By Maudlyne Ihejirika
Chicago Sun Times
CHICAGO — Over three days in police custody, Michael Tillman was beaten with a phone book, punched in the face and stomach until he vomited blood, had a plastic bag put over his head and 7 Up poured into his nose in a crude form of waterboarding, a court petition says.
Tillman, then 20, the father of a 3-year-old daughter and infant son, confessed to a crime he never committed after hours of torture under former Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge’s officers, his attorneys say.
“It does not get any uglier than this case,” said Locke Bowman of Northwestern University’s MacArthur Justice Center, which with the People’s Law Office has investigated several Burge cases.
And 23 years after Tillman’s imprisonment, those attorneys on Tuesday filed a petition seeking to vacate his conviction in the murder and rape of 42-year-old mail clerk Betty Howard, and grant him a new trial.
Now 43, Tillman was arrested on July 22, 1986, in the murder of Howard, whose body was found in a building where Tillman lived with his girlfriend and was the janitor. He was convicted on Dec. 18, 1986, -- absent any physical evidence and based solely on his confession -- according to the petition filed in Cook County Circuit Court.
Tillman’s attorney raised the torture allegations at trial, but the judge refused to throw out his confession, and Tillman was sentenced to life in prison.
Police later arrested 27-year-old Clarence Trotter, who was found with Howard’s possessions, and whose fingerprints and other physical evidence linked him to Howard’s murder. Trotter too was charged and convicted, and given life in prison. But Tillman lost a 1999 appeal, when the judge in the appellate decision, while noting lack of evidence tying him to the crime or to Trotter, wrote that his confession was “sufficient.”
“It took 23 years to get to this point because the system has failed at every step along the way, at the police level, the prosecution level, the appellate level,” said Bowman.
Burge, former Area 2 commander, and more than 20 officers who worked with him have been accused of torturing confessions from murder victims in the 1970s and 1980s. Convictions in several Burge cases have been reversed, remanded or overturned, and tens of millions paid by the city in civil settlements.
Indicted last year on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in relation to one of the civil suits, Burge is expected in court today on his pending January 2010 trial.
The People’s Law Office and MacArthur Center claim 23 people who were tortured by Burge and his men still remain in prison, including Tillman, who is being held at Menard Correctional Center.
Copyright 2009 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.