The mountain of costly settlements tied to disgraced Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge is about to get $15.4 million bigger.
On Thursday, the City Council’s Finance Committee will be asked to award that amount to Robert Smith Jr., who was tortured into confessing to a double murder he didn’t commit by the “midnight crew” trained by Burge.
Smith was released from prison in 2020 after spending 33 years behind bars, and has since been granted a certificate of innocence. The settlement amount being weighed by the Council pales in comparison to the $66 million that he sought in his lawsuit filed in 2021 in federal court in Chicago.
Smith was 39 when he was arrested in September 1987 for the murder of his wife’s mother and her grandmother. According to his lawsuit, officers placed Smith “in a small windowless interrogation room and handcuffed him to a ring on a wall” before they “beat him in the chest, threatened and choked him.”
The brutal interrogation dragged on for 19 hours. Only then did Smith confess to the murders “because he believed that he could escape the detectives’ further beatings and that once he was transferred to the hospital, he would be able to show” he was coerced into a confession, the lawsuit states.
Smith’s lawsuit further alleges that former Supt. Phil Cline lied under oath at Smith’s trial when he was still a lieutenant. Cline falsely testified that Smith admitted to killing the victims with a razor blade, according to the suit.
Smith was convicted of the double murder in 1990. Burge was fired by the Chicago Police Department in 1993, then later sent to federal prison for lying about the torture of suspects under his watch in the 1970s and 1980s. He died in 2018 at the age of 70, long after his release from prison.
In October 2020, Cook County special prosecutors moved to vacate Smith’s convictions with prejudice based on questions about the integrity of the police investigation, his lawsuit states. Smith was released from prison that day, and greeted by a son who he had never hugged outside of prison.
His lawsuit accused the police department and Burge’s henchmen of malicious misconduct and said he suffered more than three decades of “deprivation of liberty and isolation from family and society” that had caused him “profound and immeasurable” harm.
Smith’s attorney, Flint Taylor, has argued that Smith spent more than 33 years in prison for a double murder he didn’t commit after Burge-trained detectives John Yucaitis, Daniel McWeeny and others framed Smith for a double murder of his own family members by coercing his false confession, fabricating crime scene evidence to match that false confession and then lying about both at Smith’s suppression hearing and trial.
Five different judges have agreed with that conclusion.
If approved, Smith’s settlement would bring the total this year to more than $200 million. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed $16 billion budget proposes to to use five years of debt to bankroll $283 million in settlements and judgments tied to allegations of police misconduct. That includes the groundbreaking $90 million “global settlement” for more than 180 shakedown victims of corrupt former Sgt. Ronald Watts.
Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry has vowed to “take what we’ve learned” from the Watts settlement and use it to resolve other massive liability cases.
That proved to be difficult in the case of former Det. Reynaldo Guevara, whose actions led to yet another one-off settlement — this time for $17 million last month.