PONTIAC, Ill. (AP) — During his more than 30 years behind bars, Stanley Wrice insisted he was innocent, that Chicago police had beat him until he confessed to a rape he didn’t commit. On Wednesday, he walked out of an Illinois prison a free man, thanks to a judge’s order that served as a reminder that one of the darkest chapters in the city’s history is far from over.
“It’s just an overwhelming feeling of joy, happiness that finally it’s over,” said Wrice, who was greeted by his two daughters, his attorneys, and other supporters. He wore sweat pants, a dark jacket and baseball cap and carried a cardboard box filled with letters, photographs and legal papers – all of his possessions after three decades in prison.
Wrice, who was sentenced to 100 years behind bars for a 1982 sexual assault, is among more than two dozen inmates – most of them black men – who have alleged they were tortured by officers under the command of disgraced former Chicago police Lt. Jon Burge in a scandal that gave the nation’s third-largest city a reputation as haven for rogue cops and helped lead to the clearing of Illinois’ death row. Some of the prisoners have been freed; some are still behind bars, hoping to get the kind of hearing that Wrice got that eventually led to his freedom.
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Nelson Mandela, who led the emancipation of South Africa from white minority rule and served as his country’s first black president, becoming an international emblem of dignity and forbearance, died Thursday night. He was 95.
“Our nation has lost its greatest son,” said Jacob Zuma, the South African president, about Nelson Mandela. Zuma announced Mr. Mandela’s death. Mr. Mandela had long said he wanted a quiet exit, but the time he spent in a Pretoria hospital this summer was a clamor of quarreling family, hungry news media, spotlight-seeking politicians and a national outpouring of affection and loss. The vigil eclipsed a visit by President Obama, who paid homage to Mr. Mandela but decided not to intrude on the privacy of a dying man he considered his hero.
Mr. Mandela ultimately died at home at 8:50 p.m. local time, and he will be buried according to his wishes in the village of Qunu, where he grew up. The exhumed remains of three of his children were reinterred there in early July under a court order, resolving a family squabble that had played out in the news media.
Mr. Mandela’s quest for freedom took him from the court of tribal royalty to the liberation underground to a prison rock quarry to the presidential suite of Africa’s richest country. And then, when his first term of office was up, unlike so many of the successful revolutionaries he regarded as kindred spirits, he declined a second term and cheerfully handed over power to an elected successor, the country still gnawed by crime, poverty, corruption and disease but a democracy, respected in the world and remarkably at peace.
The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites had systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of his friends, and cast him into prison for 27 years, he could be so evidently free of spite.
The government he formed when he finally won the chance was an improbable fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his former oppressors. When he became president, he invited one of his white wardens to the inauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and a Nobel Peace Prize with the white president who preceded him, F. W. de Klerk.
And as president, from 1994 to 1999, he devoted much energy to moderating the bitterness of his black electorate and to reassuring whites with fears of vengeance. The explanation for his absence of rancor, at least in part, is that Mr. Mandela was that rarity among revolutionaries and moral dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable with compromise and impatient with the doctrinaire.
When the question was put to Mr. Mandela in an interview for this obituary in 2007 — after such barbarous torment, how do you keep hatred in check? — his answer was almost dismissive: Hating clouds the mind. It gets in the way of strategy. Leaders cannot afford to hate.
Cook County jurors on Tuesday awarded $1 million to a man who was wrongfully held in jail for more than a year. John Collins, a 42-year-old Chicago barber, was arrested in 2006 and spent 385 days in jail due to false charges of aggravated battery to a police office, officials said. After a three-day trial, a jury found the city of Chicago and Chicago police Officer Michael Garza guilty of malicious prosecution.
“I felt like a right in the pool of wrong,” Collins said of his time in jail. “I didn’t want to swim in that pool no more, but I didn’t want to drown either. So I kept fighting.” When officers pulled Collins over in 2006, he’d just left his salon. One officer accused him of kicking and spitting on them, but a jury acquitted Collins and he was released from Cook County in 2007.
“All I know is that I ended up a victim,” he said. Collins said the trauma and distress is still with him. “I was just devastated,” he said. “I was just devastated.” Collins missed the birth of his now 7-year-old son Elwood while in jail, a moment he said he can never get back. Since his release, Collins has worked continuously in his Dolton salon, and noted the verdict brings him a step closer to having his life back. “I’m thankful that someone’s seen justice,” he said.
A spokesman for the city’s Law Department said they are “disappointed” in the verdict in the case and said they plan to “explore all available options including an appeal.”
article by Natalie Martinez via nbcchicago.com
Members of the “Wilmington 10” hold a brief communion service before boarding a prison bus on Feb. 2, 1976 in Burgaw, North Carolina, as they surrendered to start prison terms on convictions growing out of 1971 racial disorders in Wilmington, N.C. Four of the group shown from left are Connie Tindall, Rev. Ben Chavis, Jerry Jacobs and Anne Sheppard. (AP Photo)
After decades of claims that they were wrongly convicted, nine African-American men and one white women who were imprisoned for an arson fire in North Carolina that stemmed from racial unrest over integrated schools have been pardoned. North Carolina Gov. Bev Purdue, who is leaving office in just one week, issued the pardons Monday.
Purdue’s office issued a statement, saying she had spent “a great deal of time over the past seven months reviewing the pardon of innocence requests of the persons collectively known as the Wilmington Ten.”