October 26, 2020 • 30 mins
In Chicago, old habits die hard.
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin bring us inside one of the worst police abuse scandals in U.S. history. For decades on the southside of Chicago, a group of white cops turned the interrogation room into a torture chamber for Black men. Those cops called themselves the Midnight Crew.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
And I'm Steve Drewson.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Today we're going to tell you about one of the
worst police abuse scandals in US history. For decades, on
the South side of Chicago, a group of white cops
turned the interrogation room into a torture chamber for black men.
Those cops called themselves the Midnight Crew. We'll start by
introducing you to one innocent man who encountered the Midnight
(00:28):
Crew and ended up confessing to murder. Eventually, it became
all too clear that what happened to him had happened
to hundreds of others too. Let's talk about how the
Midnight Crew got exposed to daylight, and what's being done
to make sure this kind of police torture doesn't ever
happen again. You know, we've talked a lot during our
(00:57):
podcast about psychological interrogation techniques, but this is a really
different case. This is physical torture. It's the kind of
thing most people think doesn't happen in the United States,
but it did, and it.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Did in my lifetime in Chicago. This was real. I said,
how can this be going on? You know, at the
end of the twentieth century. I mean, this is medieval,
This is the stuff of the Spanish Inquisition, because by
and large, by the nineteen fifties, these kinds of third
(01:31):
degree tactics were no longer part of law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
You know, Steve, I never knew what the term third
degree meant before I went to law school. So for
our audience, it means physical abuse during interrogations, right.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
You know. Chicago's history with police interrogations is a fascinating one.
The third degree thrived in Chicago in the thirties, forties
and fifties than a group of police reformers brought in
psychological enterigoce ation techniques that they believed would be less
likely to lead to false confessions. But in Chicago, old
(02:09):
habits die hard.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
It's easy for anyone to understand why someone would falsely
confess if they're being physically abused or tortured. That's no
way to get the truth, let alone justice. Today's story
starts on July twenty seventh, nineteen eighty eight. It's summer
in Chicago, one of the hottest on record, with temperatures
(02:31):
topping one hundred degrees on the city's predominantly black south Side.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
A lot of.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Homes are older, run down, don't have air conditioning. Economic
opportunities are thin, and people sweat just to pay the bills.
So when the temperature climbs, tempers run high too. That's
true for the residents and for the police. On July
twenty seventh, though, things get way too hot in a
Southside neighborhood called Gage Park. In the middle of the night,
(02:59):
a brick bungalow goes up in flames. After firefighters bring
the blaze under control, police go inside. They find five bodies,
two women who had worked as teacher's aids at a
local school, and three young children. All of the kids
had been smothered with pillows. One of the women had
been beaten and strangled. The other woman had been smothered too.
(03:19):
She was the daughter of a Chicago cop. It's a
horrible crime, and the case quickly becomes high profile what
Chicago police call a heater. But there's no eyewitnesses, no
forensic evidence, no nothing. So police offer a two thousand
dollars reward for information. Sure Enough, just a few days later,
a prison inmate calls police and claims that his friend,
(03:42):
Ronald Kitchen, confessed to him over the phone. Now, prison
phone calls are recorded and monitored. A quick check of
the inmate's phone recordings reveals he was lying. No one
he spoke with had ever confessed to anything, but with
no other leads, the police decide to go after Ronald Kitchen,
and they go after him hard. In nineteen eighty eight,
(04:03):
Ronald was twenty two years old, and as he admits today,
he was no angel. Back then. With one young child
and a second on the way, he made a living
by selling cocaine, but he was no killer and never
had been. On the evening of August twenty fifth, Ronald
leaves his house and heads for the corner store down
the block. He's out to buy a gallon of milk
and some cookie dough for his two year old son.
(04:25):
Before he knows it, Ronald surrounded by police cars. One
of the officers says something about a stolen vehicle. Another
cop points a gun at him. Ronald knows he had
nothing to do with any car theft, so he figures
he'll be able to clear up the situation without much difficulty.
As the police put Ronald in handcuffs, he hollers to
his family down the block, I'll be back in forty
(04:46):
five minutes. Police bring Ronald to a south Side station
called Area three. They throw him into an interrogation room
and cuff his hands to an iron ring in the wall,
and the account Ronald gives of the next sixteen hours
is harrowing. According to Ronald, an officer comes in and
asks who have you been talking to? When Ronald doesn't
(05:07):
know how to answer, the officer starts punching him in
the chest and kicking his stomach. Over the next several hours,
that officer would leave, then come back again, over and
over to ask the same question, who have you been
talking to? And to continue the beatings. Sometimes he'd be
joined by a second officer. When that officer entered the room,
he would remove his name tag before joining the assaults.
(05:31):
After hours of beatings, a third officer came into the
room alone. He asked if Ronald was okay and if
he wanted anything to eat. When Ronald asked to call
a lawyer, he says, the officer smiled, picked up the
handset from a nearby phone, and smashed it into Ronald's skull.
Do you hear ringing?
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Now?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Said the officer? On his way out, he turned off
the lights, leaving Ronald in the dark for hours. The
beatings continued, with Ronald waiting in agony for the next
round to start. The officers focused on areas of his
body where damage wouldn't be visible. At one point, officers
cuffed both his hands behind his back and used their
(06:11):
nightsticks to beat his genitals. But their desire to cover
their tracks didn't stop the police from targeting Ronald's head too.
They just used a phone book to cushion the blows
and avoid leaving a mark.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
This torture session was clearly premeditated, mapped out in advance.
The whole time. They were also calling Ronald racial slurs.
The N word just rolled off their tongues. The goal
here was total humiliation, physical and mental.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Hours of torture went by until Ronald finally broke. He
signed a false confession dictated by the police, admitting to
the Gage Park killings. Based on that confession, Ronald Kitchen
was charged with capital murder, meaning that he was facing
the death penalty. At his first court appearance, Ronald told
the judge that he'd been tortured. A few days later,
(07:02):
Ronald was transferred to a hospital for treatment. At the hospital,
his urine ran red with blood. Despite all of this,
Ronald's false confession was allowed into evidence against him at trial,
along with the testimony of that prison snitch who still
claimed that Ronald had admitted the killings. On September nineteenth,
(07:22):
nineteen ninety, Ronald Kitchen was convicted of five counts of
murder and sent to death row. There, he'd soon discovered
he wasn't alone. At least nine other residents of Illinois's
death Row had been tortured into confessing too. There was
something much bigger going on.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
This episode is sponsored by AIG, a leading global insurance company,
and Paul Weiss Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, a leading international
law firm. The AIG pro Bono program provides free legal
service and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals
most in need, and recently they announced that working to
reform the criminal justice system will become a key pillar
(08:10):
of the program's mission. Paul Weiss has long had an
unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to
the most vulnerable members of our society and in support
of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal
justice area.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
What Ronald endured at Area three was no isolated incident.
Ronald Kitchen had encountered a group of white cops who
called themselves the Midnight Crew. The Midnight Crew closed cases
by torturing black men until they confessed, and they operated
under the authority of a Chicago police detective named John Burge.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
To understand what happened to Ronald, you have to start
asking some tough questions. What kind of police officer would
do this to another human being? What kind of person
would knowingly break the laws of common decency, the laws
of humanity just to get a confession.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
When it comes to John Burge, the answer is complex.
Here's our friend John Conroy, the journalist who was investigative
reporting exposed the Midnight Crew.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
John Burge was a very driven police officer. Initially he
was a patrol officer, and then he was mooted to detective,
and then he made sergeant, and then he made lieutenant.
He seemed to me like somebody who would show up
at my family's picnic and if my elderly aunt had
a problem starting her car on the way home, he
(09:44):
would have been the first woman out there trying to
get it working. That just seemed to me to be
the kind of guy he was. On the other hand,
he brutally tortured people.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
John Burge was a Chicago Southsider born in nineteen forty
seven who grew up in a white en class called
South Deering.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
He grew up in a working class, white neighborhood on
the South Side of Chicago that during the late nineteen sixties,
went from white to black over the course of about
four years, and his family was among the last to
move out. He then went off to college, flunked out
(10:23):
after about a semester, went home and enlisted in the military.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Burg served as a military police officer in South Korea
and Vietnam. For his service, he earned the Bronze Star
Medal and Purple Heart. After he returned to Chicago, Burg
joined the police force and racked up more than a
dozen commendations.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Everyone wants torturers to be Hannibal elector or somebody like
that out of sounds of the ramps. Everyone wants torturers
to be monsters, and they're basically normal people like you
and me. Burge, for instance, once saved the woman, an
African American woman, from committing suicide. She had a gun
(11:05):
to her throat, she pulled the trigger and he got
his thumb in the firing mechanism and it didn't go off.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
But his apparent heroism wasn't the full story, because John
Burge and his underlings ended up being accused of extracting
confessions from more than two hundred black men between nineteen
seventy two and nineteen ninety one using torture.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
You know, in Chicago, the cops were under tremendous pressure
because we had an astronomical homicide rate. People talk about
homicides in Chicago now, They were eighty percent higher in
the early nineties, and so, you know, they had to
solve crimes. They were getting information. That's another reason why
(11:50):
people do it. They actually might think that they're helping
out the good people of the community by torturing the
bad ones. You do get information when you torture people,
you just don't get accurate information. People will say anything
to stop the torture.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Accusations against the Midnight Crew started emerging just a few
months before Ronald Kitchen was convicted. In January nineteen ninety,
John Conroy published an investigative report in the Chicago Reader
entitled House of Screams.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
The bird story came to me because I was writing
a book on torture but not torturers, and countries that
people normally suspected of torture, and democracies. And then a
friend of mine called me and said, there's this guy
named Andrew Wilson. He claims he was given electric shock
by the Chicago police, and his testimony was just so
(12:40):
compelling the police could not explain away his injuries.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Andrew Wilson was a suspect in the murder of two
Chicago cops, and House of Screams told the story of
what happened to him in police custody. The rumor was
that during Wilson's interrogation, Burge and his men used techniques
that Burge learned as a military Harry police officer back
in Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Andrew Wilson emerged from the police station with these very
peculiar marks on his ears and his nose in the
shape of alligator clips. They were scabs, and he had
parallel burns on his chest and a big burn on
his thigh. He said he'd been held against a hot
radiator while electric shock was administered by a hand crank device,
(13:23):
not dissimilar from a field telephone used in Vietnam, and
because he'd shot dead two cops, nobody wanted to believe him.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Nobody's going to have any sympathy for cop killers, and
Burge and his Midnight crew knew that they would be
more likely to get away with torturing a cop killer
than anybody else.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
You know, frankly, when we get in an uproar about torture,
it's over the torture of people we like, somebody like
say Nelson Mandela, and we are outraged. But if you
torture somebody whom we don't like, oh, that's no problem
at all. So, you know, I think the true test
(14:09):
of a society is can you stand up and defend
the rights of people whom you abhor.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
During Andrew Wilson's trial, his attorneys started receiving letters in
Chicago police envelopes from an inside whistleblower. The department's torture problem,
it seemed, went much further than Andrew Wilson.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
The letters provided a roadmap for anybody who wanted to investigate,
because they listed the people who went along with the torture,
and then it listed also the weak links, people who
didn't like Birch. They wouldn't be asked to participate in
the torture, but they would have been around a police
(14:53):
station would have known about it.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
After Conroy's story about Andrew Wilson ran an avalanche of
other allegation came forward. There were men who had plastic
bags put over their heads, men who were waterboarded with
seven up, men who'd had their testicles stood on during interrogation.
All black men tortured by all white cops.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Of course, I think race was a factor in all
of this. A lot of the abuse that was inflicted
was not just physical, but it was saw verbal and
it was regular use of the N word.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
The stories were horribly similar, and the evidence was there
from the beginning. One torture victim, Aaron Patterson, managed to
leave a visible cry for help in the interrogation room.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
And just picture this. This guy is being tortured and
he's scratching this message in a metal bench with a
paper clip, and the message couldn't be clearer. Please threaten
me with violence, slapped and suffocated me with plastic No
lawyer or dad signed false statement to murder. Why did
(15:58):
he do this?
Speaker 3 (16:00):
He did it.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Because he was afraid he wouldn't survive the torture, and
that even if he did survive, he was afraid that
no one would believe him.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Aaron did survive, and one of the other survivors was
Ronald Kitchen.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Ronald later realized that the second officer who participated in
his interrogation, the one who took off his name tag
before beating him, well, that was no ordinary member of
the Midnight Crew. That was John Birge himself.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
By the time John Conroy published House of Screams, John
Burge and the Midnight Crews torture campaign had been going
on for nearly twenty years. Meanwhile, Burge had been promoted
to commander, outranking ninety nine percent of the other officers
on the Chicago Police Force.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
So my article came out in January nineteen ninety as
we were approaching press time. I was really an easy
I thought, Oh Jesus, you know we're going to go
with a story that says that the Chicago police engaged
in torture. Nobody had said anything of the kind before.
(17:07):
I thought there would be a furre and we might ensue.
Even though we had done every legal check that could
be done.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Burge was a powerful man, but the allegations against him
were too numerous and too similar to ignore. In nineteen
ninety one, John Burge was suspended from the Chicago Police force.
The local police union rushed to Burges's defense, throwing him
a fundraiser at a union hall.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
I was there. It was packed with more than a
thousand people, probably most of them cops, but I'm sure
some of them were state's attorneys, because I know that
it was advertised in the State's Attorney's office.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Meanwhile, more and more allegations of police torture were coming forward, beatings,
cattle prods, Russian roulette. The Chicago Police Board held a
hearing in nineteen ninety two into Burges's alleged misconduct.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Basically, it was an employment fitness here. It was not
a criminal case, and the city had attorneys present the
case against Birch, and they did a pretty darn good job.
I thought they actually sold the Police Board on the
idea that something had indeed happened here.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
During the hearing, an internal police report came to light.
It suggested that police supervisors had known about the midnight
cruise systemic brutality for years. In nineteen ninety three, the
Police Board found that John Birge had participated in physical
abuse and fired him from the Chicago Police.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Now. The Police Board's decision was remarkable in that it
never used the word torture. It said, John Birge did
chick and or punch and or deny medical attention to
and or and or and or you couldn't tell what
exactly do you think happened. So as a result of
that decision, Burge got fired, but he was allowed to
(18:58):
retire with his pension.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Another agency, the Office of Professional Standards, began investigating two
and it released a report that went a step further.
The investigation found that Chicago police had taken part in
a systematic, planned torture campaign that command officers knew about. Meanwhile,
Ronald Kitchen, one of the victims of that torture, was
still on death row for a crime he didn't commit.
(19:22):
And remember, he was there along with other men who
had been tortured just like him by John Burge and
the Midnight Crew. For years, Ronald's appeals failed and the
system turned a blind eye to the unthinkable abuse he suffered.
But Ronald and the others on death row didn't stay silent.
The group began finding their voices, speaking out about the
(19:42):
fact that the Midnight Crew had tortured innocent people into
falsely confessing.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
What's amazing to me is how these men found their voice.
They did so by re enacting each other's trials. You
have to remember that when people are in prison, every
instinct tells you not to talk to other inmates about
your case. But these men, they acted out their case.
(20:08):
They played the role of prosecutor of defense, attorney of
police witness, and in some cases they convicted one another.
That process gave them agency, and at the end of
the day, all of these men became great storytellers. They
could not only tell the story of what happened to
(20:30):
each of them, but they could tell the stories of
each other.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
As the Midnight Crew torture scandal blew up, Ronald's personal
fight for justice became unignorable. In two thousand and one,
Ronald got a new team of post conviction lawyers. They
discovered previously undisclosed evidence about that prison snitch who claimed
Ronald had confessed. Turns out, the snitch had received money
an early release from prison in exchange for his false testimony.
(20:59):
That evidence, plus the discovery of the Midnight Crew torture
scandal led prosecutors to agree that Ronald's conviction should be
thrown out. On July seventh, two thousand and nine, Ronald
Kitchen became a free, exonerated man. Six weeks later, he
was awarded a certificate of innocence. Those forty five minutes
(21:27):
that Ronald had expected to be gone they turned into
twenty one years behind bars. The Gage Park killings have
never been solved. As for the other men on death
row with Ronald, over the years, several of them walked free,
to those who remained in prison had their sentences commuted
to life, and their continuing to fight their cases. And
(21:48):
what about John Birge, Well, as we told you, he
got kicked off the Chicago Police Force. But neither John
Burge nor any member of the Midnight Crew was ever
charged with or convicted of any act of torture because
the statute of limitations had passed by the time the
truth came to light. Maybe we can find some small
measure of justice though, in the fact that John Birge
(22:09):
did go to prison for lying about torture. In twenty ten,
Burge was sued by someone he'd tortured during the lawsuit,
Burge gave a sworn statement denying that any abuse had
occurred on his watch. That falsehood was enough to convict
Burge of perjury. John Burge served from twenty eleven to
(22:30):
twenty fourteen in federal prison, a much shorter length of
time than many of his victims spent behind bars. After
he left prison, Burge gave an interview calling the torture
victim's human vermin. He took up residence in Florida, still
collecting his police pension four thousand dollars a month. He
even drove a boat called Vigilante.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Well, no justice was not served in this case. I
mean he was sentenced to four years in prison. He
didn't serve that long. Birge was convicted thirty seven years
after the first time. We know that he used electric shock.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
You know, at the end of the day, John Burge
was released after only serving a few years in prison,
while Ronald and the other men on death row spent
decades in some of the harshest prisons in Illinois system.
That's not justice.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
In twenty eighteen, John Burge died at his home in Florida.
After his death, the police union posted a statement on Facebook,
saying that the Fraternal Order of Police does not believe
the full story about the Birge case has ever been told.
They're probably right. Decades after Burge's reign of terror, allegations
of torture by the Midnight Crew are still coming to light.
(23:44):
In two thousand and nine, the State of Illinois formed
a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to review and respond
to these allegations. Meanwhile, lawsuits upon lawsuits have been filed
and are still being filed. So far, the Midnight Crew
has cost the City of Chicago one hundred million million
dollars in brutality settlements, defense costs, and reparations.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
A reparations ordinance passed by the city Council created a
fund so that many of these torture survivors, those with
credible claims of torture, could be compensated for what happened
to them. It was a recognition and ownership of this
problem by the City of Chicago, and it's never happened
(24:27):
before in the United States.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
One lawsuit filed on behalf of fifty torture victims settled
under the condition that the story of John Burge and
systemic Chicago police misconduct be included in the Chicago Public
Schools high school curriculum so that everyone remembers.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
We can never forget the Chicago torture scandal, because if
you don't remember, then history can repeat itself. We have
to learn the lessons of history, and the best way
to do it is to teach young own minds about it.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And that's where you'll find Ronald Kitchen today. He and
other survivors of the Midnight Crew visit classrooms across Chicago
where they talk to teenagers about what they endured and
what they hope can be learned from their ordeals. And
if you pay attention to the way Chicago's kids react
to these stories, you'll have hope for the future. They listen,
They stay to hear the end of the story, even
(25:23):
after the bell rings. What do you think about all
the recent social media videos of police brutality? Students ask,
how can we as young people make a change. For
his part, Ronald Kitchen has no quick answers, but he
does have a quick sense of justice. As he told
students at one Chicago high school, there's no gray area
in torture. You need to see it for what it
(25:46):
really is. It's black and it's white. Hello, Hey Ronald, Hey,
how you doing. It's Laura and Steve. How are you doing.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
I'm I'm good.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
When you visit those schools, what do you hope the
kids learn from hearing you speak?
Speaker 5 (26:07):
Well, I think the meaning of going to the schools
is to let them know that this could happen to anybody.
It's mind boggling because the Boogeyman not just touch me,
stump me, kick me, punch me, slap me. The Boogeyman
did all this to me.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
And then your job became to fight the Boogeyman. Yeah,
it wasn't just one bad guy. You were fighting a
whole system that let these guys do what they did
for so long.
Speaker 6 (26:33):
We was fight that could lad.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
We didn't have a rock.
Speaker 6 (26:35):
We had a pencil and paper, and that penston paper
came out to be stronger than that rock could evidence.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
It's hard for people to understand how you could get
the space or the time on death Row to reenact
these trials.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
We had a couple of good captains back there. They
let us have law classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I
thank them for helping us with the process of gaining
our freedom.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
You and the other guys. They're organized, worked together and
made a big, big change even though you were locked up.
You know, do you talk to kids in schools about
how they should come together and work to make change
in the same way find their own voices.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
Yeah, that's the whole point of helping them find their voices.
Your voice is your best weapon.
Speaker 6 (27:21):
If we found our voices in a depth of hell,
your voice should be heard no.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Matter what you went.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
What are you enjoying in life these days, Ronald?
Speaker 5 (27:30):
My family, I think that's the best and adult fummy
with my little family.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Did I hear you say you were on your way
to get a pony?
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (27:39):
Today is my daughter's birthday. She's turning nine and the
theme is Cowboy. So uh yeah, I'm going to get
the pony.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
Now.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
That's so nice.
Speaker 5 (27:48):
I'm trying to get this she bugger right now, those
pictures I will.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
When you think of this scandal, you have to think
about not only Burge and his Midnight crew. You have
to think about the armies of people who knew about
it and kept quiet. Every time somebody was tortured. There
were police officers in that station who heard the screams
and then There were states attorneys who came in and
(28:19):
had to write out the confessions. There were lawyers who
heard these stories from their clients, and judges who heard
these stories in court.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
A lot of folks had to know about what was
going on for so many years.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Well, this was a case of systemic racism, not just
of a few bad apples. It was an open secret
and not so secret open secret, and think about what
that does to these communities.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
The court system may have turned a blind eye to
these defendant stories, but they must have told their family
members and their friends and their neighbors what happened to them.
Repeated story of abuse must have leaked out and saturated
the South Side.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
An open wound that for years was not addressed.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Injustices. Like the Chicago police torture scandal are at the
root of what our country is experiencing right now, a
national reckoning with race and the criminal justice system. These
stories need to be told so that we can collectively
acknowledge the wrongs and start having a real discussion about
what's right. And that's the story of the Midnight Crew.
(29:39):
Next week we'll take you to the United Kingdom to
tell you about the Birmingham six two pubs were bombed
in one of the biggest mass murders in British history,
and six Irish men found themselves in the wrong place
at the worst time. Wrongful Conviction False Confessions is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts association with Signal Company
(30:01):
Number one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm
and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by Senior
producer and Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
(30:24):
and I Wrider, and.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
You can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast dot com.
Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction,
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at
wrong Conviction
Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
And I'm Steve Drewson.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Today we're going to tell you about one of the
worst police abuse scandals in US history. For decades, on
the South side of Chicago, a group of white cops
turned the interrogation room into a torture chamber for black men.
Those cops called themselves the Midnight Crew. We'll start by
introducing you to one innocent man who encountered the Midnight
(00:28):
Crew and ended up confessing to murder. Eventually, it became
all too clear that what happened to him had happened
to hundreds of others too. Let's talk about how the
Midnight Crew got exposed to daylight, and what's being done
to make sure this kind of police torture doesn't ever
happen again. You know, we've talked a lot during our
(00:57):
podcast about psychological interrogation techniques, but this is a really
different case. This is physical torture. It's the kind of
thing most people think doesn't happen in the United States,
but it did, and it.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Did in my lifetime in Chicago. This was real. I said,
how can this be going on? You know, at the
end of the twentieth century. I mean, this is medieval,
This is the stuff of the Spanish Inquisition, because by
and large, by the nineteen fifties, these kinds of third
(01:31):
degree tactics were no longer part of law enforcement.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
You know, Steve, I never knew what the term third
degree meant before I went to law school. So for
our audience, it means physical abuse during interrogations, right.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
You know. Chicago's history with police interrogations is a fascinating one.
The third degree thrived in Chicago in the thirties, forties
and fifties than a group of police reformers brought in
psychological enterigoce ation techniques that they believed would be less
likely to lead to false confessions. But in Chicago, old
(02:09):
habits die hard.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
It's easy for anyone to understand why someone would falsely
confess if they're being physically abused or tortured. That's no
way to get the truth, let alone justice. Today's story
starts on July twenty seventh, nineteen eighty eight. It's summer
in Chicago, one of the hottest on record, with temperatures
(02:31):
topping one hundred degrees on the city's predominantly black south Side.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
A lot of.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Homes are older, run down, don't have air conditioning. Economic
opportunities are thin, and people sweat just to pay the bills.
So when the temperature climbs, tempers run high too. That's
true for the residents and for the police. On July
twenty seventh, though, things get way too hot in a
Southside neighborhood called Gage Park. In the middle of the night,
(02:59):
a brick bungalow goes up in flames. After firefighters bring
the blaze under control, police go inside. They find five bodies,
two women who had worked as teacher's aids at a
local school, and three young children. All of the kids
had been smothered with pillows. One of the women had
been beaten and strangled. The other woman had been smothered too.
(03:19):
She was the daughter of a Chicago cop. It's a
horrible crime, and the case quickly becomes high profile what
Chicago police call a heater. But there's no eyewitnesses, no
forensic evidence, no nothing. So police offer a two thousand
dollars reward for information. Sure Enough, just a few days later,
a prison inmate calls police and claims that his friend,
(03:42):
Ronald Kitchen, confessed to him over the phone. Now, prison
phone calls are recorded and monitored. A quick check of
the inmate's phone recordings reveals he was lying. No one
he spoke with had ever confessed to anything, but with
no other leads, the police decide to go after Ronald Kitchen,
and they go after him hard. In nineteen eighty eight,
(04:03):
Ronald was twenty two years old, and as he admits today,
he was no angel. Back then. With one young child
and a second on the way, he made a living
by selling cocaine, but he was no killer and never
had been. On the evening of August twenty fifth, Ronald
leaves his house and heads for the corner store down
the block. He's out to buy a gallon of milk
and some cookie dough for his two year old son.
(04:25):
Before he knows it, Ronald surrounded by police cars. One
of the officers says something about a stolen vehicle. Another
cop points a gun at him. Ronald knows he had
nothing to do with any car theft, so he figures
he'll be able to clear up the situation without much difficulty.
As the police put Ronald in handcuffs, he hollers to
his family down the block, I'll be back in forty
(04:46):
five minutes. Police bring Ronald to a south Side station
called Area three. They throw him into an interrogation room
and cuff his hands to an iron ring in the wall,
and the account Ronald gives of the next sixteen hours
is harrowing. According to Ronald, an officer comes in and
asks who have you been talking to? When Ronald doesn't
(05:07):
know how to answer, the officer starts punching him in
the chest and kicking his stomach. Over the next several hours,
that officer would leave, then come back again, over and
over to ask the same question, who have you been
talking to? And to continue the beatings. Sometimes he'd be
joined by a second officer. When that officer entered the room,
he would remove his name tag before joining the assaults.
(05:31):
After hours of beatings, a third officer came into the
room alone. He asked if Ronald was okay and if
he wanted anything to eat. When Ronald asked to call
a lawyer, he says, the officer smiled, picked up the
handset from a nearby phone, and smashed it into Ronald's skull.
Do you hear ringing?
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Now?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Said the officer? On his way out, he turned off
the lights, leaving Ronald in the dark for hours. The
beatings continued, with Ronald waiting in agony for the next
round to start. The officers focused on areas of his
body where damage wouldn't be visible. At one point, officers
cuffed both his hands behind his back and used their
(06:11):
nightsticks to beat his genitals. But their desire to cover
their tracks didn't stop the police from targeting Ronald's head too.
They just used a phone book to cushion the blows
and avoid leaving a mark.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
This torture session was clearly premeditated, mapped out in advance.
The whole time. They were also calling Ronald racial slurs.
The N word just rolled off their tongues. The goal
here was total humiliation, physical and mental.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Hours of torture went by until Ronald finally broke. He
signed a false confession dictated by the police, admitting to
the Gage Park killings. Based on that confession, Ronald Kitchen
was charged with capital murder, meaning that he was facing
the death penalty. At his first court appearance, Ronald told
the judge that he'd been tortured. A few days later,
(07:02):
Ronald was transferred to a hospital for treatment. At the hospital,
his urine ran red with blood. Despite all of this,
Ronald's false confession was allowed into evidence against him at trial,
along with the testimony of that prison snitch who still
claimed that Ronald had admitted the killings. On September nineteenth,
(07:22):
nineteen ninety, Ronald Kitchen was convicted of five counts of
murder and sent to death row. There, he'd soon discovered
he wasn't alone. At least nine other residents of Illinois's
death Row had been tortured into confessing too. There was
something much bigger going on.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
This episode is sponsored by AIG, a leading global insurance company,
and Paul Weiss Rifkin, Wharton and Garrison, a leading international
law firm. The AIG pro Bono program provides free legal
service and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals
most in need, and recently they announced that working to
reform the criminal justice system will become a key pillar
(08:10):
of the program's mission. Paul Weiss has long had an
unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to
the most vulnerable members of our society and in support
of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal
justice area.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
What Ronald endured at Area three was no isolated incident.
Ronald Kitchen had encountered a group of white cops who
called themselves the Midnight Crew. The Midnight Crew closed cases
by torturing black men until they confessed, and they operated
under the authority of a Chicago police detective named John Burge.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
To understand what happened to Ronald, you have to start
asking some tough questions. What kind of police officer would
do this to another human being? What kind of person
would knowingly break the laws of common decency, the laws
of humanity just to get a confession.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
When it comes to John Burge, the answer is complex.
Here's our friend John Conroy, the journalist who was investigative
reporting exposed the Midnight Crew.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
John Burge was a very driven police officer. Initially he
was a patrol officer, and then he was mooted to detective,
and then he made sergeant, and then he made lieutenant.
He seemed to me like somebody who would show up
at my family's picnic and if my elderly aunt had
a problem starting her car on the way home, he
(09:44):
would have been the first woman out there trying to
get it working. That just seemed to me to be
the kind of guy he was. On the other hand,
he brutally tortured people.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
John Burge was a Chicago Southsider born in nineteen forty
seven who grew up in a white en class called
South Deering.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
He grew up in a working class, white neighborhood on
the South Side of Chicago that during the late nineteen sixties,
went from white to black over the course of about
four years, and his family was among the last to
move out. He then went off to college, flunked out
(10:23):
after about a semester, went home and enlisted in the military.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Burg served as a military police officer in South Korea
and Vietnam. For his service, he earned the Bronze Star
Medal and Purple Heart. After he returned to Chicago, Burg
joined the police force and racked up more than a
dozen commendations.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
Everyone wants torturers to be Hannibal elector or somebody like
that out of sounds of the ramps. Everyone wants torturers
to be monsters, and they're basically normal people like you
and me. Burge, for instance, once saved the woman, an
African American woman, from committing suicide. She had a gun
(11:05):
to her throat, she pulled the trigger and he got
his thumb in the firing mechanism and it didn't go off.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
But his apparent heroism wasn't the full story, because John
Burge and his underlings ended up being accused of extracting
confessions from more than two hundred black men between nineteen
seventy two and nineteen ninety one using torture.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
You know, in Chicago, the cops were under tremendous pressure
because we had an astronomical homicide rate. People talk about
homicides in Chicago now, They were eighty percent higher in
the early nineties, and so, you know, they had to
solve crimes. They were getting information. That's another reason why
(11:50):
people do it. They actually might think that they're helping
out the good people of the community by torturing the
bad ones. You do get information when you torture people,
you just don't get accurate information. People will say anything
to stop the torture.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Accusations against the Midnight Crew started emerging just a few
months before Ronald Kitchen was convicted. In January nineteen ninety,
John Conroy published an investigative report in the Chicago Reader
entitled House of Screams.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
The bird story came to me because I was writing
a book on torture but not torturers, and countries that
people normally suspected of torture, and democracies. And then a
friend of mine called me and said, there's this guy
named Andrew Wilson. He claims he was given electric shock
by the Chicago police, and his testimony was just so
(12:40):
compelling the police could not explain away his injuries.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Andrew Wilson was a suspect in the murder of two
Chicago cops, and House of Screams told the story of
what happened to him in police custody. The rumor was
that during Wilson's interrogation, Burge and his men used techniques
that Burge learned as a military Harry police officer back
in Vietnam.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Andrew Wilson emerged from the police station with these very
peculiar marks on his ears and his nose in the
shape of alligator clips. They were scabs, and he had
parallel burns on his chest and a big burn on
his thigh. He said he'd been held against a hot
radiator while electric shock was administered by a hand crank device,
(13:23):
not dissimilar from a field telephone used in Vietnam, and
because he'd shot dead two cops, nobody wanted to believe him.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Nobody's going to have any sympathy for cop killers, and
Burge and his Midnight crew knew that they would be
more likely to get away with torturing a cop killer
than anybody else.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
You know, frankly, when we get in an uproar about torture,
it's over the torture of people we like, somebody like
say Nelson Mandela, and we are outraged. But if you
torture somebody whom we don't like, oh, that's no problem
at all. So, you know, I think the true test
(14:09):
of a society is can you stand up and defend
the rights of people whom you abhor.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
During Andrew Wilson's trial, his attorneys started receiving letters in
Chicago police envelopes from an inside whistleblower. The department's torture problem,
it seemed, went much further than Andrew Wilson.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
The letters provided a roadmap for anybody who wanted to investigate,
because they listed the people who went along with the torture,
and then it listed also the weak links, people who
didn't like Birch. They wouldn't be asked to participate in
the torture, but they would have been around a police
(14:53):
station would have known about it.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
After Conroy's story about Andrew Wilson ran an avalanche of
other allegation came forward. There were men who had plastic
bags put over their heads, men who were waterboarded with
seven up, men who'd had their testicles stood on during interrogation.
All black men tortured by all white cops.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Of course, I think race was a factor in all
of this. A lot of the abuse that was inflicted
was not just physical, but it was saw verbal and
it was regular use of the N word.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
The stories were horribly similar, and the evidence was there
from the beginning. One torture victim, Aaron Patterson, managed to
leave a visible cry for help in the interrogation room.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
And just picture this. This guy is being tortured and
he's scratching this message in a metal bench with a
paper clip, and the message couldn't be clearer. Please threaten
me with violence, slapped and suffocated me with plastic No
lawyer or dad signed false statement to murder. Why did
(15:58):
he do this?
Speaker 3 (16:00):
He did it.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Because he was afraid he wouldn't survive the torture, and
that even if he did survive, he was afraid that
no one would believe him.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Aaron did survive, and one of the other survivors was
Ronald Kitchen.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
Ronald later realized that the second officer who participated in
his interrogation, the one who took off his name tag
before beating him, well, that was no ordinary member of
the Midnight Crew. That was John Birge himself.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
By the time John Conroy published House of Screams, John
Burge and the Midnight Crews torture campaign had been going
on for nearly twenty years. Meanwhile, Burge had been promoted
to commander, outranking ninety nine percent of the other officers
on the Chicago Police Force.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
So my article came out in January nineteen ninety as
we were approaching press time. I was really an easy
I thought, Oh Jesus, you know we're going to go
with a story that says that the Chicago police engaged
in torture. Nobody had said anything of the kind before.
(17:07):
I thought there would be a furre and we might ensue.
Even though we had done every legal check that could
be done.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
Burge was a powerful man, but the allegations against him
were too numerous and too similar to ignore. In nineteen
ninety one, John Burge was suspended from the Chicago Police force.
The local police union rushed to Burges's defense, throwing him
a fundraiser at a union hall.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
I was there. It was packed with more than a
thousand people, probably most of them cops, but I'm sure
some of them were state's attorneys, because I know that
it was advertised in the State's Attorney's office.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Meanwhile, more and more allegations of police torture were coming forward, beatings,
cattle prods, Russian roulette. The Chicago Police Board held a
hearing in nineteen ninety two into Burges's alleged misconduct.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Basically, it was an employment fitness here. It was not
a criminal case, and the city had attorneys present the
case against Birch, and they did a pretty darn good job.
I thought they actually sold the Police Board on the
idea that something had indeed happened here.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
During the hearing, an internal police report came to light.
It suggested that police supervisors had known about the midnight
cruise systemic brutality for years. In nineteen ninety three, the
Police Board found that John Birge had participated in physical
abuse and fired him from the Chicago Police.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
Now. The Police Board's decision was remarkable in that it
never used the word torture. It said, John Birge did
chick and or punch and or deny medical attention to
and or and or and or you couldn't tell what
exactly do you think happened. So as a result of
that decision, Burge got fired, but he was allowed to
(18:58):
retire with his pension.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
Another agency, the Office of Professional Standards, began investigating two
and it released a report that went a step further.
The investigation found that Chicago police had taken part in
a systematic, planned torture campaign that command officers knew about. Meanwhile,
Ronald Kitchen, one of the victims of that torture, was
still on death row for a crime he didn't commit.
(19:22):
And remember, he was there along with other men who
had been tortured just like him by John Burge and
the Midnight Crew. For years, Ronald's appeals failed and the
system turned a blind eye to the unthinkable abuse he suffered.
But Ronald and the others on death row didn't stay silent.
The group began finding their voices, speaking out about the
(19:42):
fact that the Midnight Crew had tortured innocent people into
falsely confessing.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
What's amazing to me is how these men found their voice.
They did so by re enacting each other's trials. You
have to remember that when people are in prison, every
instinct tells you not to talk to other inmates about
your case. But these men, they acted out their case.
(20:08):
They played the role of prosecutor of defense, attorney of
police witness, and in some cases they convicted one another.
That process gave them agency, and at the end of
the day, all of these men became great storytellers. They
could not only tell the story of what happened to
(20:30):
each of them, but they could tell the stories of
each other.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
As the Midnight Crew torture scandal blew up, Ronald's personal
fight for justice became unignorable. In two thousand and one,
Ronald got a new team of post conviction lawyers. They
discovered previously undisclosed evidence about that prison snitch who claimed
Ronald had confessed. Turns out, the snitch had received money
an early release from prison in exchange for his false testimony.
(20:59):
That evidence, plus the discovery of the Midnight Crew torture
scandal led prosecutors to agree that Ronald's conviction should be
thrown out. On July seventh, two thousand and nine, Ronald
Kitchen became a free, exonerated man. Six weeks later, he
was awarded a certificate of innocence. Those forty five minutes
(21:27):
that Ronald had expected to be gone they turned into
twenty one years behind bars. The Gage Park killings have
never been solved. As for the other men on death
row with Ronald, over the years, several of them walked free,
to those who remained in prison had their sentences commuted
to life, and their continuing to fight their cases. And
(21:48):
what about John Birge, Well, as we told you, he
got kicked off the Chicago Police Force. But neither John
Burge nor any member of the Midnight Crew was ever
charged with or convicted of any act of torture because
the statute of limitations had passed by the time the
truth came to light. Maybe we can find some small
measure of justice though, in the fact that John Birge
(22:09):
did go to prison for lying about torture. In twenty ten,
Burge was sued by someone he'd tortured during the lawsuit,
Burge gave a sworn statement denying that any abuse had
occurred on his watch. That falsehood was enough to convict
Burge of perjury. John Burge served from twenty eleven to
(22:30):
twenty fourteen in federal prison, a much shorter length of
time than many of his victims spent behind bars. After
he left prison, Burge gave an interview calling the torture
victim's human vermin. He took up residence in Florida, still
collecting his police pension four thousand dollars a month. He
even drove a boat called Vigilante.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Well, no justice was not served in this case. I
mean he was sentenced to four years in prison. He
didn't serve that long. Birge was convicted thirty seven years
after the first time. We know that he used electric shock.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
You know, at the end of the day, John Burge
was released after only serving a few years in prison,
while Ronald and the other men on death row spent
decades in some of the harshest prisons in Illinois system.
That's not justice.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
In twenty eighteen, John Burge died at his home in Florida.
After his death, the police union posted a statement on Facebook,
saying that the Fraternal Order of Police does not believe
the full story about the Birge case has ever been told.
They're probably right. Decades after Burge's reign of terror, allegations
of torture by the Midnight Crew are still coming to light.
(23:44):
In two thousand and nine, the State of Illinois formed
a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to review and respond
to these allegations. Meanwhile, lawsuits upon lawsuits have been filed
and are still being filed. So far, the Midnight Crew
has cost the City of Chicago one hundred million million
dollars in brutality settlements, defense costs, and reparations.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
A reparations ordinance passed by the city Council created a
fund so that many of these torture survivors, those with
credible claims of torture, could be compensated for what happened
to them. It was a recognition and ownership of this
problem by the City of Chicago, and it's never happened
(24:27):
before in the United States.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
One lawsuit filed on behalf of fifty torture victims settled
under the condition that the story of John Burge and
systemic Chicago police misconduct be included in the Chicago Public
Schools high school curriculum so that everyone remembers.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
We can never forget the Chicago torture scandal, because if
you don't remember, then history can repeat itself. We have
to learn the lessons of history, and the best way
to do it is to teach young own minds about it.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
And that's where you'll find Ronald Kitchen today. He and
other survivors of the Midnight Crew visit classrooms across Chicago
where they talk to teenagers about what they endured and
what they hope can be learned from their ordeals. And
if you pay attention to the way Chicago's kids react
to these stories, you'll have hope for the future. They listen,
They stay to hear the end of the story, even
(25:23):
after the bell rings. What do you think about all
the recent social media videos of police brutality? Students ask,
how can we as young people make a change. For
his part, Ronald Kitchen has no quick answers, but he
does have a quick sense of justice. As he told
students at one Chicago high school, there's no gray area
in torture. You need to see it for what it
(25:46):
really is. It's black and it's white. Hello, Hey Ronald, Hey,
how you doing. It's Laura and Steve. How are you doing.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
I'm I'm good.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
When you visit those schools, what do you hope the
kids learn from hearing you speak?
Speaker 5 (26:07):
Well, I think the meaning of going to the schools
is to let them know that this could happen to anybody.
It's mind boggling because the Boogeyman not just touch me,
stump me, kick me, punch me, slap me. The Boogeyman
did all this to me.
Speaker 1 (26:23):
And then your job became to fight the Boogeyman. Yeah,
it wasn't just one bad guy. You were fighting a
whole system that let these guys do what they did
for so long.
Speaker 6 (26:33):
We was fight that could lad.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
We didn't have a rock.
Speaker 6 (26:35):
We had a pencil and paper, and that penston paper
came out to be stronger than that rock could evidence.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
It's hard for people to understand how you could get
the space or the time on death Row to reenact
these trials.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
We had a couple of good captains back there. They
let us have law classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I
thank them for helping us with the process of gaining
our freedom.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
You and the other guys. They're organized, worked together and
made a big, big change even though you were locked up.
You know, do you talk to kids in schools about
how they should come together and work to make change
in the same way find their own voices.
Speaker 5 (27:16):
Yeah, that's the whole point of helping them find their voices.
Your voice is your best weapon.
Speaker 6 (27:21):
If we found our voices in a depth of hell,
your voice should be heard no.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Matter what you went.
Speaker 1 (27:27):
What are you enjoying in life these days, Ronald?
Speaker 5 (27:30):
My family, I think that's the best and adult fummy
with my little family.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Did I hear you say you were on your way
to get a pony?
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (27:39):
Today is my daughter's birthday. She's turning nine and the
theme is Cowboy. So uh yeah, I'm going to get
the pony.
Speaker 5 (27:46):
Now.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
That's so nice.
Speaker 5 (27:48):
I'm trying to get this she bugger right now, those
pictures I will.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
When you think of this scandal, you have to think
about not only Burge and his Midnight crew. You have
to think about the armies of people who knew about
it and kept quiet. Every time somebody was tortured. There
were police officers in that station who heard the screams
and then There were states attorneys who came in and
(28:19):
had to write out the confessions. There were lawyers who
heard these stories from their clients, and judges who heard
these stories in court.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
A lot of folks had to know about what was
going on for so many years.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Well, this was a case of systemic racism, not just
of a few bad apples. It was an open secret
and not so secret open secret, and think about what
that does to these communities.
Speaker 1 (28:50):
The court system may have turned a blind eye to
these defendant stories, but they must have told their family
members and their friends and their neighbors what happened to them.
Repeated story of abuse must have leaked out and saturated
the South Side.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
An open wound that for years was not addressed.
Speaker 1 (29:11):
Injustices. Like the Chicago police torture scandal are at the
root of what our country is experiencing right now, a
national reckoning with race and the criminal justice system. These
stories need to be told so that we can collectively
acknowledge the wrongs and start having a real discussion about
what's right. And that's the story of the Midnight Crew.
(29:39):
Next week we'll take you to the United Kingdom to
tell you about the Birmingham six two pubs were bombed
in one of the biggest mass murders in British history,
and six Irish men found themselves in the wrong place
at the worst time. Wrongful Conviction False Confessions is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts association with Signal Company
(30:01):
Number one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm
and Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by Senior
producer and Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
(30:24):
and I Wrider, and.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
You can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast dot com.
Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction,
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Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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The Burden
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.