City to pay $1.25 million to man jailed 12 years for a crime he did not commit

Chicago Sun-Times
Oct. 06, 2011

Chicago taxpayers will spend $1.25 million to compensate a man who spent 12 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit after allegedly being beaten and coerced into a false confession by detectives working under Jon Burge.

The body of 39-year-old Kathy Morgan was discovered in an abandoned and torched South Side building in October, 1990. The victim had been raped, beaten and strangled.

Eighteen months later, Harold Hill was questioned about Morgan’s murder after being arrested on an unrelated charge. A teenager at the time, Hill claims that he confessed only after being hit, threatened and force-fed a false version of events by Belmont Area detectives.
[...]
A $7 million report by special prosecutors concluded that Burge and his Area 2 underlings tortured criminal suspects for two decades while police brass looked the other way. But the report concluded it’s too late to prosecute because the statute of limitations has long since run out.

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