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Aaron Patterson In The News
The Pantagraph Sunday July 12, 1998
Rally Surrounds Pontiac Inmate
by: M. K. Guetersloh, Pontiac bureau chief
PONTIAC- Bringing pamphlets, speeches and signs, protesters from various
parts of the country came to the Pontiac Correctional Center Saturday to
help JoAnn Patterson of Chicago celebrate her son's birthday.
She is hopeful that the next birthday she celebrates with her son,
he will not be behind the fences, walls and bars of the correctional center.
Aaon Patterson turned 34 years old on Friday with little fanfare
on the prison's death row where he has spent his last nine birthdays.
His case has become the focal point of human rights groups who believe
members of the Chicago police have used torture to gain confessions from
innocent people.
During the protest, JoAnn Patterson spoke of how her son was interrogated
for 25 hours by police detectives who, she claimed, at one point in the
questioning wrapped a plastic typewriter cover over his head to get a confession
for the 1986 murder of an elderly couple.
"They held the typewriter cover over his head until he succumbed to
the police and said what they wanted him to say," she said," the police
made up the confession."
In October, the London based Amnesty International is featuring Aaron
Patterson as an example of a wrongful conviction and police brutality on
the organization's upcoming report on human rights violations in the United
States.
Angie Hoogas, coordinator of Amnesty International in Wisconsin, said
the 50 people who attended the demonstration is just a small showing of
all the people around the world who are involved in Patterson's case.
"Aaron is the representative case of the 40 people who were tortured
at the Area 2 police district by Jon Burge and his officers," Hoogas said.
"We want new trials for the Burge torture victims."
Hoogas said 10 of the 40 people interrogated under Burge's command
are currently on death row.
Burge, a former police commander, was fired from the Chicago policeforce
in 1993 on charges of torturing a cop killer.
Although Aaron Patterson never signed a confession to the crime, prosecutors
in the case said that the verbal description of what happened the night
of April 19, 1986, was enough to convict him. On that night, Vincent
Sanchez, 73 and his wife Rafaela, 62 were stabbed to death during a burglary
of their home.
In a 1996 ruling denying Patterson a new trial, a Chicago Criminal
Courts judge called the claims that Aaron Patterson was tortured flimsy
at best.
JoAnn Patterson said it is through the support of the groups of people
such as those who attended the demonstration that she has the strength
to keep fighting. An appeal on Aaron Patterson's conviction was filed
with filed with the Illinois State Supreme Court Tuesday.
Protest Planned To Support Death Row Inmate
by M. K. Guetersloh, Pontiac bureau chief
PONTIAC- Human rights activists will be staging a protest today
at the Pontiac Correctional Center to show their support of an inmate on
the center's death row. That support has garnered international attention.
The London based Amnesty International is featuring Aaron Patterson
as an example of a wrongful conviction in the organizatin's upcoming report
on human rights violations in the United States.
Patterson, 35, was sentenced to death in 1989 of the stabbing death
of an elderly Chicago area couple.
Protestors who will be outside Pontiac's gates today say they want
to get the message across that Patterson is innocent of the murders and
that he was wrongfully convicted on the basis of police and judicial misconduct.
Throughout his trial and appeals process thus far, Patterson's lawyer,
G. Flynt Taylor has maintained that his client was wrongly convicted because
Patterson's confession to the 1986 murders was the result of torture flimsy
at best.
Organizers of the protest including Patterson's mother, JoAnn Patterson,
claim the Pontiac Inmate was tortured during his interrogation by the Chicago
Police, Patterson's father, Raymond Patterson, who is a retired Chicago
police officer, said he believes that his former co workers bungled the
investigation and beat his son into a false confession.
Prosecutors in the case said even though Patterson's confession to
the crime remained unsigned, his verbal description of what happened the
night of April 19th, 1986, was enough to convict him. On that night,
Vincent Sanchez, 73, and his wife Rafaela, 62, were stabbed to death in
a burglary of their home.
Patterson's case gain notoriety in 1996 when Rolando Cruz came to Patterson's
defense in the case. Cruz was acquitted of the 1983 slaying of Naperville
schoolgirl Jeanine Nicarico. He previously had been convicted of
the crime and spent several years on Death Row, where he met Patterson.
Cruz said he believes Patterson's story because he said he experienced
the same kind of torture at the hands of Chicago police.
Chicago Tribune, Sunday, October 4, 1998 Section 1
Death Row Inmate Claims He Was Forced To Confess
By Steve Mills
TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
By the time Aaron Patterson left the tiny interview room at the Chicago
Police Department's Calumet Area headquarters on May 1, 1986, two statements
that will help to determine if he lives or dies had been written--one by
a Cook County prosecutor, the other by Patterson.
In the first statement, Assistant State's Atty. Peter Troy
wrote that Patterson confessed to the murders of Vincent and Rafaela
Sanchez, a South Chicago couple who fenced stolen goods for neighborhood
thieves.Patterson never signed the 1 1/2 page statement statement: and
it only vaguely describes the vicious murders. Still, It helped to seal
his 1989 conviction for first-degree murder as well as his death sentence.
The statement Patterson wrote tells quite another story, one many defendants
have told about the homicide investigators who worked at the Far South
Side station In the mid- to the late 1980s.
With the sharp end of an unwound paper clip, Patterson desperately
scratched into a inetal bench in the interrogation room the words he hoped
would set him free: "Aaron 4/30 I lie about murders. Police threaten me
with violence. Slapped and suffocated me with plastic. No lawyer or dad.
No phone. Signed false statement to murders."
Though the etching is somewhat confusing-Patterson in fact never signed
the statement, for instance the words, scratched jaggedly down the bench
and photographed four weeks later, tell of the kind of abuse even city
oflicials concluded occurred systematically in the police station on East
111th Street.
Suffocation with plastic typewriter covers. Beatings. Coercion.
Even electric shock. city officials concluded in a 1990 report that
Lt. Jon G. Burge and some of his violent crimes detectives at the Calumet
police station used those kinds of methods to get confessions.
Today, as the tactics police use to get confessions again are under
debate-most recently in the Ryan Harris case-the complicated story of Patterson
highlights those issues. In the Harris case, Chicago police dropped
charges against boys, ages 7 and 8, when evidence contradicted the confessions
police said they obtained.
In an effort to bolster confidence in the reliability of confessions,
top law enforcement officials said Thursday they would move toward the
videotaping of confessiosn in homicide investigations.
Certainly Patterson's story reveals the potential for miscarriage of
justice if a case is not under intense public scrutiny and the defendants
have unsavory pasts that make them vulnerable to false charges.
Indeed, Patterson- a former leader of one of the city's most violent
street gangs-is hardly a sympathetic character, and that has made it difficult
for his mother and others to win him supporters.
Still, several groups have gotten behind Patterson in the past several
months, including Amnesty International. Closer to home, Northwestern
University professor David Protess, who helped to win freedom for the wrongly
convicted Ford Heights Four, and a team of students have investigated the
case.
Meanwhile, 10 people, including Patterson, are on Illinois' Death Row
as a result of murder investigations conducted by the Calumet detectives,
and most of their cases are in various stages of appeal. One, Madison
Hobbey, recently won a new hearing on charges that an investigator destroyed
critical evidence, though Hobley also has charges that he was physically
abused.
In Patterson's case, the allegations of abuse do not necessarily exonerate
him. But, along with other evidence, they may cast reasonable doubt
on the notion that justice was done in his trial. Now 34, he is at
the Pontiac Correctional Center with a final appeal in state court pending
and time running out.
Consider: No physical, forensic, or eyewitness evidence ever
tied Patterson to the Sanchez killings. The murder weapon was
never recovered.
The main witness, a 16 year old girl named Marva Hall, said in an interview
that she was threatened by the police and prosecutors into testifying falsely
against Patterson. She has since given Patterson's attorneys a sworn
statement recanting her testimony.
A neighbour said she saw Vincent Sanchez raking leaves in his front
yard hours after the police and prosecutors say Sanchez and his wife were
killed, suggesting the police scenario of the crime may be incorrect.
Patterson's co defendant, Eric Caine-who recieved a life sentence for
his role in the crime - alleges he was beaten as well, and in fact was
treated for a broken eardrum immediately after he confessed, according
to records.
Others questioned in the case said the prosecutors promised to drop
charges against them if only they would implicate Patterson in the murders.
"I'm telling you, as God is my witness, I didn't have nothing to do
with that case." Patterson said in a telephone interview from death row,
where the inmates are not allowed to do in- person interviews.
"Yes, I did some things," he added. "But I didn't do this."
The Sanchez murders were particularly vicious. Vincent Sanchez,
73, was stabbed 25 times in the neck, the chest and the back. Raphaela
Sanchez, 62, was stabbed 9 times in the chest, back and left arm.
According to police and prosecutors, the murders occured just before
dawn on April 18th, 1986, after Patterson and Caine allegedly went to the
Sanchez home at 8849 S. Burley Ave, in the South Chicago neighborhood.
The Sanchez' bodies were found the next day, after a thirteen year
old named Wayne Washington, who sometimes did odd jobs for the couple went
to the house.
Two weeks later, Patterson and Caine were charged with the murders.
Chicago police recently defended their handling of the case but declined
further comment. Burge ultimately was fired for his role in the beatings
at the Calumet station, although not for anything in the Patterson case.
Other detectives involved in the case have since retired and could not
be reached. Prosecutors Troy and Jack Hynes, who are still with the
Cook County state's attorney's office, said through an office spokesman
that they would not comment on the Patterson case while it was under appeal.
In court papers, they have defended the case, saying Patterson's confession
was voluntary and he was not mistreated. The youngest of two sons
of a longtime Chicago police officer, Aaron Patterson grew up on the South
Side in a strict Catholic family. Although he was bright, he did
not apply himself to his studies and, by the time he graduated from De
La Salle High School, he was getting into trouble.
"He had another agenda besides studying," said his mother, JoAnn Patterson,
who once hoped the younger of her two sons would go to college.
Patterson, in fact, joined the Apache Rangers street gang and soon
became its leader. He often went by the moniker "Lone Ranger."
Police got tips ahout several other men, and appear to have looked
at' some 3f them. Among them was Wayne Washingtdn's older brother Willie,
who, like Wayne, did some work for the Sanchezes and was allowed into their
home.
But it soon became evident that detectives were focusing on Patterson.
Police reports show that at least one informant pointed to Patterson and,
perhaps more important, detectives talked with the teen-aged Hall.
According to the reports, Hall told detectives she saw Patterson on
April, the day after the murders, driving around the South Side. Then,
Patterson confided to herout of the blue-that Hall's cousin, DeEdward White,
had not been involved in the Sanchez murders.
Instead, he allegedly told her he and two other men were the real killers.
He told her, too, that he had stabbed Vincent Sanchez seven times, according
to police.
Hall now recants the statement and her testimony. She said police and
prosecutors forced her to implicate Patterson, taking an incident that
occureed before the Sanchez murders, when she did in fact see Panerson,
and titting it to the investigation. She said Hynes coached her testimony
and threatened to jail her if she did not testify.
"I lied on that [witness) stand. They made me say things that wasn't
true," said Hall, tears welling in her eyes. "I know that I did wrong getting
up on that stand. But it let nothing happen to me."
In 1986, when the Sanchez murilers took place, Hall, by her own admission,
skipped school, ran with gangs-both the Apache Rangers and others~and spent
time with men who were consider-
ably older than her 16 years.
Today, she is married, working-sometimes two jobs living in southeastern
Alabama, not far from the Florida line.
Moreover, Hall has an outstanding warrant for her arrest on drug charges,
lending some weight to her recantation, since it puts her at considerable
risk.
When detectives finally caught up with Patterson, they brought him
to the boxy, low-slung building at 727 E. 111th St for questioning.
By then, Patterson was the leading suspect.
Patterson says he was at the home of Lavelle Reeves, a friend, on the
morning of the murder, drunk with Reeves, his girlfriend and others. When
he woke up, he went to the home of Steve Weatherby, another friend.
Reeves, Weatherby and others support Patterson's alibL But they are
less than c'ertain about the date, robbing Patterson of an iron-clad alibi
But it is what happened at the police station that is at the heart
of the case. According to Patterson and his attorneys, Patterson was subjected
to a regimen of abuse that other suspects have reported at the same station.
He was slapped and hit, he contends. Then, after a detective turned
out the lights, a plastic typewriter cover was placed over his head until
he could hardly breathe. At one point, an officer he identified as Burge
walked in, put his gun on the table and threatened him.
"I really thought they were going to kill me in there," said Patterson.
"They seemed like they would do anything to get me to say what they wanted."
Patterson's story might be difficult to fathom were it not for more
than two dozen charges of abuse against some of the same police detectives,
mostly led by Burge, at the same station during the same period.
It was a pattern of physical and psychological abuse that city officials
investigated and concluded, in what is commonly called the Goldston report,
was "systematic" and "methodical." Eventually, it led to Burge's firing.
In 1993, a federal appeals court said in a case that the abuse by Burge
and his crew of homicide investigators "was, in fact, common.
The day after Patterson's - arrest, during his first court appearance,
he repeated his allegations to a judge even though his lawyer, public defender
Rita Fry, urged Patterson to be silent.
'They tried to suffocate me with a plastic bag to get me to say something
that I didn't want to say," Patterson told Judge Francis Grembala, according
to the transcript from the May 2 hearing in Circuit Court.
By contrast, in the statement prosecutors said they obtained, Patterson
related how he, Caine and a man named Michael Arbuckle went to the Sanchez
home to get some drugs and guns, with Patterson staying outside while Caine
and Arbuckle went in.
When they took too long, Patterson went in armed with two pistols.
And when Vincent Sanchez told Caine that there were no drugs or guns, according
to the statement, Patterson stabbed him "severnl times," an understatement
considering Sanchez's 25 wounds. Where he got the knife and why he did
not use the two guns is left unexplained.
Troy wrote that Patterson told him that he had tired of Rafaela Sanchez's
crying, and stabbed her-again, "several times" -when she tried to
flee.
Finally, Troy write that Patterson confessed "because he wanted
to tell the truth." Patterson, however, , refused to sign the statement.
Caine made four statements implicating himself and Patterson.
But Caine said that he was beatenup by the detectives as well-so hard that
he sufferred a broken eardrum. His statements are inconsistent too.
While that does not mean that they are all wong, they certainly raise
questions.
There is,. too, an alternative suspect, one suggested by Pattersons
attorneys and some other players in the saga. He is 38 year old Willie
Washington, Wayne's older brother. According to the attorneys,
they have obtained affidavits from at least one person
saying Washington approached him about a raid on the Sanchez home before
they were murdered.
But what is, perhaps, most interesting about Washington is that he
has committed a crime that is strikingly similar to the Sanchez murders.
In April 1994, Washington broke into the home of Colleen Hamling
of Aurora and stabbed her more than two dozen times-the came kind of overkill
as in the Sanchez double murders. Washington was convicted of home
invasion and is serving a 60 year term at the prison at Menard.
He denies killing the Sanchezes.
Patterson's appeal may be heard later this year. Either way, it doesnot
focus on evidentiary matters. Instead, the 121-page motion is concerned
with his legal defense during his trial and earlier appeals, a defense
that Taylor and Lohraff say was horribly inadequete.
Chicago Sun Times Friday December 11, 1998
Petitioners Want Inmate Spared
Death Penalty Foes Say Cops Tortured Patterson
by Adrienne Drell
Legal Afairs Reporter
Former model Bianca Jagger and some of the country's most prominent
lawyers and professors asked the Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday not
to allow the execution of gang leader Aaron Patterson because he was allegedly
tortured into confessing to a double murder.
In a petition filed by the MacArthur Justice Center, Jagger and 64
other death penalty opponents contend that Patterson is among 10 people
on Illinois' Death Row whose convictions rest on confessions extracted
under torture by Area 2 Chicago police detectives supervised by then Lt.
John Burge.
Burge was fired five years ago for systematic abuse and torture of
suspected criminals.
A brief written by MacArthur Legal Director Locke E. Bowman says that
since Patterson's 1989 conviction, evidence has emerged showing that detectives
hit him in the chest and put a plastic typewriter cover over his head until
he confessed.
Later, when Patterson, 34, refused to make a statement to prosecuters,
the petition says Burge entered the interrogation room, put his handgun
on a table, and warned Patterson that if "you don't do what we tell you
to, you're going to get something worse than before."
In his appeal filed in July, Patterson asked the state high court to
reverse Judge John E. Morrissey's 1996 denial of a hearing on the torture
allegation.
The petition argues that if Patterson was executed without a full and
exhaustive inquiry into the torture allegation, "it would gravely undermine
the integrity and public confidence in the capital punishment process in
Illinois."
Jagger, once married to rock star Mick Jagger, last weighed in on behalf
of Illinois death row inmate Gwen Garcia, whose sentence was commuted by
Gov. Edgar.
Other signers include Anthony Amsterdam, a New York University law
professor and a leading capital punishment foe; former U.S District Judge
George Leighton; former Death Row inmate Carl F. Lawson; Bud Welch,
the father of Oklahoma City bombing victim Julie Welch; former White house
consel Abner Mikva, and retired Illinois Apellate Court Justice R. Eugene
Pincham.
Chicago Tribune Thursday December 17, 1998
Convicted Killer Wins Support In Battle To Overturn Death Sentence
Hearing sought on allegations of police brutality.
By Steve mills, Tribune Staff Writer
For years, Aaron Patterson has battled his 1987 double murder conviction
and death sentence with little of the attention or support that has surrounded
some of the other Death Row prisoners in Illinois.
But now support for Patterson is growing, as questions are being raised
about his case, which is under appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court, and
about the tactics of the Chicago police department detectives who arrested
him.
Last week, two groups filed amicus curiae, or friends-of-the-court
briefs, on Patterson's behalf, asking the state Supreme Court to send his
case back to Cook County Circuit Court for a hearing on allegations that
detectives physically beat Patterson and concocted his alleged confession.
The briefs were filed by a committee led by Locke Bowman of the MacArthur
Justice Center at the University of Chicago Law School, and by the London
based International Center for Criminal Law and Human Rights.
"Its a case that I think has some obvious significance in a broad way
for the administration of capital punishment in Illinois," Bowman
said. He noted that the cases of nine other Death Row prisoners were
investigated by some of the same detectives who investigated Patterson.
Patterson and Eric Caine were convicted of first degree murder for
the 1986 slayings of Vincent and Rafaela Sanchez of South Chicago.
Both were stabbed to death. Patterson was sentenced to death, while
Caine got a life sentence.
Patterson and his lawyers charge that he was beaten by detectives led
by Lt. John Burge, who was fired on charges of physically abusing murder
suspects. A city inquiry found "systemic" abuse by detectives working
for Burge.
They also say evidence that might exonerate Patterson is missing,
while a key witness in the case told the Tribune that prosecutirs had threatened
to put her in jail unless she testified falsely against Patterson.
Prosecutors have denied this. No physical evidence linked Patterson
to the killings.
The Bowman committee includes more than 50 attorneys and other people,
from Barry Scheck, the Cardozo Law School professor who worked on the O.J
Simpson trial, to Bianca Jagger, a human rights activist and former wife
of Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger.
Tim Lohraff, one of Patterson's attorneys said he hoped the briefs
would catch the attention of the court, letting the justices know the case
was being watched closely by a public fed up with questionable capital
prosecutions.
"They indicate the public is tired of innocent people being put on
Death Row," he saidm " It makes it a little harder for them to do the wrong
thing."
Bowman said he was not sure how the justices would read the brief.
"But I hope they'll read the amicus brief and be persuaded by the arguments
in it, which I think are clear and straightforward and frankly obvious."
Chicago Sun Times Tuesday December 15, 1998
Fatal Consequences
Just last month we recommended that Illinois, and the nation, call a
timeout on death penalty cases, and impose a moratorium on executions while
taking a long, hard look at the criminal justice system with the aim of
preventing wrongful executions.
Illinois alone has had nine cases in which people sent to Death Row
were ultimately-and thankfully- found to have been wrongfully condemned.
And now another case reinforces the call for a moratorium. Last
week, the MacArthur Justice Center and 65 death penalty opponents, including
some prominent lawyers and law professors, asked the Illinois Supreme Court
not to allow the execution of gang leader Aaron Patterson.
Their petition contends that Chicago detectives under the supervision
of former Lt. John Burge used torture to coerce Patterson into confessing
to a double murder in 1989. Moreover, they alleged that Patterson
is among 10 people now on death row in Illinois from whom confessions were
extracted under torture by detectives supervised by Burge.
Burge was fired from the police department five years ago on charges
of systematic abuse and torture of suspected criminals. The allegations
in the petitions to Illinois' highest court merit - indeed, demand, thorough
inspection and review. Meantime, they also point to the need for
review and reform of a criminal justice system in which, as has been all
too commonly demonstrated, people can be and have been sentenced to death
for crimes they did not commit.
Currently, Mr. Patterson's lawyers are taking a fairly aggressive approach
to dealing with this case. They are preparing a Motion for Summary
Judgement. The purpose of this type of motion is to show the Judge,
in this
case Judge Touman, that there is so much evidence to prove Mr. Patterson's
innocence and to prove he was tortured by Jon Burge, that the hearing
should
be waived and an actual new trial should be granted. This saves a great
deal
of time, as the drawn out process of calling witnesses and suffering
the
delay tactics of the State would be cut short. It gives the Judge a
preview
of the defense, so he can decide whether it's really worth going through
the
motions of a hearing, and then a new trial when everyone knows the
state
really has no case here.
The primary documentation backing this motion is the opinion of the
Illinois
Supreme Court ( http://www.state.il.us/court/2000/82711.htm
) which states:
".After reviewing the new evidence relied upon by defendant, we believe
that
it is material and that, as pleaded, would likely change the result
upon
retrial. In particular, we note that defendant has consistently claimed
that
he was tortured. In fact, he made this claim during his first court
appearance. Moreover, defendant's claims are now and have always been
strikingly similar to other claims involving the use of a typewriter
cover
to simulate suffocation. Additionally, defendant describes the use
of a gun
as a threat and beatings that do not leave physical evidence. Further,
the
officers that defendant alleges were involved in his case are officers
that
are identified in other allegations of torture. Finally, defendant's
allegations are consistent with the OPS findings that torture, as alleged
by
defendant, was systemic and methodical at Area 2 under the command
of Burge.
"Thus, we believe that defendant has presented sufficient evidence at
the
pleading stage to entitle him to a hearing. At this hearing, the trial
court
can evaluate defendant's testimony in light of the OPS report and the
relevant prior allegations of torture. Such a hearing will allow the
trial
court to determine whether (1) any of the officers who interrogated
defendant may have participated in systemic and methodical interrogation
abuse present at Area 2 and (2) those officers' credibility at the
suppression hearing might have been impeached as a result. Consequently,
we
remand this action to the trial court for a hearing to consider defendant's
new evidence relating to other allegations of police misconduct at
Area 2."
It's cut and dried. The Court admits the evidence of torture would result
in
a new trial.
Other information used in the Motion will be the discovery of all of
Jon
Burge's disciplinary records, and a Five (5) hour deposition
of John Byrne,
a police officer present at Patterson's interrogation who stated to
Carol
Marin on national television that Patterson was guilty and that no
torture
occurred. This examination could also prove helpful.
For more info contact apdc1@onebox.com . or call 312 409 4076
For a detailed background on this case see: http://www.chicago.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=862
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