The prosecutors' report fails to even mention the obvious racial component of the torture scandal-the police torturers were white and almost all the victims were African American. And shamefully, Egan and Boyle use seventy-eight pages of their report to undermine the credibility of Madison Hobley, Leroy Orange, Stanley Howard, and Aaron Patterson-four men former Governor George Ryan pardoned on the basis of innocence after they had endured torture and spent years on death row. The end result of these pages is to make it more difficult for these men to collect millions of dollars in civil suits against the city for their years of wrongful incarceration. The insidious message is-they may have been tortured, but they were guilty anyway.

While the report is not overly concerned with the rights of torture victims, it takes great pains to make sure that torturers on the police force receive every legal protection possible. “Regrettably, we have concluded that the statute of limitations would bar any prosecution of any offenses our investigation has disclosed,” they said upon release of the report.

When Egan and Boyle were appointed in 2002, it was widely understood that the three-year statute of limitations on abuse had expired. However, the petitioners won appointment of the special prosecutor on the theory that there was an ongoing conspiracy to cover up the torture, and that this cover-up was a prosecutable offense. Boyle and Egan concluded that there is no evidence that “would support a charge beyond a reasonable doubt of obstruction of justice.”

But as Leonard Cavise, a professor of law at DePaul University notes, “The statute of limitations is a very flexible doctrine.” He goes on to explain that under a theory called “equitable estoppel,” “if the defendant does something to prevent prosecution, then it's the right thing to do to stop the statute from running and extend it until the misconduct of the defendant (e.g., fraudulently concealing his wrongdoing) stops.” Even the special prosecutors admit, “all police officers refused to talk to us.” Yet they somehow conclude that this does not constitute a cover-up “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

This phrase-“reasonable doubt”-evokes the timidity with which Egan and Boyle pursued the perpetrators of torture. Under the law, juries are supposed to have proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” to convict. Prosecutors do not need such a high standard of proof to charge a defendant. The reluctance of Egan and Boyle to prosecute police officers stands in sharp contrast to the zealousness with which prosecutors often pursued the victims of torture.

Madison Hobley, for example, was sentenced to death in 1990 after enduring interrogations by police officers Robert Dwyer, James Lotito, and Daniel McWeeny, who Madison says beat him and suffocated him with a plastic typewriter cover. He was convicted for an arson that killed his wife and child. Their star witness, Andre Council, was a man who received an I-Bond from Burge, allowing him to escape charges for arson, and later testified against Madison. The other witness, Kenneth Stewart, failed to identify Madison until further pressed by police. A forensic “expert,” Virgil Mikus, who doubled as a Chicago police detective, testified that Madison must have started the fire from outside of his apartment, even though there were no traces of gasoline there. In a 2002 evidentiary hearing, an independent forensic expert disputed this evidence. Further, Madison's lawyers introduced evidence showing that a gas can had been planted at the scene of the crime to convict him. Despite the lack of evidence used to convict him, the courts denied Madison relief again and again-until Governor George Ryan pardoned him, Aaron, Leroy, and Stanley-on the basis of innocence.

Also, in sharp contrast to the skepticism Egan and Boyle express about the claims of victims is the deferential treatment they give to the state's attorney's office. Current Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was Cook County state's attorney between 1980 and 1989, a period during which there were at least fifty-five allegations of confessions given under torture, and his assistants routinely went to police stations to take statements from men who had just confessed. Richard Devine, the current state's attorney, was Daley's first assistant during a part of this time. In 1982, then Superintendent of Police Richard Brzeczek sent a letter to Daley with an attached letter from John Raba, director of Cermak Prison Health Services, detailing allegations and physical evidence of the torture of Andrew Wilson, and “seeking direction” on how to proceed with an investigation. Daley's office, however, never followed up or investigated the allegation.

In questioning Daley about the Wilson case, Boyle was deferential. “This may be an unfair question,” he asked Daley at one point, “But in the normal course of events, I assume that the [William] Fahey and [Richard] O'Brien [the officers who Wilson was accused of murdering] killing was a somewhat heightened case. And it's difficult, we've all been in law enforcement, and it's difficult to characterize a terrible event like that, so I don't know how to characterize it.”

At another point in the questioning, Daley acknowledges that he must have received Brzeczek's letter, but when his attorney says, “just if you remember,” he replies, “I don't remember today.”

During the press conference at which Egan and Boyle announced their findings, the best they could muster concerning the role of the state's attorney's office was that there was “a bit of slippage” in carrying out its duty to investigate the torture. It appears that there was also “slippage” in the choice of special prosecutors. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Egan had a nephew serving under Burge at the time of the torture, in addition to eight other family members who have served in the police force. Attorney Kurt Feuer commented, “That is a blatant bias toward the people he was investigating…. We have been saying, 'We have a biased, cover-your-ass report.'”

The purpose of the special prosecutors' investigation was best summed up at the press conference when Boyle said that their findings should “put this to rest.” They likely had hoped that by releasing another toothless admission that torture occurred, the public would be satisfied and the credibility of the criminal justice system-under which Boyle had served as a prosecutor and Egan as a judge-would be restored. In order to try to reassure the gathered media, they claimed that “no pattern of police violence could happen now” because of reforms including a database tracking allegations of brutality and the videotaping of interrogations.

But instead of burying the decades-long torture scandal, the report has heightened scrutiny of it, and few believe that justice has been done. Almost every day, mainstream news articles have called Daley's role into question, forcing him to comment on the allegations for the first time, simultaneously claiming that he'll “take responsibility” and “apologize to anyone” while denying that he knew anything about the torture. Carol Marin, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, in a scathing piece, sums up many people's mood at the lack of indictments:

Burge must be getting quite a kick out of all of this. I can just see him, cigarette in one hand, drink in another, aboard the boat he docks outside his Apollo Beach house in Florida, paid for with his ongoing police pension…. It must be giving him quite a chuckle.

Activists and attorneys working to win justice for torture victims can sense this and are pushing forward with their demands. Flint Taylor, an attorney for the People's Law Office, for example, has been in the news often, questioning the integrity of the special prosecutors' investigation, particularly, as he calls it, their “16-inch softball questions” to Daley, and pushing for federal indictments of torturers under Jon Burge. Three aldermen have introduced a resolution stripping Burge of his pension and legal fees. Organizing meetings sponsored by the National Conference of Black Lawyers have drawn fifty to sixty people. And activists with the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, along with family members of torture victims, have been stepping up demands to win new trials for torture victims, organizing a protest that drew almost seventy people on just three days' notice. Now, they are planning a “people's tribunal” to put Daley, Burge, and State's Attorney Richard Devine on trial while demanding the victims receive the justice they deserve.

Rather than putting the issue of police torture behind them, Egan and Boyle may have awakened a movement that will put increasing public pressure on public officials who are knee-deep in the torture scandal. It is this kind of public pressure that can win real justice for torture victims and their long-suffering families.

Julien Ball is an organizer for the Campaign to End the Death Penalty in Chicago.