Chicago police accused of denying lawyers access to their clients at Homan Square facility

IF YOU are arrested on suspicion of a crime, the normal state of affairs is that once detained you are entitled access to a lawyer.

Once your lawyer arrives, they are taken to where you are being held and the process goes on from there.

But in one part of Chicago there are claims that police don’t always play by those rules.

A series of investigations carried out by The Guardian claim police operating out of a warehouse in the west of the city known as Homan Square routinely ‘disappear’ arrestees.

The British newspaper claims documents it obtained show more than 7000 people held at the so-called off-the-books interrogation facility were detained for several hours.

Of those held from August 2004 to June 2015, only 0.94% or 68 were allowed access to legal representation or a public notice of their whereabouts. And almost 6000 were African American.

The information was found in internal police documents obtained by the newspaper following a Freedom of Information request and a court order forcing the Chicago Police Department to hand over information relating to Homan Square.

The CPD has strenuously denied the reports saying officers at Homan Square obey the law and explained its secretive reputation was the result of the work being carried out by its undercover narcotic and gang units.

But those who have been detained claim it’s much more than that.

The Guardian said it spoke to 22 people who claimed that when they were kept at the facility they remained there for hours, some days and were pressured to become informants.

And all but two caucasian detainees claimed that police denied them phone calls to alert family or their lawyers about their whereabouts.

Chicago lawyer David Gaeger, who had a client taken to Homan Square in 2011, told The Guardian the facility scared him.

“Not much shakes me in this business — baby murder, sex assault, I’ve done it all,” he said. “That place was and is scary. It’s a scary place. There’s nothing about it that resembles a police station. It comes from a Bond movie or something.”

Mr Gaeger also claimed trying to find a number for the precinct was impossible.

“Try finding a phone number for Homan to see if anyone’s there. You can’t, ever,” he said “If you’re labouring under the assumption that your client’s at Homan, there really isn’t much you can do as a lawyer. You’re shut-out. It’s guarded like a military installation.”

But not everyone agrees with the assessment that Homan Square is unique as a secret CIA-style black site where arrestees get lost in the system.

Some seasoned criminal defence lawyers say the tactics used by officers at Homan Square are used by the wider Chicago police department.

“Everything that was described (in the Guardian story) was something that happens every day,” Richard Dvorak told the Chicago Tribune. “I think it’s pretty systemic throughout CPD.”

A University of Chicago law professor, Craig Futterman, who spent years researching police misconduct cases in Chicago told the Chicago Tribune he thought the “black site” rhetoric may be an exaggeration adding that police routinely played cat-and-mouse games with detainees and lawyers at district stations and detective area headquarters all over the city.

First Defence Legal Aid executive director Eliza Solowiej agreed telling the Chicago-based newspaper the problems were systemic.

She also revealed her agency had a client they could not find who had been held at Homan Square. When that client was released they had a head wound.

“It’s not just this facility. This is a city wide problem,” she said.

But it seems Homan Square’s notoriety has also made it to the small screen. The season finale of the courtroom drama, The Good Wife, featured a storyline involving Homan Square.

The show’s main character Alicia Florrick gets a call from her client’s wife saying he went missing. After conducting a Find Your iPhone search, she located the man at a nondescript red brick building, Homan Square.

When she inquired to speak to him, she was told he was not there. After several trips to a judge she was finally allowed access to her client, but police had already compiled a confession.

While this was all fiction, Homan Square is currently the subject of a number of court cases.

A few days ago three people lodged a lawsuit against the Chicago PD claiming they were “physically and psychologically abused” for a day at the facility, Fox 32 reported.

Atheris Mann, Jessie Patrick and Deanda Wilson were arrested on October 21, 2013, in connection with a drug investigation and taken to Homan Square, where it has been claimed they were stripsearched and ignored when they asked to use a bathroom or call family members and lawyers.

They also claimed detectives insulted, threatened and used racial slurs while interrogating the trio, who are all black.

In March, a grocery worker and two customers of the Paseo Boricua Grocery filed legal action against Chicago police alleging they were detained at Homan Square for hours under false charges.

Jose Garcia and the two customers John Vergara and Carlos Ruiz, who were in the store buying coffee, allege masked officers burst inside on September 29, 2011 and arrested them and two others, the Chicago Tribune reported.

They claim they then spent between eight to nine hours in custody before being released after one them claimed to know a high-profile civil rights lawyer.

Vergara, an art teacher, told The Guardian four of them were then released on the condition that they promised not to tell the lawyer anything about what happened.

The trio decided to launch legal action after seeing the stories in The Guardian.

Original report here


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