State’s top court weighs convicted rapist’s claim of torture by Lt. Burge’s crew

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/7677350-418/states-top-court-weighs-convicted-rapists-claim-of-torture-by-lt-burges-crew.html

BY DAVE MCKINNEY Sun-Times Springfield bureau chief [e-mail]
September 15, 2011 2:32PM

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. snip

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.