Hello and thank you for downloading our history program witness on the BBC World Service with me Rachel Gilman.

Today I'm taking you back to January the 12th 2003 and to the US City of Chicago.

The state's governor announced that four men living on death row had been pardoned.

They had been victims of police torture to make them confess to crimes they hadn't committed,

but they weren't the only victims of the city's police department.

In the 70s and 80s, police commander John Byrd ran the Area 2 section of the Chicago Police

Department on the south side of the city.

Burge was a decorated war veteran and had a high profile.

He became very, very well known and was promoted very quickly from detective to sergeant to lieutenant to commander

because he was successful in getting confessions he was successful in sending people to jail and many people he also was instrumental in

sending to death row. Flint Taylor is a lawyer at the People's Law Office in

Chicago and has represented many victims of police torture in the city.

Back in the early 80s, many US politicians were focused on bringing crime rates down.

It was in this political landscape that Burge and his team of white detectives became

well known.

Particularly under the Nixon administration and then later under the Reagan administration

there was what they called a war on crime which later became a war on drugs

which really was a war on the black community with the exception of one or two of the now 125 people that we've documented and all African American men, men who were

primarily on serious crimes, although some of them were witnesses

rather than suspects.

Others were just brought in in drag nets.

And of course, Darrow can tell you in more detail the horrendous torture that he was subjected to by two

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