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RACIST TORTURE AND THE CODE OF SILENCE

A Situational Analysis of Sidebar Secrecy and Legal Cynicism in the Trial of Jon Burge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2021

John Hagan ,
Bill McCarthy  and
Daniel Herda
John Hagan*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Northwestern University
Bill McCarthy
Affiliation:
School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University Newark
Daniel Herda
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Merrimack College
*
Corresponding author: John Hagan, Sociology Department, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 60608. E-mail: j-hagan@northwestern.edu.
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Abstract

We join Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of the racialized U.S. social system with a situational methodology developed by Arthur L. Stinchcombe and Irving Goffman to analyze how law works as a mechanism that connects formal legal equality with legal cynicism. The data for this analysis come from the trial of a Chicago police detective, Jon Burge, who as leader of an infamous torture squad escaped criminal charges for more than thirty years. Burge was finally charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, charges that obscured and perpetuated the larger structural reality of a code of silence that enabled racist torture of more than a hundred Black men. This case study demonstrates how the non-transparency of courtroom sidebars plays an important role in perpetuating systemic features of American criminal injustice: a code of silence, racist discrimination, and legal cynicism.

Keywords

RaceSocial StructureCrimeJusticeLawCode of SilencePolice BrutalityRacist Torture
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 31 - 60
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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