CHICAGO | A former high-ranking Chicago police official was arrested Tuesday on charges of lying when he said he and homicide detectives under his command didn't torture one or more murder suspects more than two decades ago, the U.S. Attorney's office announced.
A federal indictment charges that Jon Burge, 60, lied when he said he and other detectives hadn't participated in the "bagging" of a suspect -- covering his head with a typewriter cover until he couldn't breathe -- in January 1987.
Burge, fired by the police department in the early 1990s, has long been the focus of allegations by civil rights attorneys that he and his detectives used beatings, electric shocks and death threats against homicide suspects to obtain confessions decades ago.
The arrest capped a long-running controversy over allegations that torture was used against suspects at Burge's Area 2 violent crimes headquarters.
"There is no place for torture and abuse in a police station," U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said in a statement issued after the arrest. "There is no place for perjury and false statements in federal lawsuits. No person is above the law and no person -- even a suspected murderer -- is beneath its protection."
Burge was arrested before dawn at his home in Apollo Beach, Fla., after federal prosecutors in Chicago obtained a sealed indictment charging him with perjury and obstruction of justice statements he made when answering questions about allegations of police torture in a civil lawsuit.
According to the indictment, Burge was asked whether he had been involved in the torture of homicide suspect Madison Hobley and said: "I have not observed nor do I have knowledge of any other examples of physical abuse and/or torture on the part of Chicago police officers at Area 2."
He repeatedly answered similar questions with flat denials.
Hobley claims he was tortured into confessing.
Burge was tentatively scheduled to be arraigned in Chicago Nov. 27.
A report by two special prosecutors appointed by the Cook County Circuit Court concluded two years ago that Chicago police beat, kicked, shocked or otherwise tortured scores of black suspects in the 1970s and 1980s as they tried to force confessions. But they said the actions were too old to warrant indictments.
The city has more recently agreed to pay $20 million to settle lawsuits by Hobley and other former inmates who were convicted on evidence gathered by Burge and detectives under him and later spent years in prison.
