Mayor Richard M. Daley today said he did “everything possible” as Cook County state’s attorney in the 1980′s, when some critics say he could have moved to end the alleged torture perpetrated by former Chicago Police commander Jon Burge.
In his first public comments since Burge’s federal conviction Monday for lying under oath about the torture of suspects, Daley said he had no regrets stemming from the case.
A doctor who saw one man’s injuries in 1982 wrote a letter to then-police superintendent Richard Brzeczek asking for an investigation into a case of possible police brutality. Brzeczek forwarded the letter to Daley, who was Cook County state’s attorney at the time, but charges were never brought against any officers.
Daley said the letter from Brzeczek came to his office “after the fact.”
Asked if he wished he had done more, Daley replied, “We did everything possible in that time. After you look back you could change a lot of things.”
The mayor added that he regrets “a lot of things in my life — just not that.”
Daley’s name was not mentioned during the Burge trial.
The mayor was even more reticent to discuss another recent court decision, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last week that weakens the “honest services” law used to convict many political figures, including Daley’s former patronage chief, Robert Sorich, and other mayoral aides.
The court’s ruling could result in a new trial for Sorich, who was sent to prison in 2006 for rigging city hiring to benefit pro-Daley campaign workers. Sorich is from the mayor’s native Bridgeport neighborhood.
“I didn’t read the opinion,” the mayor said, adding that the court ruling pertained specifically to the honest services conviction of Conrad Black, former CEO of the company that owned the Chicago Sun-Times.
When reporters noted that the ruling also could affect Sorich and other former assistants in his office, the mayor replied, “This has to do with thousands of cases in America. It has nothing to do with one case … That was business. Conrad Black was business. It had nothing to do with politics.”