Sworn testimony from former Mayor Richard M. Daley regarding torture tactics used by detectives working for disgraced Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge will remain out of the public view, at least for now.
Daley has long been able to steer clear of the public accounting of the Burge case. And his video-recorded deposition in one lawsuit has remained under a protective order since 2018, when Daley testified in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by Alonzo Smith.
Smith alleged Daley — then the Cook County state’s attorney — ignored evidence that Chicago Police Department detectives under Burge routinely tortured criminal suspects, mostly Black men. Peter Dignan and John Byrne, two detectives working under Burge at Area 2 detective headquarters, beat Smith with a rubber nightstick, kicked him in the groin and put a plastic bag over his head to force him to confess to the 1983 slaying of James Fullilove, the suit alleged.
Less than a year after Daley testified, the lawsuit was settled for $5.25 million before going to trial. Crucially, the settlement of the case also meant that Daley’s deposition was not entered into the court record. A protective order on the video forbids its distribution.
U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall issued a memorandum order and opinion in late September following motions and arguments by attorneys for a documentary producer who sought to have the order lifted.
“While the Court recognizes the public interest in seeing Daley’s deposition testimony, (the intervenor) has failed to demonstrate a legally significant change in circumstances that justifies vacating the protective order,” Kendall wrote. “Moreover, the public’s interest remains significantly augmented by the fact that Daley’s deposition is not public material.”
“The video deposition is decidedly not a matter of public record under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” Kendall added.
Daley’s attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment. In court filings, though, the former mayor’s attorney argued that lifting the protective order would violate Daley’s right to privacy concerning various health matters. Daley, now 83, suffered a stroke in 2014.
“(The intervenor’s) belief that the deposition will provide substantive information that the ‘public deserves to hear’ or consists of ‘important material’ is mistaken,” Daley’s attorney, Terrence Burns, wrote in a February 2025 filing. “Whatever the public’s possible interest, it is not ‘sufficiently strong’ enough to overcome Mr. Daley’s substantial interest in the confidentiality of his medical circumstances.”
The intervenor, Bob Hercules, is a Peabody Award-winning film producer, one of several who’s worked on a forthcoming documentary about CPD’s Area 2 on the Far South Side, where Burge and his underlings were assigned in the 1970s and 1980s.
In court filings, Hercules averred that attorney Flint Taylor — who represented Alonzo Smith and questioned Daley in the recorded deposition — had agreed to give him a copy of the recording if the protective order was lifted. Hercules argued that the protective order violated his First Amendment rights to receive information from a willing speaker.
Another producer of the film, James Sorrels, told the Tribune that he and his colleagues are considering their standing to appeal Kendall’s order.
“It’s extraordinary evidence,” Sorrels said. “It’s an extraordinary deposition by the former state’s attorney (in) Chicago at this critical time where the torture of Andrew Wilson, at a minimum, was known about and Chicago was still haunted by the inaction of the state’s attorney’s (office). It’s of critical importance for the city to know about this issue, this scandal, that we’re all still paying for how many years later.”
In 1982, brothers Andrew and Jackie Wilson were charged in the killings of two CPD officers, William Fahey and Richard O’Brien. The investigation was headed by Burge and the detectives working under him, and the Wilson brothers soon raised allegations that they were tortured by police.
It was undisputed that Andrew Wilson fired the fatal shots, but conviction of Jackie Wilson touched off a decades-long saga that, ultimately, led to Burge’s firing from CPD in 1993, the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois and a $17 million settlement for Jackie Wilson at the expense of Cook County taxpayers.
According to his lawsuit, Smith alleged torture all along — testifying about it at his bond hearing and later at a motion to suppress his confession. But both times judges sided with the detectives, who claimed it never happened.
Smith spent nearly 20 years in prison before being granted a new trial in 2015. Four years later, Smith obtained a certificate of innocence.
Smith’s lawsuit alleged that for years Daley failed to do anything about the burgeoning torture scandal even after he’d learned from police brass as far back as 1982 — when he was state’s attorney — that serious allegations had been raised about Burge and detectives under his command.
Twice before, Daley had been ordered to give a deposition in other lawsuits over torture claims, but the city settled those cases before he was questioned under oath.
In denying a motion by lawyers for the city to dismiss Smith’s lawsuit in 2016, former U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve — now assigned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit — wrote that Smith’s attorneys “sufficiently allege that Daley, as Chicago’s mayor, participated in a conspiracy to conceal evidence of police torture.”
The judge did, however, dismiss on technical grounds allegations over Daley’s actions as state’s attorney, saying that by law he was immune from exposure to damages stemming from a criminal prosecution.
In all, Burge and detectives under his command were alleged to have tortured and abused more than 100 suspects in the 1970s and 1980s.
Burge was suspended in 1991 and fired in 1993 by the Chicago Police Board for the torture of Andrew Wilson. Thirteen years later, special Cook County prosecutors found evidence of widespread abuse by Burge and detectives under his command but concluded that the statute of limitations on criminal charges had passed.
In 2008 he was arrested in Florida after being indicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice for denying involvement in torture in his written answers in a 2003 lawsuit in U.S. District Court.
In one example, Burge was asked to “state whether you have ever used methods, procedures or techniques involving any form of verbal or physical coercion of suspects while in detention or during interrogation, such as deprivation of sleep, quiet, food, drink, bathroom facilities, or contact with legal counsel and/or family members; the use of verbal and/or physical threats or intimidation, physical beatings, or hangings; the use of racial slurs or profanity; the use of physical restraints, such as handcuffs; the use of photographs or polygraph testing; and the use of physical objects to inflict pain, suffering or fear, such as firearms, telephone books, typewriter covers, radiators, or machines that deliver an electric shock.”
He answered: “… I have never used any techniques set forth above as a means of improper coercion of suspects while in detention or during interrogation.”
At his 2010 trial, a number of former convicts testified that Burge had used cattle prods on their genitals, suffocated them with plastic and beaten them with phone books.
Burge testified in his defense, denying in court that he ever tortured suspects or condoned torture. He said he had never witnessed a cop abusing a suspect in his 30 years with the department. He was convicted and served time in a North Carolina prison.
Despite costing the city tens of millions of dollars in legal expenses because of lawsuits related to the torture and abuse, Burge continued collecting a $4,000-a-month police pension.