G. Flint Taylor
Taylor was part of a team of negotiators in the 2015 landmark decision by the City of Chicago to award reparations to the survivors of police torture, becoming the first municipal government to do so.
[4] One of Taylor's most notable cases involved litigation over the death of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, killed in what was reported by police as a shootout at his apartment.
The officers entered an apartment on Chicago's West Side, shooting and killing Hampton and Black Panther activist Mark Clark, and wounding four others.
[11] The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations concluded in its 1976 report that the BPP raid by the Chicago police was part of a nationwide FBI program called COINTELPRO that was designed to "destroy" the Black Panther movement.
[14] In April 1979, the Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, overturned the dismissal, holding that the evidence introduced at trial supported the allegations of a conspiracy among the Chicago police, the Cook County State's Attorney, and the FBI against the Black Panther members.
[9] On November 3, 1979, members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party, with a former FBI and police informant, Edward Dawson, in the lead car, drove into Greensboro, North Carolina.
[16][17] In 1980, a volunteer legal team had filed a civil rights damages case alleging a conspiracy among the Klansmen, Nazis, the Greensboro police, and the FBI in failing to protect protesters when they had knowledge of likely Klan violence.
[3] In the spring of 1985, during a ten-week trial in federal district court in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Taylor and his co-counsel Lewis Pitts and Carolyn MacAllister questioned scores of Nazi, Klan, FBI, police and informant witnesses.
[18] At one point in the trial, Taylor interrogated reputed Nazi leader Roland Wayne Wood about five miniature skulls pinned to his lapel.
[22] In 1987, Taylor, Haas and law partner John Stainthorp agreed to represent death row prisoner Andrew Wilson in his pro se civil rights suit.
The anonymous letters asserted that what happened to Wilson was part of a decades-old pattern of police torture, led by Burge, that victimized African-American detainees.
In addition to suffering electric shock, they told stories of police putting a loaded gun in their mouth or a typewriter cover over their head to make them believe they would die.
In 1994, Taylor, together with law partners Joey Mogul and Tim Lohraff, began representing death row inmate Aaron Patterson, who alleged that he was tortured by Burge and his men into a coerced confession.
[32] In 2011, Taylor and his colleagues obtained the first judicial decision holding former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley as a defendant in a civil police torture case, alleging a citywide conspiracy to cover it up.
The ordinance was conceived by noted Chicago civil rights attorney Standish Willis and drafted by CTJM co-founder Joey Mogul.
"[35] For more than a year, the reparations ordinance, which had been introduced by Aldermen co-sponsors Joe Moreno and Howard Brookins Jr. in October 2013, had been stalled in the Chicago City Council.
CTJM, Amnesty International, and other activists collected 40,000 signatures, which they delivered to Emanuel's office in December 2014, suggesting growing public support for the proposal.
Various aldermen and staffers from the mayor's office and the law department got involved, and a compromise that would include financial payments to living victims, but not to the families of those who had died, was eventually brokered.
[1] In May 2015, a month after Emanuel was re-elected, Chicago aldermen unanimously approved a 5.5-million-dollar reparations package, agreeing to compensate the approximately 60 living victims with valid claims of torture while in police custody during Burge's command, each to receive up to $100,000.
[37] They also established a requirement that Chicago public schools teach students in the eighth and tenth grades about the Burge legacy of police brutality.
[1] At the May Council meeting, in the presence of more than a dozen survivors, Emanuel offered an official apology on behalf of the City of Chicago, and the aldermen stood and applauded them.
[45] Taylor also worked in the mid 80's with People's Law Office colleagues Cunningham, Haas, Stainthorp, Michael Deutsch and Peter Schmiedel on the "street files" cases, during which Chicago police detective Frank Laverty brought to light the Chicago Police Department's secret filing system in which detectives concealed evidence that supported a criminal defendant's innocence.
[46][47] In the late 1990s, Taylor joined Wyoming attorney Jerry Spence, now Federal Judge Matthew Kennelly, and former Northwestern School of Law professor Lawrence Marshall to obtain a $36-million-dollar wrongful conviction settlement for four men, who each served more than a decade behind bars for the 1978 murder of a couple in Ford Heights, Illinois, a suburb just south of Chicago.
[49] Taylor contributes to a variety of academic journals,[50][51][52] legal publications[53] and online blogs, including The Nation and Huffington Post, on the subjects of police misconduct and racism.
[57][58][59][60] He has testified on these topics before the Chicago City Council,[61]Cook County Board,[62]U.S. Congressional Committees,[63] and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
[64] When, in July 2006, Cook County Special Prosecutor Edward Egan failed to indict Burge for perjury and instead issued a report after four years of investigation of torture cases, Taylor publicly criticized the Special Prosecutor's failure to indict and called the report a cover-up that whitewashed the role of Richard M. Daley and other high ranking police and prosecutorial officials.
