can be overturned. But James would wait a long time. He was staring down a life sentence for a crime he would never stop insisting he didn't commit. The years stretched out ahead of him. He was alone.
- [34:48]
James Gibson
I ain't had nobody to talk to on the phone. I couldn't call my mama cause she couldn't help. I couldn't call my daddy cause I didn't know where he was at. My grandfather was dead. My great grandmama was 100 something years old. She couldn't help me Couldn't nobody help me. I can scream, holler. It's just what it.
- [35:12]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
What James didn't know is he wasn't alone. Because by the 1990s, there were already dozens and dozens of Chicago men who had been tortured by Burgess detectives, forced to confess and caught up in manipulated or manufactured narratives designed to put people away and close the cases. James had no idea, but one of those men had dragged the police department into court over his own torture. A lot of people wanted the story to stay buried, but it was about to break wide open.
- [35:51]
John Conroy (Chicago journalist)
The torture machine was a box that had a generator in it. And they attached wires to the generator in this box. And they had clips, alligator clips on the wire. How do you. How do you deal with violence? One of the ways is violence has to mean violence. These anonymous letters came in Chicago Police Department envelopes and there were four of them.
- [36:21]
James Gibson
She told me I was coming home and I believe that. And I put every effort in tan they ass up. I didn't miss a beat. She and I'm still mad too.
- [36:36]
Narrator / Reporter (possibly Omar Jimenez)
That's in the next episode.
- [36:44]
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- [37:15]
John Conroy (Chicago journalist)
News fatigue. Have I got News for you Is the cure and also the disease. CNN's Comedy Quiz show is back, making sense of the mayhem and definitely adding to it. Have I got news for you. Saturday at 9 on CNN.