CHICAGO -- The investigation of decades-old claims that Chicago police tortured suspects with beatings, electric shocks and games of Russian roulette won't stop with last week's federal indictment of a controversial homicide commander.
Dozens of former detectives and other officers can expect to be called before a federal grand jury as the panel digs deeper into a scandal that has haunted Chicago for more than 20 years.
Prosecutors hint that fresh charges could be on the way.
"Torture and abuse have no place in a Chicago police station," U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said last week in unveiling charges against Jon Burge, the tough 60-year-old former commander of the South Side's Area 2 violent crimes unit.
Burge, whose name is now synonymous with the scandal, is due before U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow on Monday to be arraigned on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.
Prosecutors say Burge, who was fired in 1993, lied under oath five years ago in written answers for a civil rights lawsuit.
Civil rights lawyers who have long pressed for a federal investigation of the torture allegations praised the indictment but said it was a long time in coming.
Two court-appointed special prosecutors found two years ago that scores of black suspects had been seriously abused at Area 2 in the 1970s and 1980s to force them to confess, but determined that the abuse had occurred so long ago that criminal charges were no longer possible.
Similarly, Burge never was charged with actual torture, and the statute of limitations has run out, meaning he cannot be charged with such crimes. Prosecutors have said charging him with lying about the alleged torture was better than nothing at all.
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