Court Opinion

ID: 9497689
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:57:31.199085+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:21.283097
License: Public Domain

WOOD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
While I agree that the district court correctly denied Leonard Hinton’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2254, given the stringent standards for relief that apply to such claims, I see this as a much closer case than the majority does. Hinton raised a serious challenge to his conviction. He loses, however, because the state court’s conclusion that the tainted confession did not affect the outcome of Hinton’s trial was not downright unreasonable. Nevertheless, the claim Hinton has made regarding his confession illustrates dramatically the high price our system of criminal justice pays when police abuse runs rampant: a cloud hangs over everything that the bad actors touched, whether or not they did anything wrong on a particular occasion.
In his § 2254 application, Hinton argued that his confession to the police was the result of a nightmarish course of torture (including having a suffocating plastic bag put over his head, being kept from the toilet, being hung from a pole near the ceiling, and having his genitals and rectum shocked) that had lasted over a period spanning several days. Had he not admitted to the murders in his coerced confession, he continues, he would not have testified as he did at the trial, and the remainder of the state’s case (which included no physical evidence linking him to the scene) would have looked far weaker. The state court evaluated the record as a whole, as my colleagues have recounted, and it concluded that enough evidence existed that was completely independent of the confession to make it confident that any error in the admission of *822the confession was harmless. That finding is not so far-fetched that it can be labeled unreasonable, as the term is defined for AEDPA.
Nonetheless, as Hinton’s appellate lawyers have pointed out to this court, a mountain of evidence indicates that torture was an ordinary occurrence at the Area Two station of the Chicago Police Department during the exact time period pertinent to Hinton’s case. Eventually, as this sorry tale came to light, the Office of Professional Standards Investigation of the Police Department looked into the allegations, and it issued a report that concluded that police torture under the command of Lt. Jon Burge — the officer in charge of Hinton’s case — had been a regular part of the system for more than ten years. And, in language reminiscent of the news reports of 2004 concerning the notorious Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq, the report said that “[t]he type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture.” The report detailed specific cases, such as the case of Andrew Wilson, who was taken to Area Two on February 14, 1982. There a group led by Burge beat Wilson, stuffed a bag over his head, handcuffed him to a radiator, and repeatedly administered electric shocks to his ears, nose, and genitals. See People v. Wilson, 116 Ill.2d 29, 106 Ill.Dec. 771, 506 N.E.2d 571 (1987). Burge eventually lost his job with the police, though not until 1992. See In the Matter of the Charges Filed Against Jon Burge, No. 91-1856 (Chicago Police Board, February 11, 1993). To this day, Burge has not been prosecuted for any of these actions, though it appears that he at least thinks that he may still be at some risk of prosecution. See, for example, “Cop brutality probe must be thorough, fair,” Chi. Sun-Times, May 16, 2002 (editorial); Hal Dardick, “Burge repeatedly takes 5th; Former police commander stays mum on torture questions,” Chi. Tribune, Sept. 2, 2004 (noting allegations that Burge or people reporting to him had tortured 108 Black and Latino suspects between August 1972 and September 1991).
It is of course possible — one would hope even likely — that Burge did not torture every single suspect who crossed his path. Thus, it was not enough for Hinton to show that Burge had tortured or supervised the torture of a substantial number of other arrestees. Hinton had to offer some evidence indicating that he himself was the victim of this abuse. His task here was exceedingly difficult. First, the trial court resolved critical issues of credibility' against him: it did not credit his account of the torture at all, given the lack of markings on his body or other corroborative evidence. Second, the state court found that the alleged blood-stained jersey that Hinton argued should have been introduced into evidence was not the clear evidence of injury Hinton believed it to be. Third, Hinton did admit to the killings at the trial, even though he attempted to characterize them as self-defense or accidents. Coercion or even torture at the confession stage did not give him license to commit perjury. The jury was fully entitled to take this evidence into account and decide how plausible Hinton’s spin on it was.
For these reasons, I conclude that the district court correctly denied Hinton’s petition. I do so, however, aware that there is some risk of error in every decision that a court makes. Behavior like that attributed to Burge imposes a huge cost on society: it creates distrust of the police generally, despite the fact that most police officers would abhor such tactics, and it creates a cloud over even the valid convictions in which the problem officer played a role. Indeed, the alleged conduct is so *823extreme that, if proven, it would fall within the prohibitions established by the United Nations Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), which defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession ...thereby violating the fundamental human rights principles that the United States is committed to uphold. It is somewhat disturbing, given the gravity of the problem, to label what happened as “harmless” error. Nevertheless, I know of no clearly established Supreme Court case that would have required the state court to recognize the error as structural in nature. To the contrary, the Court has used the harmless error doctrine in involuntary confession cases, although it has never done so when the coercion rose to the level of torture. See Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 285, 111 S.Ct. 1246, 113 L.Ed.2d 302 (1991); cf. Brown v. Mississippi 297 U.S. 278, 56 S.Ct. 461, 80 L.Ed. 682 (1936) (holding that convictions resting solely on confessions that were “extorted by officers of the State by brutality and violence” violated the due process clause and the admission of which at trial was “a wrong so fundamental that it made the whole proceeding a mere pretense of a trial and rendered the conviction and sentence wholly void.”) I respectfully concur.