The City of Chicago stands on the precipice of finalizing a nearly $15.4 million settlement to 77-year-old Robert Smith, who endured 33 years behind bars for a wrongful conviction. Smith's three-decade nightmare began with a coerced confession to a 1987 double murder, a crime he steadfastly maintained he did not commit. The grotesque saga, implicating Chicago police detectives trained by the disgraced former Cmdr. Jon Burge in acts of torture, continues to unfold as the City Council's Finance Committee is slated to cast their vote on the settlement recommendation this Thursday.
In the reports from the Chicago Sun-Times, Smith, arrested in September 1987, was subjected to a 19-hour-long interrogation involving beatings, threats, and choking. These actions were conducted by members of Burge's so-called "midnight crew," resulting in a coerced confession. This confession ultimately led to Smith's 1990 conviction for the murder of his wife’s mother and her grandmother, pushing him into a life encased within prison walls until his release in 2020.
The case against Smith fell apart with the work of special prosecutors, who in 2020 acknowledged the credibility damage done by Burge and his crew's history of alleged torture. Consequently, Smith's conviction was vacated, and he was released to a world much changed and to a son he had never embraced outside the confines of incarceration. The full exoneration came with a certificate of innocence, effectively scrubbing clean the years of tarnished accusations.
According to a report by CBS News Chicago, the egregious details of Smith's ordeal included beatings with a telephone book and a club, racial slurs, and near asphyxiation, all tactics used in an effort to extract a confession. Evidence against Smith was claimed to have been fabricated, further depicting the depths of alleged corruption among the detectives. These detectives even went as far as reportedly dipping Smith’s underwear in the blood to create falsified crime scene evidence. And while Jon Burge was never prosecuted for the torture alleged by over 100 people, he was convicted on perjury and obstruction charges in a related civil case in 2010.
If the Finance Committee issues a favorable vote for the $15.4 million settlement, the proposal will move forward to a full City Council vote slated for December 10. Approval would resolve a legacy of injustice that has haunted Chicago, stemming from an era where the reliability of police interrogation techniques was deeply challenged by claims of systemic abuse. The city, already burdened with a history of police misconduct settlements, finds this single case of Smith adding to the cumulative tallies of recompense owed by a metropolis striving to reconcile with its shadowed past.
