![]() ![]() “There have been a number of really bad apples in the Chicago police department who unquestionably have railroaded unknown numbers of innocent people into prison,” Warden said. As a top Guantánamo torture investigator, retired Army major general Mark Furlow, told the Guardian: “Zuley was one of those individuals in such a unique situation that our processes, system of checks and balances at that time were unable to provide clear guidance.”īut Chicago has a longstanding history of police abuse, much of it racialized. Zuley may be unique, Warden said, in being a police officer who “graduated from Chicago to Guantánamo”. The Cook County state’s attorney’s convictions-integrity unit is now examining another case involving Zuley, and is seeking his complaint file from a Chicago police-review board. Yet greater transparency may be on the horizon. Zuley, through a spokeswoman at his current job at the Chicago department of aviation, declined to participate in this and stories published by the Guardian on Wednesday, despite repeated attempts. But based on patterns from other Chicago police investigators, he said, the number of people Zuley put in prison likely “runs well into the double digits, perhaps the triple digits”.Ĭhicago police have yet to fulfill a freedom-of-information request on Zuley’s personnel file, and detailed lists of questions from the Guardian to Zuley’s attorney and a Chicago police department spokesperson went unresponded. Rob Warden, who founded Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, said he had never heard of Zuley. It is unclear how many cases Zuley investigated. With another man, Lee Harris, he turned on his own informant.Īllegations stemming from interviews and court documents suggest a kind of beta test in the ugly history of Chicago police abuse – which has robbed black and poor Americans of their health and freedom and still costs taxpayers millions in civil-rights payouts – for both the worst excesses of torture in the war on terrorism and a trail of convictions based on dubious confessions born of brutality. With Lathierial Boyd, he appears to have hidden disconfirming evidence. Zuley pursued murder suspects, often poor and black, who were flimsily linked to crime. In conversations with the Guardian from jail, three other people Zuley sent to prison – people who insist upon their innocence – describe being shackled through eyebolts for hours on end to precinct walls, giving Zuley’s police work in Chicago echoes of his interrogation work at Guantánamo. Whether they were true or not is less definitive. If anything, he is alone in going free.ĭuring his 30 years as a detective on Chicago’s north side and his time inside the wartime prison at Guantánamo, Zuley wanted confessions. ![]() The detective and the convicted businessman would see each other again: at a 2004 court hearing, Zuley described himself as “on a leave of absence” from the Chicago police department, “assigned to the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo”.Īnd then, in 2013, after Boyd lived half his life in prison, the state of Illinois exonerated him, admitting that he should never have been prosecuted in the first place.Ī Guardian investigation into Zuley’s police record and thousands of court documents – forgotten paperwork from old cases in Chicago, a new civil-rights lawsuit in federal court and the detective’s interrogation work for the US military at Guantánamo Bay – has found that Boyd was far from alone in facing brutality and manipulated justice. ![]() The evidence connecting Boyd to the shooting of two men was non-existent: a suspicious piece of paper, eyewitnesses ruling him out from the scene, evidence ignored. Thanks to the police work of Dick Zuley, whom Boyd describes as “evil”, an innocent man was found guilty of murder. As soon as Detective Richard Zuley came back, Boyd thought, he’d be free.Ī quarter-century later, Boyd remembered Zuley’s words when the detective returned from his well-heeled home: “No nigger is supposed to live like this.” His business papers were in order: contracts for his real-estate business, tax documents, the forgettable dealings of a successful man – hardly what a killer might carry. But he had turned a corner with his life, and the contents of his briefcase, which Boyd had also handed over, could prove where his money came from. Yes, Boyd had sold drugs when he was younger. ![]()
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