City Council committee OKs $10 million payment in Burge case

Source: Chicago TribuneJuly 19--A key City Council committee today endorsed a $10 million payment to a man who was wrongfully convicted after being beaten into a false confession by detectives working under disgraced former Chicago Police Cmdr.儲存倉 Jon Burge.The Finance Committee's approval makes approval of the payment to Eric Caine a matter of routine when the full council meets next Wednesday.Because of the significant amount to be paid to Caine, who was imprisoned for more than 25 years for a murder he did not commit, city Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton, the city's top attorney, explained to aldermen personally why the case is being settled.A doctor who treated Caine at a hospital after the interrogation that led to his confession testified during a pre-trial session that he "believed Mr. Caine was tortured and there was actually physical evidence of that," Patton said. "This is the first case that I have brought you where there was actual physical confirmation, medical evidence, of abuse."The Caine settlement will bring the tab on Burge cases to nearly $70 million when legal fees are counted. So far this year, police misconduct lawsuits overall have cost the city at least $54 million.There are three other Burge-related cases against the city still being litigated, Patton said. One of those was filed on behalf of Ronald Kitchen, who was exonerated in 2009 after spending 21 years in prison -- 13 of them on death row -- for the 1988 slaying of two women and three children in their South Side bungalow."In many of these Burge cases, we've concluded that the best course of action is to settle them, and that that will avoid a much worse result if we were to take the case to trial," Patton said. "And in some cases it's also because we've co迷你倉沙田cluded it's the right thing to do in those situations."According to his lawsuit, Caine, now 47, falsely confessed to the 1986 murders of an elderly couple, Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez, after two detectives working for Burge punched and threatened him as he sat handcuffed to a chair in a South Side police station, rupturing his eardrum. A doctor who examined Caine after his interrogation signed an affidavit confirming his eardrum was ruptured.In 2003, Caine's co-defendant, Aaron Patterson, was pardoned by then-Gov. George Ryan and freed from death row, but Caine, who was given a life sentence, languished in prison for years more -- "an afterthought," in his words.Cook County Judge William Hooks threw out Caine's confession in early 2011, and prosecutors dismissed the indictment after determining they could not go forward without the tainted confession as evidence. Caine later won a certificate of innocence from the court.On the day of Caine's release from Menard Correctional Center on March 17, 2011, Burge was spending his first full day at a federal prison in North Carolina. He had been sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison in federal court for lying in a lawsuit about his knowledge of police torture.The Finance Committee also signed off on $830,000 in settlements in two other police misconduct cases.One settlement was related to a September 2009 incident in which a police officer gave a 32-year-old woman a ride home and allegedly sexually assaulted her with his partner present.In the other three unnamed officers were accused of unlawfully holding a man for eight hours and then beating him in 2007.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 the Chicago Tribune Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉價錢