The Conviction Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians, and Police Violence in Chicago

In this alarming exposé, civil rights attorney Taylor (The Torture Machine) reveals decades of government collusion to hide evidence of racist police violence in Chicago. While digitizing old files related to a civil case he pursued on behalf of Fred Hampton’s family after the activist’s 1969 assassination by Chicago police, the author “realized that numerous instances of blatant... corruption and cover-up... had never been sufficiently recounted.” Taylor undertakes a reexamination of the “breathtaking... manipulation” around the case, along the way drawing connections between Hampton’s murder and Chicago’s subsequent decades of anti-Black police violence. He does so in part by revisiting the plight of another client, Jackie Wilson, whose 1982 confession to killing two police officers was obtained through “electric shock” during the notorious “twenty-year reign of torture” of detective Jon Burge. Recapping the many criminal and civil trials, grand juries, and special prosecutor investigations surrounding both cases, Taylor unearths an extraordinary amount of misconduct, including perjury from police, a “rigged judicial acquittal” meant to influence an upcoming election, and backroom deals between prosecutors and judges seeking to avoid their own indictments. Even amid such jaw-droppingly crooked dealings, some still stand out, such as the continued use of “international con artist” William Coleman as a witness in all three of Wilson’s criminal trials. The result is a painstaking, vital record of institutionalized corruption. (May)