Chicago City Wire

A former Chicago FOP official applauded two special prosecutors for taking on a 14-year-old commission that legitimatizes claims of police abuse, and also serves as a lucrative pipeline for plaintiffs’ lawyers filing wrongful conviction cases.

The prosecutors, law partners Maria McCarthy and Fabio Valentini, challenged the Torture Inquiry & Relief Commission (TIRC) on constitutional and statutorial grounds, a rare legal move for attorneys defending former detectives and police officers in wrongful conviction cases, writes former FOP spokesman Martin Preib in a two-part commentary published in the Chicago Contrarian.

“Being an attorney who actually defends the Constitution in Illinois is a lonely pursuit, rife with condemnation from the rest of the legal and political swamp currently in power,” Preib wrote. “However, every now and then, someone emerges from Illinois' cesspool to do just that.”

McCarthy and Valentini challenged TIRC in the post-conviction cases of two convicted of double murders, Kevin Murray in 1987 and Devon Daniels in 1996, who claimed that the lead investigator, retired Detective Kriston Kato, tortured them into confessing. TIRC referred both cases for evidentiary hearings based on the claims.  

But on October 20, Will County Judge David Carlson (presiding due to a Cook County conflict of interest) ruled that “the act (2009 state law that created TIRC) itself skirts very closely to the edge of constitutionality…It also calls into question whether or not the TIRC statute in and of itself impugns the integrity of the judicial system of the third branch of government.”

The judge dismissed the Murray and Daniel TIRC referrals.

In his commentary, Preib wrote that the referrals are largely founded on “subjective, biased, and largely evidentiary baseless claims that accused officers are the target of numerous complaints, TIRC turns rumor mongering and media manufactured lies into powerful forces in the demise of the justice system.”

The legislature approved the TIRC statute in the wake of the much-publicized allegations of abuse by Commander Jon Burge (now deceased), convicted in 2010 of perjury surrounding the allegations. Since then, dozens of wrongful conviction cases have been brought, and settled, over claims of police abuse, with the once convicted murderers and their attorneys making millions in the payouts.

“With the advent of TIRC, the exoneration industry became yet another key revenue stream in the instances when attorneys and their media lapdogs failed to exonerate convicts through the courts,” Preib wrote. “TIRC served as a new venue when the pesky mountains of evidence claiming a maniac gangbanger was the ‘victim’ of police abuse.”