Reed was wrongfully convicted 29 years ago based on a confession extracted through torture by subordinates of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. His conviction was vacated on December 18, 2019 by Judge Thomas V. Gainer, who ordered that he be given a new trial and that his tortured confession be suppressed.

The case was assigned to Judge Thomas J. Hennelly, who for 14 months entertained arguments over whether to retry or release Reed. On February 14 of this year Judge Hennelly grossly exceeded his authority and reversed Judge Gainer’s order, directing that Reed be returned to the prison for life without possibility of parole. He is now in the Illinois Department of Corrections Northern Reception and Classification center in Joliet, Illinois.

In their letter the community leaders say, “We are appealing to you in your unique capacity as Governor to immediately release Gerald Reed because recent judicial decisions in his case have been conducted outside the rule of law and in denial of his rights to due process, leaving him and his family with no other recourse.” The Governor has the power to pardon Reed or commute his sentence.

Many organizations have called on the Governor to use this power to release elderly prisoners and others at risk for the COVID-19 virus infection. The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is urging the Governor to use his power to free all survivors of police torture in Illinois.

The groups and individuals signing the letter to Gov. Pritzker are:

Frank Chapman Jazmine Salas Regina Russell Souzan Naser Nadine Naber, Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity Community Renewal Society Chicago Torture Justice Center Black Lives Matter, Chicago Diane Palmer, President SEIU Local 73 Andy Clarno, Associate Professor of Sociology and African American Studies and Coordinator of the Policing in Chicago Research Group at UIC Sheila A. Bedi, Clinical Professor of Law, Director, Community Justice & Civil Rights Clinic, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Alderman, 35th Ward Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation Stacey Krueger, Graduate Student, UIC Jenine Wehbeh, Chicago Teacher Stacey Austin, Esq. Maryam Kashani, Lead Coordinator, Believers Bail Out, www.believersbailout.org, Assistant Professor, Gender and Women's Studies & Asian American Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign A. Naomi Paik, Associate Professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Indivisible Chicago-South Side Chicago Community Bond Fund Arab American Action Network (AAAN) U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)-Chicago chapter Byron Lopez, Alderman, 25th Ward, Chicago Jeanette Taylor, Alderman, 20th Ward, Chicago

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #Healthcare #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PoliticalPrisoners #JonBurge #GeraldReed #COVID19

Chicago, IL – In an attack on the human rights movement to stop police torture in Chicago, a Cook County judge ordered a torture survivor back to prison for life on February 14. In doing so, Judge Thomas Hennelly ignored irrefutable X-ray evidence of Gerald Reed’s torture at the hands of the infamous Jon Burge “midnight crew,” flouted the findings of the governor-appointed Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission – which affirmed Gerald’s claim of torture – and overturned the ruling of the judge formerly assigned to the case, who vacated Reed’s original conviction before retiring.

In response to Hennelly’s outrageous move, some 40 protesters occupied the hallway outside the office of the chief judge of the Cook County Circuit Court on February 25. Led by Reed’s mother, they demanded that the Chief Judge free Gerald Reed and impeach Judge Hennelly, who has a long history of denying evidence of police torture. Though the chief refused to meet with them, Reed’s supporters vowed to continue their fight.

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #PoliceBrutality #JonBurge

In one of the cases, that of Gerald Reed, Hennelly is deciding whether a man tortured by the infamous Jon Burge police crew – tortured to the point of having his leg broken – and tried solely on the basis of a false confession should be subjected to the injustice of a second baseless trial, after his original sentence was vacated. In the other, he is deciding whether evidence of wrongdoing warrants a special hearing for Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, two brothers who were framed by Detective Reynaldo Guevara, who has had 20 convictions tossed so far.

Burge and Guevara are the two most infamously abusive and corrupt cops in modern Chicago history, the twin terrors of police crimes in Chicago, accused of torturing, framing and wrongfully convicting hundreds of Black and brown men. Two cases involving the CPD’s most offensive stains and one judge who could change the course of so much, a judge whose very election to the bench is tainted by an attempted cover-up of a racist act.

Who is Judge Thomas Hennelly? Is he an impartial arbiter of the law, ruling from the rarified air of the bench, cozily removed from the slime and the muck of police and prosecutorial corruption? Hardly.

Elected to the circuit court in 2005, Hennelly is part of the small club that rules over criminal justice in Chicago. He was at the heart of the prosecutor’s office under Richard Devine that used torture confessions taken by Detective Burge and his crew. He started out in the Felony Review office and eventually became a supervisor in the Gang Crimes Unit. After leaving Gang Crimes, Hennelly became Chief Deputy of the Special Prosecutions office.

In that role, Hennelly’s boss at the time was a man named Robert Milan – a former prosecutor with his own disturbing approach to criminal justice, including defending a CPD detective with a voluminous history of abuse allegations and personally sitting with police to take confessions from the Dixmoor Five, a group of teens who were subjected to hours of intimidation before falsely confessing to rape and murder. Though wrongfully convicted, all five were exonerated years later on the basis of DNA evidence found at the scene, which came from a known serial rapist.

Milan has also called for the military occupation of entire Black neighborhoods in Chicago, with entrances sealed off, military check points erected, drones overhead filming residents’ every move, and 8000 National Guard troops sent in to patrol the streets of the South and West sides. “I’m here to help these poor people who are poverty-stricken and living in rough places,” Milan said of his plan. “When you start using words like ‘occupy’ or ‘militarize’ or ‘tanks rolling down the street’ – when you package it that way, you’re gonna get a lot of pushback. The way this thing should be packaged is: protection, protection, protection…”

Milan’s relationship with Hennelly epitomizes what is wrong with the justice system in Chicago. Because of conflicts of interest that tainted the entire prosecutor’s office under former State’s Attorney Richard Devine – who had personally represented Jon Burge – the court assigned the cases to a special prosecutor, but declined to take these cases away from Cook County judges, 198 of whom were former prosecutors.

But in Gerald Reed’s case, the special prosecutor assigned to the case is none other than Robert Milan, Hennelly’s former boss and the career Assistant State’s Attorney (ASA) who prosecuted men tortured by Burge and rose to become the chief deputy of the entire prosecutor’s office under Richard Devine. And now Milan comes to court day after day asking his former employee to keep Gerald Reed in prison. So far, Judge Hennelly is letting him. For over a year, Hennelly has allowed his former boss to delay and obfuscate, even granting Milan a continuance because he didn’t bother to read a motion Reed had submitted in advance.

Gerald Reed’s case is not the first time Milan and Hennelly have worked together to keep an innocent man behind bars. During their time as prosecutors, the two men fought to keep Aaron Patterson in prison even after ample evidence of his torture by Detective Jon Burge came to light. Patterson was sentenced to death, but eventually exonerated by Governor Pat Ryan because the evidence showed that Milan and Hennelly had built a case that rested entirely on a false confession.

Hennelly’s pattern of denying police torture is well-documented, including in the case of Kevin Murray, who – like Gerald Reed – was convicted on the basis of a forced confession and whose torture claim was upheld in 2017 by the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Review Commission (TIRC). Hennelly, then an ASA trying to prosecute Murray, sought to cast the victim as a liar. Commenting on Murray’s claims of being tortured into confessing by CPD Detective Kriston Kato, Hennelly told the Chicago Tribune, “You are getting a parade of murderers who come in and say Kato is a beater,” adding, “It's a lot of nonsense.”

In 2002, a CPD detective blew the whistle on Kato to Internal Affairs, documenting how he elicited a false confession from a suspect in a rape case, hitting the homeless man with such force that the whistleblower thought the man would likely die from the blow. Despite being accused for decades of torturing suspects, the CPD treated Kato as a miracle detective who could find suspects willing to confess within days of taking up old cases. To date, five murder convictions based on confessions he obtained have been overturned because of torture evidence.

Maybe the most disturbing part about Hennelly’s story is how he became a judge in the first place. As a prosecutor, Hennelly had committed a Batson violation, an egregious constitutional violation that involves striking minority jurors on the basis of their race in order to ensure an all-white jury. (Batson violations have been in the national spotlight of late, due to the case of Curtis Flowers.)

Thomas Hennelly and his partner in the prosecutor’s office, John Hynes, struck all but one of the Black jurors from their case for no reason other than their race. They tried to hide their racist action, but an Illinois Appellate Court was unconvinced of their defense and overturned the conviction of Johnny Walls and Charles Byrd as a result, citing a Batson violation. But Hennelly never disclosed this fact when applying to become a judge, something noted by the Chicago Council of Lawyers in their evaluation of him: “The Council is troubled, however, that [Hennelly] determined that it was not necessary to disclose on his judicial evaluation application that he was involved earlier in his career in a case where a Batson violation was found by a reviewing court.” Hennelly’s partner was the subject of an Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) investigation following a series of Chicago Tribune articles that revealed that he, too, failed to disclose this Batson violation when he applied for a judgeship, years before Hennelly. In Hennelly’s case, no investigation was ever launched, and he sailed into office.

Given Hennelly’s pattern of suppressing torture evidence and denying the accused their constitutional rights to justice, are we to simply assume he has now found an impartiality and fairness he failed to display as a prosecutor?

This year, Chicagoans will decide whether to re-elect State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who has explicitly decided to take the prosecutor’s office down a different path, away from its besmirched legacy, by undoing the work of men like Burge and Guevara and Hennelly and Milan. In total, Foxx has exonerated over 70 wrongfully convicted prisoners. But with the likes of Hennelly and Milan continuing to operate the system from both sides of the bench, we can’t just hope that legacy will be undone. Instead, we have to organize and demand that Hennelly and Milan and the others like them – who have aided, abetted, covered up, and profited from the torture and egregious violations of Black and brown men – are kept far from the operation of justice in this city, where they have no place.

#ChicagoIL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PoliticalRepression #ChicagoPoliceDepartment #JonBurge #JudgeThomasHennelly

Tampa, FL – Tampa activists protested at a Tampa area funeral home, Sept. 21, the location of the remains of torturer Jon Burge. The protesters demanded that the torture victims of Jon Burge be freed. They also called for the conviction of killer-cop Jason Van Dyke.

Jon Burge oversaw the torture of over 100 African-Americans from 1972 to 1991. By tying the victims to chairs, using electric shocks, putting bags over their heads, mock executions and attacks to their genitals, Jon Burge and his Chicago Police Department torture ring were able to obtain forced confessions.

Although he was charged with lying about the torture, he was never charged for the actual acts of torture he committed. Burge spent the last years of his life in a Tampa area halfway home, still receiving his $54,000 a year pension. His victims, however, oftentimes received the death penalty or life in prison based on the false confessions gathered from torture. Some 20 of his victims are still in prison today.

“We are here to protest legacy of Jon Burge,” said Gage LaCharite, an organizer of the protest. “We are also standing with the ongoing struggle in Chicago to convict Jason Van Dyke. Van Dyke is the most notoriously racist Chicago cop since Jon Burge. There is a broader pattern of violence against African Americans and other nationalities by CPD and police across the country. This is why we need Civilian Police Accountability Councils now!”

#TampaFL #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #Antiracism #ChicagoPoliceDepartment #JasonVanDyke #JonBurge