The Special Prosecutor in the John Burge case has not made any visible progress and some are starting to ask questions about it. Burge is a former Chicago Police Commander who allegedly tortured a number of suspects:
Burge’s investigative methods were said to be brutal and sadistic. During the late 1970s and the 1980s dozens of African-Americans detained at Area 2 reported that they were suffocated with plastic bags, forced to engage in "games" of Russian roulette, had electric shocks applied to their ears or their testicles and were held against heated radiators and burned.
While the Burge case is a tough one due to physical evidence being largely non-existent and the passage to time the authors bring up important points:
But what has the special prosecutor accomplished in the year since his appointment? And, in particular, why has that prosecutor (from all appearances) failed to use his grand jury subpoena power to force police witnesses–including Burge and his underlings–to tell what they know about whether Area 2 police officers tortured citizens in their custody and whether they have lied and covered up the torture?If the special prosecutor would aggressively use his grand jury subpoena power, he might succeed in unraveling the questions surrounding Burge. We have no doubt that there are many good police officers who deplore those crimes. With assurance that an aggressive, no-nonsense investigation is underway, some of them may be willing to breach the police "code of silence" and reveal new information about Burge, his alleged practices and how secrets were kept. This investigation will be a failure if Egan does no more than methodically collect documents and ask victims to repeat their accounts of being tortured. The point here is to prosecute the torturers. If that does not happen, Egan will have muffed an important, historic opportunity to do justice.