By Michael Miner
Main needed to avoid sounding naive about this background, and I don’t think he succeeded. He wrote, “Dignan said he continues to consider Burge a friend, saying he was subjected to a ‘kangaroo court’ by the Police Board that recommended his dismissal.” Burge was hardly railroaded. A series of lawyers for cop killer Andrew Wilson, who claimed he’d been tortured at Burge’s hands, fought an uphill battle for 11 years until 1993, when the city finally threw Burge off the force. The city has since acknowledged the torture.
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Last month prosecutors made a deal with Cannon. He dropped his torture claim, and in return his life sentence for murder was reduced to 40 years for armed violence and conspiracy to commit murder; he now faces less than three more years of imprisonment. But the deal ended his hearing before his lawyers could cross-examine Dignan and his former Area Two colleague, John Byrne.
The notion that Devine made the deal to keep the truth buried is one I wish Dignan had been urged to confront. As Conroy observes in this issue of the Reader, “The state doesn’t make deals like that unless it doesn’t trust its witnesses and evidence.” Instead, Dignan was allowed to say simply that he opposed the deal, since he’d hoped to testify against Cannon at the hearing and he believed Cannon should never hit the streets again.
“I decided after looking at the Reader stories and looking at the Tribune and Sun-Times stories that this guy had not been interviewed thoroughly by anyone in the city,” explains Main. “I did go into some detail about the allegations against him, and because of space considerations and because I wanted Cannon’s version and I didn’t have endless inches of copy, I didn’t get into as much fine detail as I could have.”
There are champions of Chicago school reform who’ve never quite trusted Paul Vallas since he took over the public schools in 1995. They doubt his commitment to the structure of local school councils he inherited, and when they read the February 16 Sun-Times some believed he’d finally said what he thought.
Because the Tribune was the first to get back to De Zutter, that’s where his letter appeared. But it didn’t show up exactly as he’d written it. As published last Thursday, it said Vallas “was reported to have said, ‘This whole concept of having 600 schools doing 600 different things, the whole premise of the first school reform movement in 1987–what we are learning is that the probationary schools, the schools where we intervene and go in and dictate models, are the ones making the most significant gains.’”
