There have been moments in reporting this story that have really just stopped me in my tracks, whether it's the scale, or even just thinking about the time these people lost — and for what? The first time I learned about how police in Chicago had systematically tortured suspects for decades, I was a college student. I was working with the Chicago Innocence Project back in 2014. And I met this man, another victim of police torture on the South Side. His story is actually a lot like James Gibson's. He was also in prison for decades after being tortured by police. And he was exonerated after years of trying to get a rightful day in court. And I remember talking to him, and he told me when he got out of prison, he was picked up, he was smiling in front of the cameras, and when he'd gotten the car, someone had to explain to him how to use the seat belt. Because when he went to prison in 1982, seat belts actually weren't required for passengers. That's how much the world had changed. And that small detail always stuck with me, because it represented so much else. The world had moved on, but he was still in the same place. To him, just being able to get up, go across the street, use a card to pay, eat a burger, that's an achievement. He actually said to me, "I'm an achievement." But it comes with this lifetime of lost experiences. Now imagine that loss multiplied by 10, by 50, by however many people serve time for something they didn't do. It's honestly a scale of suffering that's kind of hard to grasp. This episode is about the question we posed at the beginning of this series. Is justice possible when so much has been lost? I'm Omar Jimenez. From CNN Presents, this is Tortured Justice.

'It's the mid-90s. Chicago now knows in detail what Jon Burge and the Midnight Crew did. Burge has been fired from the Chicago Police Department, but now he's actually moved south to live a quiet life in Florida, living off of the full police pension he was allowed to keep, by the way. And none of the detectives on the Midnight Crew have been prosecuted. For Burge's victims and the activists who supported them, well, now there's been public acknowledgement of what happened, but was this justice? At the center of so much of that work in Chicago is Flint Taylor, the civil rights lawyer who had represented Andrew Wilson. The civil suit that they had won against the city of Chicago inspired other victims of the Midnight Crew to come forward.

As we were doing these other cases, there was more and more evidence of torture coming out.

'He is 15-year-old Marcus Wiggins.

I put them things on my hands, or he's burning my hand.

We kept a running tab of how many cases of police torture were being uncovered and being documented.

Gregory Banks has testified that after a street shooting back in 83 Chicago detectives beat and kicked and tortured a murder confession out of him. I was scared. I thought they was trying to kill me.

And it was going from 15.

Perry Cobb

Melvin Jones

Madison Hobley

To, you know, 40 to 60.

Daryl Cannon, David Bates, Leroy Orrin, Ronald Kitchin, and Derek King.

Stanley Howard and others.

If you think about a tea kettle on a hot stove, in the moments right before the water boils, you can hear the kettle sort of rumble. That's what it was like in Chicago in the 90s. The pressure was building for something, some kind of justice for the torture survivors and bearing down on the city from all directions.

'John Conroy was writing additional articles in The Reader as this evidence came out. There were reporters at the Tribune and the Sun-Times who were interested and started to write about it.

In the late 1990s, public attention zeroed in on the fate of one group of men. They had all been tortured by Burge and his crew, and they had all been sentenced to death. They called themselves the Death Row 10.

Ten men, now on death row, claim Burge and some of his officers tortured them until they confessed.

Those were 10 men who were tortured by Burge and who had death sentences, were doing their own organizing both in the prison and in conjunction with activists.

'All the men were Black. The crimes they were convicted of included some of the worst things a person can do to another person. That might have made them some of the least sympathetic of Burge's alleged victims, but they also forced people to consider another dark possibility. If what they claimed was true, they represented the worst thing the state could do to a person: pin a crime on them and kill them for something they didn't do. From prison, the Death Row 10 were extraordinarily effective organizers. They cut out letters from newspapers and magazines to make flyers for rallies that anti-death penalty groups then distributed around the city. They got their moms and dads to show up to protests, carrying signs plastered with their faces, larger than life. And their work paid off in national media attention. Geraldo Rivera did a primetime piece about the Death Row 10 on CNBC, featuring Myra Hobbly, mother of Madison Hobbly who was wrongfully convicted of an arson that killed his wife and child.

'Myra Hobley is part of a group of women who came together as mothers of the Death Row 10. They believe police frame-ups and torture are the only reasons their sons confess and were in turn condemned to die. If somebody cut off your oxygen, you'll do whatever they want you to do.

Folks that were fighting against the death penalty and the folks that were fighting against police torture unified around the importance and connection of these two issues. And so that brought the issue even more to the forefront and gave it much more strength and power.

The Death Row 10 turned this light on the terrible track record of the Illinois capital punishment system.

For every man Illinois has executed, it has set another man free, either because of new evidence or a reexamination of old.

And in 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan put a moratorium on executions in the state.

Our system was in terrible shape.

He told Geraldo Rivera about why he took such a historic step.

If we have missent people to death row innocently, how many people are sitting now in prisons that were convicted and sentenced that really don't belong there?

And not long after that, Governor Ryan pardoned four of the Death Row 10 and granted a lifeline to every inmate on Death Row.

I'm commuting the sentence of all death row inmates, 167 of them.

'And then, after years of advocacy for victims of police torture in Chicago, the Illinois legislature responded by creating something new. It was called the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission. T-I-R-C — TIRC. The eight-member body was tasked with investigating claims of torture by Burge or his detectives. And the idea was, if five or more members of the commission thought your claim was credible, they'd send it straight to the circuit court for judicial review. That typically means a hearing. And if the judge thinks you might have been wrongfully convicted, maybe a new trial.

'I don't think at the time we recognized the significance of that legislation. The thing about TIRC was, even if you had exhausted all of your rights in criminal court and on appeal, post-conviction, under TIRC, if you could show the commission that you had a serious case of police torture and that's one of the reasons you were convicted, then you could get back into criminal court.

It was this legal door through what had previously been an impenetrable wall for a lot of people. James Gibson would actually end up being an early applicant to the new commission, but we'll come back to that in a bit. While the new torture commission was starting to work through a backlog of cases, a group of prosecutors was building another case, a case against Jon Burge. Because somewhere along the line here, Burge made a mistake.

There was definitely a sense of responsibility and hope that we would be able to do something that no one else had been able to up until that point. Or — willing or able to due up until the point.

Betsy Biffl is a former prosecutor. In 2007, she was a brand new employee of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. And one of the first things that landed on her desk was the Burge case. The outrage in Chicago, the protesters in the streets, the drumbeat of news stories with mothers of sons on death row, the dozens of accounts of torture that never seemed to end — it actually seemed like some Chicago leaders were finally listening. There was so much credible evidence of torture by police, but no criminal charges had been filed against the perpetrators. And there was a legal reason for this. Burge and his officers might've been charged with any number of felonies: armed violence, aggravated battery, conspiracy to commit those crimes. But there's a pretty short statute of limitations attached to them in Illinois — only three years. Meaning the government only had three years to charge Burge and the Midnight Crew after the crimes were alleged to have been committed. But at this point, Burge had been fired for more than a decade, so that door shut a long time ago. If there was no way for local prosecutors to charge Burge, the thinking went, well, maybe the Justice Department could.

We had to figure out, is there a crime that was committed within the statute of limitations? And that was the bottom line.

Biffl was part of a team of prosecutors working under the U.S. Attorney at the time for the area, Pat Fitzgerald. They had to navigate a lot of documents, including long transcripts of depositions taken from Jon Burge and other members of the Midnight Crew when they were fighting off civil suits from torture victims.

'J-O-N, middle initial G as in George, Burge, B-U-R-G-E.

'This is one of many depositions in which Flint-Taylor and others questioned Burge about torture cases.

My lawyers advised me that the mere act of testifying to matters arising from my efforts as a Chicago police officer to apprehend criminals could cause me to be criminally indicted by a special prosecutor.

In all those depositions, Burge never admitted to wrongdoing. He actually never said much at all, besides asserting his Fifth Amendment right —

Not to incriminate myself.

In the early 1970s, did you have an electrical device that you used at Area 2?

I will assert my Fifth Amendment right.

And specifically, did have any kind of electrical device that was in a box or any kind of container?

I will assert my Fifth Amendment right.

And was it, did you have an electrical device that was...

This tape, it goes on and on like this for more than three hours in this deposition alone. But it was one of these civil cases against Burge that tripped him up. It had to do with a case brought by Madison Hobly, one of the Death Row 10 who we mentioned earlier.

'26-Year-old Madison Hobley is charged with seven counts of murder.

In 1987, Hobbly was charged with arson and murder after a fire in his apartment building killed seven people, including his wife and young son. He said police detectives in Area 2 beat him, suffocated him with a typewriter cover, and cuffed him to a wall for hours. And then they claimed he confessed to setting the fire.

I didn't confess to this crime. That's something they said, I did not confess to this crime. Didn't you have an interview with the cops? If that's what you want to call it. Well, what do you call it? I call it a beating, a beat down.

Hobbly maintained his innocence and the details of his torture through more than a decade in prison. And in 2003, Hobbly was one of the four men pardoned by the governor.

Where were you when Governor Ryan declared the moratorium on the death of him? I'll never forget that day. Tell me. I think Governor Ryan is a great man.

After his release, he sued Burge in the city of Chicago. And buried in a pile of Madison Hobbie's civil proceedings, betsy Biffl and the other prosecutors working on the case found something. Burge had to answer written questions from Hobley's attorney under oath. Among the questions: Had he ever used torture methods on suspects? Did he know of any of his officers using them? Burge didn't plead the fifth in Hobley's case. His written answer was short, but sweeping and significant: That he never used any such methods on suspects, nor was he aware of any. Biffl remembers paging through Hobley's case and reading that answer from Burge.

When we saw that very broad answer, we knew it was different. We knew that this was really where we might have our hook. And then was the challenge of, so how do we prove it? How do we proof that he lied?

Because by that time, 2003, a decade after Burge was off the force, there was a lot of evidence that showed he had tortured people and that he knew his detectives had too. Official reports had chronicled the torture. He'd been fired over it. And lying under oath, that's a federal crime, one for which the statute of limitations had not run out. It was Biffl's job to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. A big part of that meant repeating the work that a lot of other investigators had done in the decade before, going back over dozens of cases alleging torture at the hands of Burge and his detectives. It wasn't easy. Biffl tried to talk with torture survivors and witnesses who just didn't want to talk to a prosecutor.

Which was completely understandable because why would and should they trust us after they had been let down so many times by the government up until then?

In the end, they used only a handful of cases to prove the torture that Burge knew about when he claimed he didn't. Just a few. Out of well over 100 identified victims tied to Burge.

What struck me was that even though it had been decades, they still were so affected by what had happened to them and when they had to describe it. I mean, they're reliving it. And we had to ask them to do that numerous times. Each time they talked to us and then in front of the jury with Burge sitting there and then exposing them to being attacked, it's really difficult. And I was very grateful to the victims who were willing to put themselves through that.

'The federal prosecutors had an uphill battle. One reason was the so-called Blue Wall of Silence, the unspoken rule that police officers do not incriminate or testify against each other. At first, Betsy Biffl and the other prosecutors thought they'd actually found someone willing to break the Blue Wall, an officer named Michael McDermott who was a member of the Midnight Crew. He testified about witnessing torture to a grand jury and was granted immunity in order to testify at trial. But McDermott backtracked. When he took the stand during Burge's trial, he said he misspoke, that he thought about it more, that Burge was a good lieutenant. The jury found Jon Burge guilty anyway. In 2011, he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. At his sentencing, the judge, Joan Lefkow, read this long statement while Burge stood in front of her. She was no stranger to violent crime. Her husband and her mother were shot dead in the Chicago home she shared with them just a few years before the Burge trial, targeted by a man angry over one of her rulings. It was clearly on her mind in this moment. She said, and I'm quoting here, How can one trust that justice will be served when the justice system has been so defiled? That's what torture does to the pursuit of justice. If justice is the fair and impartial application of the law, it can't exist anymore in a case where a suspect has been tortured and coerced. And the judge sees the moment at the sentencing to say in open court something that had been hinted at, alleged, assumed, shouted by protesters in the streets: People in power knew about this torture. She put it this way. If others, such as the United States Attorney and the State's Attorney, had given heed long ago, so much pain could have been avoided. She was talking to Burge, but to me it feels like she was referencing others, including the man who is now mayor of the city, Richard M. Daley. He's come up a lot in this series. He was state's Attorney when Andrew Wilson was tortured, the case that broke the whole Burge story open. And his power only grew from there for decades. Critics have slammed him for covering up torture. He's never had to testify in court about it. He's also never apologized for what happened on his watch. I tried to talk to him for this. I spent weeks making multiple calls and emails to try to get an interview, even just a statement. I never got anything. I also reached out to many of the police officers who made up the Midnight Crew, to the legal teams that have either represented them or their estates. There's a lot of silence in this story. Burge was sentenced to four and a half years in a low-security federal prison in North Carolina. He served less than four. He got out in 2014 and died four years later at the age of 70.

I felt that justice had been done, but to me it was never enough because it was only him.

Did you at any time shock him on the genitals or the ears or anywhere else?

I will assert my Fifth Amendment Right.

Did you from time to time...

It was terrible what he did, what these people lived through and that they weren't believed and that people who were in positions to do something about it didn't do it. It's just very sad and it makes me angry.

Did you participate or witness any abuse of him?

I will assert my Fifth Amendment right...

There are a lot of police officers who made up the Midnight Crew. At least 19 have been accused of torture, but have never been convicted of a crime. Probably never will at this point. And then there are those that Betsy Biffl talked about. People higher up in the chain of command who knew about what was going on and didn't stop it.

In the narrative, there's a danger of isolating Burge and saying, well, it was just one police officer or one precinct.

Laurence Ralph is the expert we heard from back in episode one. He's a professor at Princeton University and the author of a book about the Burge scandal called The Torture Letters, and he's studied the way things like this happen within a system.

I'm trying to get away from the kind of metaphor of a rotten apple, right? But if we look at what I call the torture tree, we see that now there's a whole system and structure that actually grew the apple and that has the potential to grow many more apples and there's branches that connect the apple to other places in the government like the district attorney's office, like the mayor's office.

Dr. Ralph says this system allowed the torture to continue, even if people knew the truth.

The way that I think about it conceptually is through the kind of idea of an open secret. The open secret is something that people know. It's just that we also know that nothing is gonna be done about it. And so we have to see these things as connected or else we run the risk of allowing this to happen again.

Treating Jon Burge like he's just a bad apple doesn't really do anything to prevent the system from creating more Jon Burges. The system had to change. And for police reform activists, a first step was reparations for the victims of police violence. After more than two decades of advocacy, a new city administration was willing to hear their calls for justice and to do something about it.

Basically, I wanted to close the book.

'In the spring of 2015, then Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a multi-part reparations package for the survivors of torture under Jon Burge. I talked to him this summer. Emanuel is also a CNN contributor these days, so I didn't have to go far to find him.

This chapter in the city to be put behind us and also a reminder of what happened

'Activists and alderpersons, which are kind of like city council people in Chicago, had negotiated for months on the terms. Fifty-seven torture survivors were given $100,000 each in compensation. They and their families were given free tuition at Chicago City Colleges. The city promised to create a permanent public memorial, and it founded the Chicago Torture Justice Center, a place where people can seek help for the psychological harm created by racialized police violence. That's still open today. The package also required that this story of police torture in Chicago be taught in public schools. It's now mandated history curriculum for eighth and 10th graders. The final piece was an apology from the city.

Why did you feel that was a necessary step to take?

Well, because the city was still fighting coming to terms with this. Here's a guy responsible for enforcing the law and upholding the law who is violating the law, and he was doing it with the badge that the city gives him. And I thought if you're looking for closure, the biggest part of the apology was ownership that the city in the name of this police officer was accountable and responsible for what happened. So I thought there was an emotional and psychological component that no amount of money by itself could address. And the city had to own that fact.

The reparations package had its critics, but the city called it historic. And so did a lot of the activists who worked on it. People like Flint Taylor, who's been fighting for justice for victims and for people to just listen to their stories for decades.

It's very rewarding to all of us who were involved in that struggle that students are learning the true narrative. That doesn't often happen, you know, because often the history that's taught and the history that is trying to be completely erased during this era, young people really need to know.

The passing of the reparations package was a sign that there was a hunger in the city of Chicago for change, for a reckoning with the past and a different future when it came to how police and prosecutors fight crime. And more reforms followed. Cook County elected Kim Foxx as state's attorney in 2016, a progressive prosecutor who ran on criminal justice reform, and she oversaw a lot of changes, but she really got headlines for the number of criminal convictions she got overturned. We're talking hundreds, and most of them weren't related to Burge.

Kim Fox vacating seven murder convictions today, tied to disgrace former Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara.

Former CPD Sergeant Ronald Watts planted evidence and fabricated charges on Southside residents for more than a decade.

These allegations of police misconduct have had a significant stain on the justice system that we can no longer afford to ignore.

While Fox was top prosecutor, she oversaw the release of 226 people whose cases were connected to just one cop, Ronald Watts. He eventually pleaded guilty to stealing drug proceeds from somebody who turned out to be an FBI informant. The civil lawsuits against him and the city are piling up too. Chicago is still in the middle of this reckoning. The effort that started with activists way back in the 80s, the protests of the 90s, the investigations and lawsuits of the last 20 years, it was like this flood. The weather might be changing, but the water's still rising.

We're gonna take a quick break. We'll be right back.

While all of this reform we've been talking about was happening, James Gibson was still in prison.

I had to go to bed one night at a time.

At that point, it had been over 25 years, serving time for a crime, a double murder, that he maintained he had nothing to do with.

I wrote every media outlet in the nation trying to get some help of somebody to just listen to my calls. I had like a formula so to speak. I would write 20 letters a day and then I would file motions and I've been filing motions ever since.

James became a jailhouse lawyer and over the years became a relentless litigator. Everything he learned about how criminal defense worked, he tried to pass on to others.

I used to teach guys and show them how to file grievances and I used show them how to fire post convictions, direct appeal. We getting up on some knowledge. Know your rights.

'2015, he got a break. He'd filed a claim a couple years before with the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission. That was the body that had been set up to review cases of people who said they'd been tortured by police. The commission found sufficient evidence he had been tortured, and they referred his claim back to the very same court that had sent him to prison. So it's not over, but it's a chance. In 2016, he and his attorneys laid out their evidence in a circuit court hearing. Two officers who interrogated James back in 1989 pleaded the fifth in that hearing. For more than three years, his case ping-ponged back and forth between the circuit court and appellate court. A judge eventually ordered a new trial. And then on April 26, 2019, all charges against him were dismissed. And James Gibson walked free. He eventually got something else besides his freedom, a certificate of innocence from a judge.

Given all the work that you've put in, what did it feel like when you finally got your certificate of innocence?

It was like, I didn't have no feelings, you know. I'm institutionalized. I'm not working with no feelings and emotions, you know what I'm saying? They done conditioned me to be like this. I feel disrespected, you understand? I've been fighting so long, I'm still swinging. I've being punch drunk. You know, they had me for 98 hours. I still carry scars on my body 36 years later. I sweat in the middle of the night, every night at three o'clock, because they held the door up on me for five years in the winter time. I had to plug my ears up and nose up with toilet paper because roaches were so deep in there you can hear them and smell them. And you talkin' about how I feel.

The thing about overturning a wrongful conviction is that it's never a simple win. And for others, it doesn't feel like a win at all. All of the stories of torture related to John Burge started with a brutal crime. So what happens when a crime victim's family finds out that the story the cops had always told them about their loved one's murder, the closure they thought they had, is gone? Let's go back to the crime at the beginning of this story. Two men, a mechanic and insurance salesman, shot dead outside a garage on the South Side of Chicago on a freezing day in 1989. One of those men, the insurance salesmen, was Lloyd Benjamin. He left behind a family.

You know, growing up, uh, my dad was like my best friend. He taught me everything I knew about sports and we were like, you know, best buddies.

Bill Benjamin is the only son of Lloyd Benjamin. Just as that December day is seared in James' memory, it's also seared in Bill's. He was 33 years old when his dad was killed.

I remember that it was cold, like minus 20 or minus 30 out. I was over at a friend's house and my mother knew where I was so she called my friend and I guess she told him what had happened and she said, don't tell him what happened.

Somebody had shot his dad two times in the head outside Hunter Wash's garage. He died there.

My mom begged my dad not to go out that day because it was so cold. It was right before Christmas. And, you know, he never came home. Every Christmas, it's supposed to be a celebration. Well, not to me anymore. So. It was just, ah. It was heartbreaking.

Bill said police were confident they were on the right track with their investigation.

They said they think they had the guy, they're just waiting on a few things, and they finally came through and said, "Yep, yep, we got him.'"

We got him. They were talking about James Gibson. Bill was in the courtroom for James's bench trial. He believed James had killed his dad. And seeing James get life in prison, it gave Bill a kind of comfort.

I was happy when he got convicted.

He said he still believes James is guilty.

For them all to say that they were all tortured by Burge, I doubt it. I highly doubt it. Maybe a few of them were. And then everybody else just got on their coattails and now everybody's free. I know everybody's all happy, all the families are happy. What about the victims' families? I'll bet none of them are happy. I know I'm not.

You know, you feel that James Gibson definitely did this, that he's sort of wrongfully out of prison. And I'm going to ask you this, not to sort of disrespect your conviction there, but I just wonder for you and your reflection, did you ever consider that he might not have done this?

I mean, it's crossed my mind. I don't believe that to be the case, but it's crossed my mind, do I know for positive that he pulled the trigger? No, quite honestly. No, I don't I believe that, but I don't know that for a fact.

Does it bother you at all, that the guilt that you believe James is guilty of, for lack of a better word, was tarred by the behavior of police in handling what would have been a suspect at the time?

I'm sure that some people were tortured. That's not, I'm not condoning that, that's for sure. I don't know, it's hard to tell who was and who wasn't. It just ruins the whole investigation when stuff like that happens. It shouldn't happen. I, yeah, I blame Burge for that, for sure.

There's too much blame to go around. Not enough places for it to land now.

If he didn't, then who did? I think about that every day.

In the spring of 2019, a couple weeks after he finally walked free, James Gibson sued the city of Chicago for wrongful conviction. His legal fight wasn't over.

'I'm a warrior. I've been fighting and being denied. I've in the appellate court, the Supreme Court, the circuit court of appeals, the Seventh Circuit, the United States really sanctuary, the federal court, the post-convictions, the commutations. I've being in the court system since 1990. So I don't know how to do nothing else but to fight.

He's tried to make up for what was lost. He's reconnected with family. He started a nonprofit, the Clara and James Gibson Foundation, to draw attention to the stories of people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes. And as he tried to rebuild his life, he kept fighting the city and the courts. When I first met James this spring, he still didn't know what a resolution to his case would look like. At that point, it had been almost six years since he'd sued the city. In June, his lawyer called me with news. The city of Chicago proposed a settlement, and that settlement would be up for a vote at the next city council meeting.

It's a Wednesday in June, 10 a.m. Outside, it's cloudy and humid. I'd flown to Chicago the day before and met James Gibson in person for what was the first time at that point. Now, he's dressed in a tailored blue suit. He's sitting in the Chicago City Council chambers, in the gallery, on the edge of his seat, watching the City Council make its way through its agenda. And if you've ever sat through a City Council meeting, they've always got a long agenda. I see James Gibson's name on the meeting agenda. James Gibson versus the city of Chicago. Underneath that, in bold type, is an amount, $14.75 million. It's listed under three other settlements approved by the city's finance committee, and it's the biggest one by far. The chair of the finance committee rattles off other agenda items. Then she gets to the settlements. James Gibson's is last.

In the case of James Gibson versus city of Chicago at all in the amount of $14,750,000. I move passage of this item by the same motion. Hearing no objections, seeing no hands, so ordered. Item number 12 is the communication...

The meeting just moves on, business as usual. I look over at James. I can't interpret the look on his face, and his lawyer, Andrew M. Stroth, is whispering in his ear. We'd put a mic on him before the meeting started, and I wonder if it'll capture what he's feeling in this huge moment. But it all happened so fast. James' lawyer is now hustling him out of the room, telling him — all right, that's it. Right outside the council chambers, James and his lawyer said a few words. Then I watched James go over to a corner. It seemed like it was all sinking in. He took a moment for himself.

I'm here, Mama, I'm here. I'm here, Mama. I made it. I'm here, Mama. I'm here, I'm here, Mama. They couldn't break me. They couldn't break me, Mama. I'm here, I'm here, Mama. I'm here, Mama. They couldn't —

We keep coming back to the numbers in this story. 130. At least. That's the number of documented cases of torture by Jon Burge or detectives under him. At least 119 million. After combing through city records, that's the dollar amount we totaled up has been paid out in the last 25 years in settlements, verdicts, and reparations to people who were tortured by Burge or the Midnight Crew. And there are other victims not related to Burge. According to one alderman, there are 200 wrongful conviction cases still pending in Chicago. And then there are the numbers that we're left with at the end of James' story. A $14.75 million settlement. 29 years, three months, and 19 days served in prison. Those dollars are never gonna outweigh that lost time. And to James Gibson, that scale of justice will never feel balanced.

Somebody called me and said, congratulations, you should be happy, you rich now. And I'm like, how am I gonna be rich in something when I lost my mother, my father? I ain't never had a chance to be married. My mother's gone, there's no glue to hold us together. I mean, how should I be happy about that? All the money in the world can't replace my happiness, my peace, my loss. I lost everything, you know what I'm saying? I lost every thing, so how do you replace that?

Weigh that scale with the other side. Three years, eight months, and 12 days. That's the amount of time Jon Burge spent in prison. When I set out to make this series, I wanted to answer a question that I'd been turning over for years, ever since I learned about this story. It's a question that's at the bottom of that stack of numbers, the question the numbers can't answer. And it's a questions I asked just about everybody I interviewed. What should justice look like in this case? A lot of the people I talk to have thought about this question longer and harder than I have. Some, like attorney Flint Taylor, feel like the years of legal battles and protests delivered a real victory and that Burge faced real consequences.

He was fired. He was exiled to Florida. He ended up being reviled, being notorious. That the narrative had changed — that's what's so important.

Other people, when I ask them this question, I can hear them reaching for an answer that's gonna satisfy them, me, anybody. Here's Betsy Biffl, the prosecutor.

I don't know. I don't think paying someone millions of dollars to spend their entire adult life in prison makes up for it. I don't, you know, for the civil suits that are still ongoing, I don't think that the 54 month sentence he got in this case made up for what the five victims who testified went through. But I don't know. I don't know what it looks like at this point.

And Laurence Ralph, the torture expert.

I don't think there can be justice on an individual level. I think the missing piece from the city's part is a dimension that makes the police department itself accountable. We have to think about ways to reduce the police imprint, and I think that will necessarily reduce the kinds of damages that are inflicted on the community. In the name of police violence. That's the missing piece that brings us closer to justice.

Bill Benjamin, the son of the person Gibson was accused of killing.

That's a tough question. I mean, we thought we had justice, and now there's question marks, obviously. I don't think there is any right now. Not for my family, anyway.

All this time later, there is still a web of people trying to unwind themselves from the mangled mess of what was determined for them to be justice. It was storming the day James Gibson got his settlement. That was the real thunder that day, by the way. We left City Hall together and drove to Englewood, his old neighborhood.

I say every time I get a blessing, it rains. It be my mama.

What do you think she would say if she could see you now to see where you've ended up, to see what you've been able to do?

'She would say, uh, stop all that other stuff. Stop all that extra stuff and have some class, more class. It seemed like it was just yesterday. It's been 20-something years, every moment, every day. She would want me to let it go. I'm still working on it Mama. I'm still working on it. I'm still working on that part.

'Tortured Justice was produced by Graelyn Bershear, Madeleine Thompson, Emily Williams, Kyra Dahring, Sofia Sanchez, and Lauren Kim. The series editor was Lacy Roberts. Our technical director is Dan Dzula. The executive producer of CNN podcasts is Steve Lickteig. We had production help from Jake Sorgan, Joe DeCeault, David Guggenheim, Jessica Pupovac, Miriam Annenberg, and Jordan Guzzardo. Special thanks to Haley Thomas, Robert Mathers, Alex Manasseri, Jo Parker, Kate Carroll, Emma Lacey-Bordeaux, and Frank Lamonte. And Ferlon Webster Jr. and Ed Kelly, the actors whose voices you heard in Episode Two. We'd also like to thank the Chicago Police Torture Archive. A lot of people have devoted a lot of time and effort to uncovering this story and sharing it with the world. Two of them were in this podcast. Their original reporting and fact finding over decades was essential to this series even happening in the first place: journalist John Conroy and civil rights attorney Flint Taylor. I'm Omar Jimenez. Thanks for listening.