I'm Audie Cornish, and this is the assignment.

When my colleague Omar Jimenez was a journalism student in Chicago, this was more than a decade ago,

he learned about a story that kind of blew his mind, both because it was horrifying,

but also because nobody outside Chicago seemed to know anything about it.

There was this police commander who was on the force there from the 70s through the early 90s, who was in charge of a group of detectives who systematically tortured young black men into confessions. It took decades for the whole story to come out and it's still coming out. There were at least 130 documented victims and many of those people went to jail for a long time

for crimes that they were later cleared of. And a lot of those people have sued the city of

Chicago over their wrongful convictions. Omar's wanted to tell this story for a long time,

and he just put out a three-part podcast series about it called Tortured Justice.

We're bringing you the first episode of that series today.

Stay with us.

I go to the side of the house, to the door.

Who is it? Open the door.

I'm like, man, open the door.

Like, who is me? It's me. It's the to the front, I'm like, man, open the door. Like, who is me?

They're like, hey, who is me?

It's the night before New Year's Eve, December 30th, 1989, south side of Chicago.

James Gibson stands in the freezing cold in the alley next to his mom's house and bangs on the door.

He's 23, home from college for the holidays, but clearly

something's wrong. He's been beaten up and he's in pain. They finally opened up the door. I stumbled

in the house. My sister went to hug me and I collapsed. I know I was kicked in the chest,

but I didn't know my rib had been cracked.

And my sister said, what's wrong with you? And I'm like, man, they've been in there doing

...