• Exclusive: Secret interrogation facility reveals aspects
of war on terror in US
• ‘They disappeared us’: protester details 17-hour shackling
without basic rights
• Accounts describe police brutality, missing 15-year-old
and one man’s death
While US military and
intelligence interrogation impacted people overseas, Homan Square – said to
house military-style vehicles and even a cage – focuses on American citizens,
most often poor, black and brown. ‘When you go in,’ Brian Jacob Church told the
Guardian, ‘nobody knows what happened to you.’ Video: Phil Batta for the
Guardian; editing: Mae Ryan
Spencer Ackerman in Chicago
The Guardian
The Chicago police department
operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to
be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the
domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.
Two ex-senior Justice
Department officials say allegations about police operation are ‘very
disturbing’ and raise serious questions about constitutional violations
Read more
The facility, a nondescript
warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene
of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and
one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square
describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.
Alleged police practices at
Homan Square, according to those familiar with the facility who spoke out to
the Guardian after its investigation into Chicago police abuse, include:
• Keeping arrestees out of official booking databases.
• Beating by police, resulting in head wounds.
• Shackling for prolonged periods.
• Denying attorneys access to the “secure” facility.
• Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24
hours, including people as young as 15.
At least one man was found
unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.
Brian Jacob Church, a protester
known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in
2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of
a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police
station to be booked and charged.
This building looks innocent
enough. But those familiar with the secretive interrogation and holding
facility describe a shocking display of police abuses
Read more
“Homan Square is definitely an
unusual place,” Church told the Guardian on Friday. “It brings to mind the
interrogation facilities they use in the Middle East. The CIA calls them black
sites. It’s a domestic black site. When you go in, no one knows what’s happened
to you.”
The secretive warehouse is the
latest example of Chicago police practices that echo the much-criticized
detention abuses of the US war on terrorism. While those abuses impacted people
overseas, Homan Square – said to house military-style vehicles, interrogation cells
and even a cage – trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and
brown.
Unlike a precinct, no one taken
to Homan Square is said to be booked. Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans
who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered
into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at
a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their
whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square
are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside.
“It’s sort of an open secret
among attorneys that regularly make police station visits, this place – if you
can’t find a client in the system, odds are they’re there,” said Chicago lawyer
Julia Bartmes.
Chicago civil-rights attorney
Flint Taylor said Homan Square represented a routinization of a notorious
practice in local police work that violates the fifth and sixth amendments of
the constitution.
“This Homan Square revelation
seems to me to be an institutionalization of the practice that dates back more
than 40 years,” Taylor said, “of violating a suspect or witness’ rights to a
lawyer and not to be physically or otherwise coerced into giving a statement.”
Much remains hidden about Homan
Square. The Chicago police department did not respond to the Guardian’s
questions about the facility. But after the Guardian published this story, the
department provided a statement insisting, without specifics, that there is
nothing untoward taking place at what it called the “sensitive” location, home
to undercover units.
“CPD [Chicago police
department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any
interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility.
If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other
facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them. It also houses CPD’s
Evidence Recovered Property Section, where the public is able to claim inventoried
property,” the statement said, something numerous attorneys and one Homan
Square arrestee have denied.
“There are always records of
anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square,”
it continued.
The Chicago police statement
did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are
generated or their availability to the public. A department spokesperson did
not respond to a detailed request for clarification.
When a Guardian reporter
arrived at the warehouse on Friday, a man at the gatehouse outside refused any
entrance and would not answer questions. “This is a secure facility. You’re not
even supposed to be standing here,” said the man, who refused to give his name.
A former Chicago police
superintendent and a more recently retired detective, both of whom have been
inside Homan Square in the last few years in a post-police capacity, said the
police department did not operate out of the warehouse until the late 1990s.
But in detailing episodes
involving their clients over the past several years, lawyers described mad
scrambles that led to the closed doors of Homan Square, a place most had never
heard of previously. The facility was even unknown to Rob Warden, the founder
of Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, until
the Guardian informed him of the allegations of clients who vanish into
inherently coercive police custody.
“They just disappear,” said
Anthony Hill, a criminal defense attorney, “until they show up at a district
for charging or are just released back out on the street.”
‘They were held incommunicado for much longer
than I think should be permitted in this country – anywhere – but particularly
given the strong constitutional rights afforded to people who are being charged
with crimes,” said Sarah Gelsomino, the lawyer for Brian Jacob Church.
Photograph: Phil Batta/Guardian
Jacob Church learned about
Homan Square the hard way. On May 16 2012, he and 11 others were taken there
after police infiltrated their protest against the Nato summit. Church says
officers cuffed him to a bench for an estimated 17 hours, intermittently
interrogating him without reading his Miranda rights to remain silent. It would
take another three hours – and an unusual lawyer visit through a wire cage –
before he was finally charged with terrorism-related offenses at the nearby
11th district station, where he was made to sign papers, fingerprinted and
photographed.
In preparation for the Nato
protest, Church, who is from Florida, had written a phone number for the
National Lawyers Guild on his arm as a precautionary measure. Once taken to
Homan Square, Church asked explicitly to call his lawyers, and said he was
denied.
“Essentially, I wasn’t allowed
to make any contact with anybody,” Church told the Guardian, in contradiction
of a police guidance on permitting phone calls and legal counsel to arrestees.
Church’s left wrist was cuffed
to a bar behind a bench in windowless cinderblock cell, with his ankles cuffed
together. He remained in those restraints for about 17 hours.
“I had essentially figured,
‘All right, well, they disappeared us and so we’re probably never going to see
the light of day again,’” Church said.
Though the raid attracted major
media attention, a team of attorneys could not find Church through 12 hours of
“active searching”, Sarah Gelsomino, Church’s lawyer, recalled. No booking
record existed. Only after she and others made a “major stink” with contacts in
the offices of the corporation counsel and Mayor Rahm Emanuel did they even learn
about Homan Square.
They sent another attorney to
the facility, where he ultimately gained entry, and talked to Church through a
floor-to-ceiling chain-link metal cage. Finally, hours later, police took
Church and his two co-defendants to a nearby police station for booking.
After serving two and a half
years in prison, Church is currently on parole after he and his co-defendants
were found not guilty in 2014 of terrorism-related offenses but guilty of
lesser charges of possessing an incendiary device and the misdemeanor of “mob
action”.
It’s almost like they throw a
black bag over your head and make you disappear for a day or two
Brian Jacob Church
The access that Nato Three
attorneys received to Homan Square was an exception to the rule, even if Jacob Church’s
experience there was not.
Three attorneys interviewed by
the Guardian report being personally turned away from Homan Square between 2009
and 2013 without being allowed access to their clients. Two more lawyers who
hadn’t been physically denied described it as a place where police withheld
information about their clients’ whereabouts. Church was the only person who
had been detained at the facility who agreed to talk with the Guardian: their
lawyers say others fear police retaliation.
One man in January 2013 had his
name changed in the Chicago central bookings database and then taken to Homan
Square without a record of his transfer being kept, according to Eliza Solowiej
of Chicago’s First Defense Legal Aid. (The man, the Guardian understands, wishes
to be anonymous; his current attorney declined to confirm Solowiej’s account.)
She found out where he was after he was taken to the hospital with a head
injury.
“He said that the officers
caused his head injuries in an interrogation room at Homan Square. I had been
looking for him for six to eight hours, and every department member I talked to
said they had never heard of him,” Solowiej said. “He sent me a phone pic of
his head injuries because I had seen him in a police station right before he
was transferred to Homan Square without any.”
Bartmes, another Chicago
attorney, said that in September 2013 she got a call from a mother worried that
her 15-year-old son had been picked up by police before dawn. A sympathetic
sergeant followed up with the mother to say her son was being questioned at
Homan Square in connection to a shooting and would be released soon. When hours
passed, Bartmes traveled to Homan Square, only to be refused entry for nearly
an hour.
An officer told her, “Well, you
can’t just stand here taking notes, this is a secure facility, there are
undercover officers, and you’re making people very nervous,” Bartmes recalled.
Told to leave, she said she would return in an hour if the boy was not
released. He was home, and not charged, after “12, maybe 13” hours in custody.
On February 2, 2013, John
Hubbard was taken to Homan Square. Hubbard never walked out. The Chicago
Tribune reported that the 44-year old was found “unresponsive inside an
interview room”, and pronounced dead. After publication, the Cook County
medical examiner told the Guardian that the cause of death was determined to be
heroin intoxication.
Homan Square is hardly
concerned exclusively with terrorism. Several special units operate outside of
it, including the anti-gang and anti-drug forces. If police “want money, guns,
drugs”, or information on the flow of any of them onto Chicago’s streets, “they
bring them there and use it as a place of interrogation off the books,” Hill
said.
‘The real danger in allowing practices like
Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into other
aspects,’ criminologist Tracy Siska told the Guardian. Photograph: Chandler
West/Guardian
A former Chicago detective and
current private investigator, Bill Dorsch, said he had not heard of the police
abuses described by Church and lawyers for other suspects who had been taken to
Homan Square. He has been permitted access to the facility to visit one of its
main features, an evidence locker for the police department. (“I just showed my
retirement star and passed through,” Dorsch said.)
Transferring detainees through
police custody to deny them access to legal counsel, would be “a career-ender,”
Dorsch said. “To move just for the purpose of hiding them, I can’t see that
happening,” he told the Guardian.
Richard Brzeczek, Chicago’s
police superintendent from 1980 to 1983, who also said he had no first-hand
knowledge of abuses at Homan Square, said it was “never justified” to deny
access to attorneys.
“Homan Square should be on the
same list as every other facility where you can call central booking and say:
‘Can you tell me if this person is in custody and where,’” Brzeczek said.
“If you’re going to be doing
this, then you have to include Homan Square on the list of facilities that
prisoners are taken into and a record made. It can’t be an exempt facility.”
Indeed, Chicago police
guidelines appear to ban the sorts of practices Church and the lawyers said
occur at Homan Square.
A directive titled “Processing
Persons Under Department Control” instructs that “investigation or
interrogation of an arrestee will not delay the booking process,” and arrestees
must be allowed “a reasonable number of telephone calls” to attorneys swiftly
“after their arrival at the first place of custody.” Another directive,
“Arrestee and In-Custody Communications,” says police supervisors must “allow
visitation by attorneys.”
Attorney Scott Finger said that
the Chicago police tightened the latter directive in 2012 after quiet complaints
from lawyers about their lack of access to Homan Square. Without those changes,
Church’s attorneys might not have gained entry at all. But that tightening –
about a week before Church’s arrest – did not prevent Church’s prolonged
detention without a lawyer, nor the later cases where lawyers were unable to
enter.
The combination of holding
clients for long periods, while concealing their whereabouts and denying access
to a lawyer, struck legal experts as a throwback to the worst excesses of
Chicago police abuse, with a post-9/11 feel to it.
On a smaller scale, Homan
Square is “analogous to the CIA’s black sites,” said Andrea Lyon, a former
Chicago public defender and current dean of Valparaiso University Law School.
When she practiced law in Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, she said, “police
used the term ‘shadow site’” to refer to the quasi-disappearances now in place
at Homan Square.
I’ve never known any kind of
organized, secret place where they go and hold somebody before booking for
hours and hours
James Trainum, former
detective, Washington DC
“Back when I first started
working on torture cases and started representing criminal defendants in the
early 1970s, my clients often told me they’d been taken from one police station
to another before ending up at Area 2 where they were tortured,” said Taylor,
the civil-rights lawyer most associated with pursuing the notoriously abusive
Area 2 police commander Jon Burge. “And in that way the police prevent their
family and lawyers from seeing them until they could coerce, through torture or
other means, confessions from them.”
Police often have off-site
facilities to have private conversations with their informants. But a retired
Washington DC homicide detective, James Trainum, could not think of another circumstance
nationwide where police held people incommunicado for extended periods.
“I’ve never known any kind of
organized, secret place where they go and just hold somebody before booking for
hours and hours and hours. That scares the hell out of me that that even exists
or might exist,” said Trainum, who now studies national policing issues, to
include interrogations, for the Innocence Project and the Constitution Project.
Regardless of departmental
regulations, police frequently deny or elide access to lawyers even at regular
police precincts, said Solowiej of First Defense Legal Aid. But she said the
outright denial was exacerbated at Chicago’s secretive interrogation and
holding facility: “It’s very, very rare for anyone to experience their
constitutional rights in Chicago police custody, and even more so at Homan
Square,” Solowiej said.
Church said that one of his
more striking memories of Homan Square was the “big, big vehicles” police had
inside the complex that “look like very large MRAPs that they use in the Middle
East.”
Cook County, home of Chicago,
has received some 1,700 pieces of military equipment from a much-criticized
Pentagon program transferring military gear to local police. It includes a
Humvee, according to a local ABC News report.
Tracy Siska, a criminologist
and civil-rights activist with the Chicago Justice Project, said that Homan
Square, as well as the unrelated case of ex-Guantánamo interrogator and retired
Chicago detective Richard Zuley, showed the lines blurring between domestic law
enforcement and overseas military operations.
“The real danger in allowing
practices like Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib is the fact that they always creep into
other aspects,” Siska said.
“They creep into domestic law
enforcement, either with weaponry like with the militarization of police, or
interrogation practices. That’s how we ended up with a black site in Chicago.”
The Chicago police used
appalling military interrogation tactics for decades
Tracy Siska/The Guardian
From Russian roulette to
electric shocks to genitalia, abuse associated with black sites has happened in
the heart of America
The culture of interrogations
at Guantánamo didn't develop in a vacuum. Similar techniques have been used
against African Americans for far too long. Photograph: Joaquin Palting/CORBIS
Tracy Siska is the Executive
Director of the Chicago Justice Project.
department has promised for
more than a century to eliminate torture from its interrogation rooms. For more
than a century, the Chicago police department has failed to deliver on that
promise.
The latest shameful episode is
the tale of Richard Zuley, a police officer who brought the tactics he learned
in Chicago to Guantánamo Bay and back again, as reported by The Guardian.
Sadly, there is a precedent for
Zuley.
For example, in a 2000 case
that resulted in a successful federal civil rights lawsuit, a Latino teenager
was held for four days chained to a wall in an interrogation room, where he was
not only questioned repeatedly, but denied bathroom access and left to soil
himself. During the boy’s civil rights trial, officers could only prove that
they fed him once during the four days. The teen eventually confessed to a
murder he did not commit. After he spent just a few weeks in jail, another
suspect was arrested with the murder weapon and confessed shortly after his
arrest. How many others locked up have not been so fortunate?
Exclusive: At the notorious
wartime prison, Richard Zuley oversaw a shocking military interrogation that
has become a permanent stain on his country. Part one of a Guardian
investigation reveals he used disturbingly similar tactics to extract
confessions from minorities for years – as a police officer in urban America
Read more
Most infamously, there is
highly decorated Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge who, during his 23-year
tenure on the force from 1970 to 1993, used the techniques he learned from
interrogating the Vietcong as a military policeman in Vietnam on black suspects
in Chicago. These techniques included Russian roulette with pistols and
shotguns, burning suspects on radiators, suffocation with typewriter covers,
beatings with phone books and electric shocks to the ears, nose, fingers, and
testicles.
Burge was a fast-rising and
well-respected officer who operated with impunity; neither his colleagues nor
his supervisors blew the whistle. Neither did prosecutors or officials in the
Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. Instead, Burge was accorded hero status
– until community activists, public interest lawyers and one lonely journalist
at the city’s weekly exposed his horrid behavior what it really was:
unacceptable.
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Once public pressure mounted –
and only then – Burge was finally fired in 1993, accused of torturing
confessions out of what is believed to be more than 100 African American men.
He was not, however, without his defenders: at the time of his firing, the
Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the largest union representing officers,
attempted to run a float honoring Burge in the Chicago’s St Patrick’s Day
parade. And it wasn’t until 2006 that a special prosecutor was appointed to
examine Burge’s record and determine if a criminal case could be brought
against him. (Only a perjury charge stuck.)
The relationship between
communities of color in Chicago and the Chicago Police Department hasn’t
recovered from Burge’s abuses. Residents remain wary, while the police remain
largely unapologetic. Today, the Chicago Police Department’s tactics – known as
“touchless torture” – are less horrific but still abusive.
These new methods focus more on
sensory deprivation and isolation to wear down a suspect – sometimes with the
same result: false confessions. Because these methods do not leave marks, it is
much harder for judges and juries to understand just how coercive they are.
A series of US supreme court
cases over the last century have codified the rights that are supposed to
protect suspects under our system. Sadly, those rights still mean next to
nothing in Chicago interrogation rooms, which still bear too much resemblance
to those in Guantánamo – and those from the now-distant past of Vietnam.
The way forward requires reform
on a system’s level – not at an individual case level. The use of these types
of tactics is not a bad apple issue, but rather about a rotten-to-the-core
system that turns a blind eye to massive civil rights violations because the
system benefits from those civil rights violations. About 90% of all criminal
cases in America result in a plea bargain, which makes any given confession so
much more powerful than it would normally be and thus that more desirable to
obtain. Sadly prosecutors who have a constitutional obligation to be a check on
coercive police practices fail in their obligations in America because there is
an institutional incentive for them to ignore civil rights violations and push
for plea bargains using the coerced confessions.
Any meaningful reform starts
with educating juries about the coerciveness of the interrogation room and the
tactics used to extract confessions; after that, judges must live up to their
responsibilities and deny plea bargains in case in which the only evidence is a
confession. While hardly a cure-all, these two massive reforms of legal
procedure could help remove the institutional incentives for those working for
the system to obtain and use coerced confessions.
