Hours after the Chicago City Council signed off on a $10
million payout to settle his lawsuit, a somber Eric Caine stood in his lawyer's
Near West Side office Wednesday surrounded by relatives of other alleged
victims of police misconduct.
Caine didn't crack a smile. He said the money could never
erase the 25 years he spent behind bars for a crime he did not commit. But he
hoped his case brought attention to the plight of other men languishing in
prison despite valid claims of police wrongdoing.
"They know they're innocent, but they have little or no
way to prove it, and they struggle to get anybody to hear their cries to help
them," Caine said in a low voice.
Caine's case was the latest in a series of lawsuit
settlements involving disgraced former police Cmdr. Jon Burge and detectives
under his command that have brought the tab to nearly $70 million when legal
fees are counted.
Caine's attorney, Jon Loevy, used Wednesday's news
conference to sound a warning that even as cases involving Burge and his men
get resolved, there are scores of others involving other Chicago detectives who
"made cases regardless of guilt or innocence."
Loevy said that while the city has been forced to come to
terms with Burge's wrongdoing, the tendency is to resist acknowledging that the
problem of police misconduct was systemic.
"There are obviously a small number of police officers
where there are great clusters of accusations that improper tactics were used
and wrongful convictions occurred," Loevy said. "The city would have
us believe that if we just take care of the Jon Burge cases, the problem will
go away. Not so."
Among the names mentioned Wednesday was Kenneth Boudreau,
who worked under Burge and was featured in a 2001 Tribune series that found
Boudreau had helped obtain confessions from more than a dozen defendants in
murder cases in which the charges later were dismissed or the defendant was
acquitted at trial.
The lawyers also mentioned Ray Guevara, a now-retired West
Side homicide detective who over the years has been accused of beating suspects
into confessions, falsely translating statements of Spanish-speaking suspects
and threatening witnesses with criminal charges if they did not say what he
wanted them to say.
In 2009, a federal jury awarded $21 million to Juan Johnson
after finding Guevara intimidated and threatened witnesses to get them to
testify against Johnson, who spent more than 11 years in prison until he was
acquitted in a retrial.
Two inmates, Armando Serrano and Jose Montanez, are vying
for a new trial after the main witness in their 1993 murder case recanted and
accused Guevara of intimidating him into making a statement. At a hearing this
year, Guevara took the stand and invoked his Fifth Amendment right against
self-incrimination when asked about the alleged frame-up. The case is pending.
At Wednesday's news conference, Maria Rodriguez stood with
tears in her eyes as she held up a photo of her son, Ricardo, who she says was
framed by Guevara for murder. After 18 years in prison, her son is still
hopeful his claims will be heard, she said.
Caine, 47, said he falsely confessed to the 1986 murders of
an elderly couple, Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez, after two detectives working
for Burge threatened and punched him, rupturing his eardrum, as he sat
handcuffed to a chair in a South Side police station.
A judge threw out Caine's confession in early 2011, and
prosecutors dismissed the indictment after determining they could not go
forward without the tainted confession as evidence.
Burge is serving a 41/2 year sentence on a federal
conviction for lying in a lawsuit about his knowledge of police torture.
Caine said Wednesday that he still struggles day to day
because of his ordeal, but he always had faith he would be vindicated.
"I'm better today than I was yesterday, I can tell you
that."
