Why can’t they admit they were wrong?
Conroy has written a meticulous chronicle of the evidence of police torture–a trickle at first but eventually a mountain–to which the state’s attorney’s office has never responded. But he’s not first to point this out. Back in 1989 Warden was editing Chicago Lawyer, then a muckraking monthly newspaper. That March, “Torture in Chicago,” a front-page story by Mary Ann Williams, asserted, “Authorities empowered to investigate such [torture] charges–the state’s attorney of Cook County, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, and the Chicago Police Department’s internal investigative unit–have known about the evidence for years but have done nothing.”
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The previous month Warden had written a column on the same subject for Crain’s Chicago Business. Richard M. Daley was the state’s attorney then, and Warden let him have it. “A professional state’s attorney would have realized not only that it was his sworn duty to prosecute police torturers but also that tacitly condoning torture by failing to prosecute was likely to be counterproductive….Daley’s failure [to step in] brings into question his ability to responsibly manage any public office.”
But O’Malley would never take Warden’s point about Jim Ryan. “Jack shook his head and said, ‘I know Jim Ryan. I can’t believe that.’ The same thing’s true of all of us in the newspaper business. We know people who have done things, and we know they’re not bad people. We socialize with them. It’s very hard to overcome where you come from and what you did. Jack was a former police officer. His experiences with other police officers were largely positive. He knew them to be by and large scrupulous people who wanted to do the right thing.”
“People like Rich Daley, Jack O’Malley, Cecil Partee are fundamentally good people who want to do the right thing, and they are simply blind to the facts and able to deceive themselves. And Dick Devine–I’d throw him in. I know Dick personally. There’s no question he’s a good man. When he questions [police torture] he’s not being disingenuous. He literally does not believe it in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
She feels this strongly because, as a reporter trying to champion the accused, she’s felt just as invasive. “I have to know everything about this defendant,” she says, “and I become evil myself knowing everything that I’d never want anyone to know about me. It’s awful. I can remember the times I’ve wept, I’ve felt so ashamed of myself. I feel like a priest in a confessional, but this person didn’t come to me willingly to tell me these things.” The person was desperate and had no choice. “I’ve always felt this was a very sick relationship,” she says. “They write letters about how they love you. How could they have lived if you hadn’t come into their life? And as soon as they get out they turn on you. Because the whole thing was so sick. That’s very healthy, really.”
My friend who’s familiar with the state’s attorney’s office points to the “fly in the ointment” of Warden’s argument. “A lot of these people are guilty,” he says, meaning the prisoners alleging abuse. And that matters. “If they’re innocent, torture is terrible. If they’re guilty and tortured, it’s still bad. But they’re guilty.”
