The Exonerated: Two Chicago Men Wrongly Imprisoned for Decades Speak Out on Police Abuse, Torture

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As Chicago hosts the 2024 Democratic National Convention, we look at the city’s long history of police misconduct, including the use of torture under police commander Jon Burge, accused of interrogating more than 100 African American men in Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s using electric shocks and suffocation, among other methods, to extract false confessions from men who were later exonerated. Illinois has one of the highest rates of wrongful convictions in the United States, and a disproportionate number of the wrongfully convicted are Black or Brown people. For more, we speak with two men from Chicago who were exonerated after serving decades in prison: Stanley Howard spent 16 years of his life on death row for a 1984 murder that he confessed to after being tortured; Jimmy Soto was released from an Illinois prison in December after a 42-year fight to prove his innocence.

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