CHICAGO—(ENEWSPF)—October 19, 2015. Today attorneys Flint Taylor and Shubra Ohri of the People’s Law Office filed an eleven count complaint on behalf of three men who were allegedly subjected to unconstitutional abuse at Homan Square that led to their wrongful imprisonment for 15 months and was caused by a combination of “policies, practices and/or customs of the Defendant City of Chicago, acting through and by its Police Department, Police Superintendents, Police Board, Mayors, and City Council.” Coming on the heels of another shocking Guardian expose, the suit describes Homan Square as an “off the books police detention, interrogation, and intelligence gathering center where the CPD unconstitutionally detained many thousands of predominantly, and disproportionately, African American and Hispanic citizens without probable cause and without access to lawyers and family,” and alleges that the policies and practices employed by the CPD at Homan Square included the widespread use of “unconstitutionally coercive and torturous tactics” against detainees including “handcuffing them to the wall in dark, Spartan-like cells without food, water, or access to bathroom facilities; using physical threats, beatings, assaults with a knife, and other forms of physical brutality; conducting illegal strip and violently invasive body cavity searches; subjecting detainees to verbal racial abuse, and using the threat of charging the detainee with bogus criminal offenses if he or she did not provide information.”
The three Plaintiffs, Atheris Mann, Jessie Patrick, and Deanda Wilson allege that they were picked up by the police defendants on the morning of October 21, 2013, taken to Homan Square and subjected to physical and psychological abuse that included being subjected to strip searches, being held handcuffed for hours in dark rooms without food, water or bathroom facilities, being subjected to personal threats, threats to their families and racial epithets, being denied requests to contact lawyers and family, and Wilson having a knife put to his throat. When the men refused to give their police interrogators information, the suit alleges, they were charged with bogus drug offenses and were falsely imprisoned for 15 months before they were released by a Cook County Judge who entered a directed finding of not guilty on their behalf after the State presented its case at trial.
Source: People’s Law Office
