SPRINGFIELD — Stanley Wrice contends officers working for notorious Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge beat him into wrongly confessing a role in a 1982 gang rape.
That’s enough to warrant a new hearing that might reverse his conviction, he argues.
But eyewitness accounts put Wrice at the scene of the rape and showed him carrying a hot clothing iron used to burn the rape victim on 70 percent of her body.
And that’s sufficient evidence to keep him imprisoned, a special prosecutor contends.
Those were the arguments presented Thursday to the Illinois Supreme Court in the first case in a decade in which justices are being asked to weigh the claim of a Burge torture victim and possibly establish a legal precedent that could lead to freedom for 15 imprisoned inmates who claim to be victims of Burge’s “Midnight Crew.”
Wrice’s confession to the brutal crime, which came after he allegedly was beaten by two Burge officers with a flashlight and rubber hose, essentially amounts to “a harmless error” that doesn’t prove his innocence, prosecutors have contended — a claim Wrice’s legal team took aim at Thursday.
“They’ve given you no reason other than just saying it’s no consequence that a man was taken downstairs [by police], and carried and beaten, and some of these men who were electrocuted and waterboarded, it’s of no consequence to this court. That’s just a regular error that happens in the state of Illinois. Well it’s not,” Heidi Lambros, an appellate defender representing Wrice, told the justices.
“This court should not stand for that. This court should not tolerate the torture of its citizens within its walls,” she said.
Wrice, who has been imprisoned for nearly three decades of a 100-year sentence for the crime, won an Illinois Appellate Court decision in December that ordered a new hearing on his torture claims, which had been repeatedly rejected by the trial court. That decision was appealed by the state.
A special prosecutor, who described the Burge unit’s tactics as “abhorrent,” argued that “overwhelming evidence” existed beyond just the confession to convict Wrice originally, including testimony from two eyewitnesses and the facts the assault occurred in Wrice’s bedroom in his house.
“This was a party house where two individual eyewitnesses came forward and identified Stanley Wrice … finding an iron in this party house, taking it and lighting it on a stove over a three-hour period, [and going] up and down his stairways to his bedroom with his friends where a woman was burned and raped repeatedly,” special prosecutor Myles O’Rourke told the court.
“The other evidence is exactly what the appellate court looked toward in finding there was sufficient evidence of guilt,” O’Rourke said, referring to an earlier appeals court ruling that upheld Wrice’s conviction.
No DNA evidence existed to tie Wrice to the crime, which Justice Charles Freeman focused upon while questioning O’Rourke, who acknowledged the technology was not in use at the time of the crime.
The lone remaining eyewitness and his two co-defendants have recanted their accounts implicating Wrice, saying they too had been beaten or threatened by Burge’s officers.
“Bobbie Joe Williams is the only surviving witness in this case, and he claims that he did not see Stanley Wrice put an iron on the stove, heat it up, go upstairs, and his testimony to that effect is false,” said David Protess, president of the Chicago Innocence Project, which interviewed all of the surviving witnesses in the case and favors a hearing on Wrice’s torture claims.
The court adjourned Thursday without making a decision in the case.
