Last week, the Chicago City Council announced it will pay over $5 million in reparations to scores of African-American men tortured with electrocutions, beatings, and other brutal acts by the Chicago Police Department in the 1970s and 1980s. The majority of those men were the victims of Jon Burge, a disgraced former Chicago police commander who was spared from being convicted of human rights crimes by statutes of limitations and a friendly prosecutor’s office that rarely found wrongdoing by cops.

Burge and his officers solicited confessions from at least ten men who were sent to death row based on their words of admission. Eventually, Former Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned some of them, or handed down reduced sentences based on the revelations that their confessions may have come as a result of torture. Similarly harsh methods of eliciting confessions and cooperation may still be in use. As theGuardian reported Thursday, a man named Angel Perez claims two Chicago police officers sexually assaulted him with an unknown object inside Homan Square, a so-called “black site” where off-the-books interrogations allegedly take place. . . .

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