With his colleagues
at the People’s Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil
rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-ups within the
Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city’s corrupt
political machine.
The Torture Machine
takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party
chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic,
thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged
pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within
the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to
elicit false confessions from suspects.
Joining forces with
community activists, torture survivors and their families, other
lawyers, and local reporters, Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence
from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD officers and the
City of Chicago. As the struggle expanded beyond the torture scandal
to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in
Illinois, and obtained reparations for many of the torture survivors,
it set human rights precedents that have since been adopted across
the United States.