#166 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - The Midnight Crew

confessing to murder. Eventually, it became all too clear that what happened to him had happened to hundreds of others too. Let's talk about how the Midnight Crew got exposed to daylight and what's being done to make sure this kind of police torture doesn't ever happen again. You know, we've talked a lot during our podcast about psychological interrogation techniques. This is a really different case. This is physical torture.

It's the kind of thing most people think doesn't happen in the United States, but it did, and it did in my lifetime in Chicago. This was real. I said, how can this be going on? You know, at the end of the twentieth century. I mean, this is medieval, This is the stuff of the Spanish Inquisition, because by and large, by the nineteen fifties, these kinds of third degree tactics were no longer part of law enforcement. You know, Steve, I never knew what the term third degree meant before

I went to law school. So for our audience, it means physical abuse during interrogations, right. You know, Chicago's history with police interrogations is a fascinating one. The third degree thrived in Chicago in the thirties, forties and fifties. Then a group of police reformers brought in psychological and terry Asian techniques that they believed would be less likely to lead to false confessions. But in Chicago, old habits die hard. It's easy for anyone to understand why someone would falsely

confess if they're being physically abused or tortured. That's no way to get the truth, let alone justice. Today's story starts on July. It's summer in Chicago, one of the hottest on record, with temperatures topping a hundred degrees on the city is predominantly black South Side. A lot of homes are older run down, don't have air conditioning. Economic opportunities are thin, and people sweat just to pay the bills. So when the temperature climbs, tempers run high to That's

true for the residents and for the police. On July, things get way too hot in a south Side neighborhood called Gauge Park. In the middle of the night, a brick bungalow goes up in flames. After firefighters bring the blaze under control, police go inside. They find five bodies, two women who had worked as teacher's aids at a local school, and three young children. All of the kids had been smothered with pillows. One of the women had

been beaten and strangled. The other woman had been smothered too. She was the daughter of a Chicago cop. It's a horrible crime, and the case quickly becomes high profile. What Chicago police call a heater. But there's no eyewitnesses, no forensic evidence, no nothing. So police offer a two thousand dollar reward for information. Sure enough, just a few days later, a prison inmate calls police and claims that his friend,

Ronald Kitchen, confessed to him over the phone. Now prison phone calls are recorded and monitored, A quick chuck of the inmates phone recordings reveals he was lying. No one he spoke with had ever confessed to anything, but with no other leads, the police decide to go after Ronald Kitchen and go after him hard. Ronald was twenty two years old, and, as he admits today, he was no angel. Back then, with one young child and a second on the way, he made a living by selling cocaine, but

he was no killer and never had been. On the evening of August, Ronald leaves his house and heads for the corner store down the block. He's out to buy a gallon of milk and some cookie dough for his two year old son. Before he knows it, Ronald surrounded by police cars. One of the officers says something about a stolen vehicle. Another cop points a gun at him. Ronald knows he had nothing to do with any car theft, so he figures he'll be able to clear up the

situation without much difficulty. As the police put Ronald in handcuffs, he hollers to his family down the block, I'll be back in forty five minutes. Police bring Ronald to a south Side station called Area three. They throw him into an interrogation room and cuff his hands to an iron ring in the wall, and the account Ronald gives of the next sixteen hour is harrowing. According to Ronald, an officer comes in and asks who have you been talking to?

When Ronald doesn't know how to answer, the officer starts punching him in the chest and kicking his stomach. Over the next several hours, that officer would leave, then come back again over and over to ask the same question, who have you been talking to? And to continue the beatings. Sometimes he'd be joined by a second officer. When that officer entered the room, he would remove his nametag before joining the assaults. After hours of beatings, a third officer

came into the room alone. He asked if Ronald was okay and if he wanted anything to eat. When Ronald asked to call a lawyer, he says, the officer smiled, picked up the handset from a nearby phone, and smashed it into Ronald's skull. Do you hear ringing? Now? Said the officer. On his way out, he turned off the lights, leaving Ronald in the dark for hours. The beatings continued, with Ronald waiting in agony for the next round to start, the officers focused on areas of his body where damage

wouldn't be visible. At one point, officers cuffed both his hands behind his back and used their nightsticks to beat his genitals. But their desire to cover their tracks didn't stop the police from targeting Ronald's head too. They just used a phone book to cushion the blows and avoid leaving a mark. This torture session was clearly premeditated, mapped out in advance. The whole time. They were also calling Ronald racial slurs. The N word just rolled off their tongues.

The goal here was total humiliation, physical and mental. Hours of torture went by until Ronald finally broke. He signed a false confession dictated by the police, admitting to the Gauge Park killings. Based on that confession, Ronald Kitchen was charged with capital murder, meaning that he was facing the death penalty. At his first court appearance, Ronald told the judge that he had been tortured. A few days later, Ronald was transferred to a hospital for treatment. At the hospital,

his urine ran red with blood. Despite all of this, Ronald's false confession was allowed into evidence. Against him at trial, along with the testimony of that prison snitch who still claimed that Ronald had admitted the killings. On September, Ronald Kitchen was convicted of five counts of murder and sent to death Row. There, he'd soon discover he wasn't alone. At least nine other residents of Illinois Death Row had been tortured into confessing too. There was something much bigger

going on. This episode is sponsored by a i G, a leading global insurance company, and Paul Weiss, Rifkin, Morton and Garrison, a leading international law firm. The A i G Pro Bono Program provides free legal service, says, and other support to many nonprofit organizations and individuals most in need, and recently they announced that working to reform the criminal justice system will become a key pillar of the program's mission.

Paul Weiss has long had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society and in support of the public interest, including extensive work in the criminal justice area. What Ronald endured at Area three was no isolated incident. Ronald Kitchen had encountered a group of white cops who called themselves the Midnight Crew. The Midnight Crew closed cases by torturing black men until they confessed, and they operated under the

authority of a Chicago police detective named John Burge. To understand what happened to Ronald, you have to start asking some tough questions. What kind of police officer would do this to another human being? What kind of person would knowingly break the laws of common decency, the laws of humanity just to get a confession. When it comes to John Burge, the answer is complex. Here's our friend John Conroy, the journalist who was investigative reporting exposed the Midnight Crew.

John Burge was a very driven police officer. Initially he was a patrol officer, and then he was mooted to detective, and then he made sergeant, and then he made lieutenant. He seemed to me like somebody who would show up at my family's picnic and if my elderly aunt had a problem starting her car on the way home, he would have been the first one out there trying to get it working. That just seemed to me to be the kind of guy he was. On the other hand,

he brutally tortured people. John Burge was a Chicago Southsider born who grew up in a white on if called South Deering. He grew up in a working class, white neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago that during the late nineteen sixties went from white to black over the course of about four years, and his family was among the last to move out. He then went off to college, flunked out after about a semester, went home and enlisted in the military. Bird served as a military police officer

in South Korea and Vietnam. For his service, he earned the Bronze Star, Metal and Purple Heart. After he returned to Chicago, Bird joined the police force and racked up more than a dozen commendations. Everyone wants torturers to be Hannibal elector or somebody like that out of signs of the Lamps. Everyone wants torturers to be monsters, and they're basically normal people like you and me. Burns, for instance, once saved the woman, an African American woman, from committing suicide.

She had a gun to her throat. She pulled the trigger and he got his thumb in the firing mechanism and it didn't go off, but his apparent heroism wasn't the full story, because John Burge and his underlings ended up being accused of extracting confessions for more than two

hundred black men between using torture. You know, in Chicago, the cops were under tremendous pressure because we had an astronomical homicide People talk about homicides in Chicago now, they were eight higher in the early nineties, and so, you know, they hand solve crimes. They were getting information. That's another reason why people do it. They actually might think that they're helping out the good people of the community by torturing the bad ones. You do get information when you

torture people, you just don't get accurate information. People will say anything to stop the torture. Accusations against the Midnight Crew started emerging. Just a few months before Ronald Kitchen was convicted. In January, John Conroy published an investigative report in The Chicago Reader entitled House of Screams. The birds story came to me because I was writing a book on torture but not torturers and countries that people normally

suspected of torture, torture and democracies. And then a friend of mine called me and said, there's this guy named Andrew Wilson. He claimed he was given electric shock by the Chicago police and his testimony was just so compelling the police could not explain away his injuries. Andrew Wilson was a suspect in the murder of two Chicago cops, and House of Screams told the story of what happened

to him in police custody. The rumor was that during Wilson's interrogation, Burge and his men used techniques that Bird learned as a military Harry police officer back in Vietnam. Andrew Wilson emerged from the police station with these very peculiar marks on his ears and his nose in the shape of alligator clips. They were scabs, and he had parallel burns on his chest and a big burn on

his thigh. He said he'd been held against a hot radiator while electric shock was administered by a hand cranked device not dio, similar from a field telephone used in Vietnam. And because he'd shot the two cops, nobody wanted to believe him. Nobody's going to have any sympathy for cop killers, and Burge and his Midnight crew knew that they would be more likely to get away with torturing a cop

killer than anybody else. You know, Frankly, when we get in an uproar about torture, it's over the torture of people we like, somebody like say Nelson Madela, and we are outraged. But if you torture somebody whom we don't like, oh, that's no problem at all. So, you know, I think the true test of the society is can you stand up and defend the rights of people whom you abhor. During Andrew Wilson's trial, his attorneys started receiving letters in

Chicago police envelopes from an inside whistleblower. The department's torture problem, it seemed, went much further than Andrew Wilson. The letters provided a roadmap for anybody who wanted to investigate, because they listed the people who went along with the torture, and then it listed also the weak links, people who didn't like Birch. They wouldn't be asked to participate in the torture, but they would have been around the police station,

would have known about. After Conroy's story about Andrew Wilson ran an avalanche of other allegation came forward. There were men who had plastic bags put over their heads, men who were waterboarded with seven up, men who had their testicles stood on during interrogation. All black men tortured by all white cops. Of course, I think race was a factor in all of this. A lot of the abuse that was inflicted was not just physical, but it was verbal,

and it was regular use of the N word. The stories were horribly similar, and the evidence was there from the beginning. One torture victim, Aaron Patterson, managed to leave a visible cry for help in the interrogation room. And just picture this. This guy is being tortured and he's scratching this message in a metal bench with a paper clip, and the message couldn't be clearer. Please threaten me with violence, slapped and suffocated me with plastic No lawyer or dad

signed false statement to murder. Why did he do this? He did it because he was afraid he wouldn't survive the torture, and that even if he did survive, he was afraid that no one would believe him. Aaron did survive, and one of the other survivors was Ronald Kitchen. Ronald later realized that the second officer who participated in his interrogation, the one who took off his name tag before beating him. Well, that was no ordinary member of the Midnight Crew. That

was John Burge himself. By the time John Conroy published House of Screams, John Burge and the Midnight Cruise torture campaign had been going on for nearly twenty years. Meanwhile, Burge had been promoted to commander, out ranking of the other officers on the Chicago Police Force. So my article came out in January. As we were approaching press time, I was really uneasy. I thought, Oh Jesus, you know we're gonna go with a story that says that the

Chicago police engaged in torture. Nobody had said anything of the kind before. I thought there would be a furor and we might get sued, even though we had done every legal check that could be done. Burge was a powerful man, but the allegations against him were too numerous and too similar to ignore. John Burge was suspended from the Chicago Police Force. The local police union rushed to Burge's defense, throwing him a fundraiser at a union hall.

I was there. It was packed with more than a thousand people, probably most of them cops, but I'm sure some of them were States attorneys, because I know that it was advertised in the States Attorney's office. Meanwhile, more and more allegations of police torture were coming forward, beatings, cattle prods, Russian roulette. The Chicago Police Board held a hearing in into burgess alleged misconduct. Basically, it was an

employment fitness here. It was not a criminal case, and the city had attorneys present the case against Birch and they did a pretty done good job. I thought they actually sold the Police board on the idea that something had indeed happened here. During the hearing, an internal police report came to light. It suggested that police supervisors had known about the midnight cruise systemic brutality for years. The Police board found that John Birge had participated in physical

abuse and fired him from the Chicago Police. Now. The Police Board's decision was remarkable in that it never used the word torture. It said, John Birge did chick and or punch and or denied medical attention to and or and or and or you couldn't tell, Oh, well, what exactly do you think happened. So as a result of that decision, Birds got fired, but he was allowed to

retire with his pension. Another agency, the Office of Professional Standards, began investigating too, and it released a report that went a step further. The investigation found that Chicago police had taken part in a systematic, planned torture campaign that command officers knew about. Meanwhile, Ronald Kitchen, one of the victims of that torture, was still on death row for a crime he didn't commit. And remember, he was there along with other men who had been tortured just like him

by John Burge and the Midnight Crew. For years, Ronald's appeals failed and the system turned a blind eye to the unthinkable abuse he suffered. But Ronald and the others on death row didn't stay silent. The group began finding their voices, speaking out about the fact that the Midnight Crew had tortured innocent people into falsely confessing. What's amazing to me is how these men found their voice. They

did so by re enacting each other's trials. You have to remember that when people are in prison, every instinct tells you not to talk to other inmates about your case. But these men they acted out their case. They played the role of prosecutor of defense, attorney of police witness, and in some cases they convicted one another. That process gave them agency, and at the end of the day, all of these men became great storytellers. They could not only tell the story of what happened to each of them,

but they could tell the stories of each other. As the Midnight Crew torture scandal blew up, Ronald's personal fight for justice became un ignorable. In two thousand one, Ronald got a new team of post conviction lawyers. They discovered previously undisclosed evidence about that prison snitch who claimed Ronald had confessed. Turns out the snitch had received money and early release from prison in exchange for his false testimony.

That evidence, plus the discovery of the Midnight Crew torture scandal, led prosecutors to agree that Ronald's conviction should be thrown out. On July seven, two thousand nine, Ronald Kitchen became a free, exonerated man. Six weeks later, he was awarded a certificate of innocence. Those forty five minutes that Ronald had expected to be gone they turned into twenty one years behind bars.

The Gauge Park killings have never been solved. As for the other men on death row with Ronald, over the years, several of them walked free to those who remained in prison had their sentences commuted to life, and they're continuing to fight their cases. And what about John Burge. Well, as we told you, he got kicked off the Chicago

Police Force. But neither John Burge nor any member of the Midnight Crew was ever charged with or convicted of any of torture because the statute of limitations had passed by the time the truth came to light. Maybe we can find some small measure of justice though, in the fact that John Birge did go to prison for lying about torture. In two thousand ten, Burge was sued by someone he tortured. During the lawsuit, Burge gave a sworn statement denying that any abuse had occurred on his watch.

That falsehood was enough to convict Birge of perjury. John Birge served from two thousand eleven to two thousand fourteen in federal prison, a much shorter length of time than many of his victims spent behind bars. After he left prison, Burge gave an interview, calling the torture victims human vermin. He took up residence in Florida, still collecting his police pension four thousand dollars a month. He even drove a boat called Vigilante. Well, no justice was not served in

this case. I mean he was sentenced to four years in prison. He didn't serve that. Burge was convicted thirty seven years after the first time. We know that he used electric shock. You know, at the end of the day, John Burge was released after only serving a few years in prison, while Ronald and the other men on death Row spent decades in some of the harshest prisons in Illinois system. That's not justice. In two thousand and eighteen,

John Burge died at his home in Florida. After his death, the police union posted a statement on Facebook saying that the Fraternal Order of Police does not believe the full story about the Birge case has ever been told. They're probably right. Decades after Burge's reign of terror, allegations of torture by the Midnight Crew are still coming to light. In two thousand nine, the state of Illinois formed a Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission to review and respond to

these allegations. Meanwhile, lawsuits upon lawsuits have been filed and are still being filed. So far, the Midnight Crew has cost the City of Chicago one lion dollars in brutality settlements, defense costs, and reparations. A Reparation's ordinance passed by the City Council created a fund so that many of these torture survivors, those with credible claims of torture, could be compensated for what happened to them. It was a recognition and ownership of this problem by the City of Chicago,

and it's never happened before in the United States. One lawsuit filed on behalf of fifty torture victims settled under the condition that the story of John Burge and systemic Chicago police misconduct be included in the Chicago Public Schools high school curriculum so that everyone remembers. We can never forget the Chicago torture scandal, because if you don't remember, then history can repeat itself. We have to learn the lessons of history, and the best way to do it

is to teach young minds about it. And that's where you'll find Ronald Kitchen. Today, he and other survivors of the Midnight Crew visit classrooms across Chicago, where they talk to teenagers about what they endured and what they hope can be learned from their ordeals. And if you pay attention to the way Chicago's kids react to these stories, you'll have hope for the future. They listen, They stay to hear the end of the story, even after the bell rings. What do you think about all the recent

social media videos of police brutality? Students ask how can we as young people make a change. For his part, Ronald Kitchen has no quick answers, but he does have a quick sense of justice. As he told students at one Chicago high school, there's no gray area in torture. You need to see it for what it really is. It's black and it's white. Hello, hey, Ronald, how are you doing? It's Laura and Steve. How are you doing. I'm good, I'm good. When you visit those schools, what

do you hope the kids learned from hearing you to speak? Well? I think the meaning of going to the schools this let him knows that this could happen to anybody. It's mind bothering because the boogey Man not just touched me, stop me, kick me, punched me, slap me. The boogey Man did all this to me, and then your job became to fight the Boogeyman. It wasn't just one bad guy. You were fighting a whole system that let these guys do what they did. For so long we was fighting

good laugh. We didn't have a rock. We had a consul paper, and that punslum paper came out to be stronger than that rock could ever do. It's hard for people to understand how you could get the space or the time on death row to re enact these trials. We had a couple of good captains back there. They let us have law classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I thank them for helping us with the process of gaining

out freedom. You and the other guys, they're organized, work together and made a big, big change even though you were locked up. You know, do you talk to kids in schools about how they should come together and work to make change in the same way find their own voices. Yeah, that's the whole point of having them. Finding course is your best weapon. If we found out voices and a depth for hell no force to be heard. No matter what you we what are you enjoying in life these days? Ronald?

My family, I think that's the best. And a dope from me with my little family. Did I hear you say you were on your way to get a pony? Yeah? The day is my daughter's birthday. She turned in nine and the theme is cowboy. So yeah, I'm gonna get the pony. Now. That's so nice. I'm trying to get this she bug it right now. I will. When you think of this scandal, you have to think about not only Burge in his Midnight crew. You have to think about the armies of people who knew about it and

kept quiet every time somebody was tortured. There were police officers in that station who heard the screens, and then there were states attorneys who came in and had to write out the confessions. There were lawyers who heard these stories from their clients, and judges who heard these stories in court. A lot of folks had to know about what was going on for so many years. This was a case of systemic racism, not just of a few

bad apples. It was an open secret and not so secret open secret, and you know, think about what that does to these communities. The court system may have turned a blind eye to these defendant stories, but they must have told their family members and their friends and their

neighbors what happened to them. And this repeated story of abuse must have leaked out and saturated the South Side, an open wound that for years was not addressed injustices like the Chicago police torture scandal are at the root of what our countries experiencing right now, a national reckoning with race and the criminal justice system. These stories need to be told so that we can collectively acknowledge the wrongs and start having a real discussion about what's right.

And that's the story of the Midnight Crew. Next week we'll take you to the United Kingdom to tell you about the Birmingham Six. Two pubs were bombed in one of the biggest mass murders in British history, and six Irish men found themselves in the wrong place at the worst time. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flam and

Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by senior producer and Pope, along with producers Josh Hammer and Jess Shane. Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo. John Colbert is our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura and II Writer, and you can follow me on Twitter at s driven. For more information on the show, visit

Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction