The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago - Paperback

by Flint Taylor (Author)

With his colleagues at the People's Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city's political machine, from aldermen to the mayor's office.

Torture Machine takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark--and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed--through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects.

Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department's "code of silence" that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.

Author Biography

Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People's Law Office in Chicago. He is one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, has represented many survivors of Chicago police torture over the past 30 years and is counsel in several illegal search and wrongful death cases brought against the Milwaukee Police Department.