Probably should have posted about this yesterday, but this story about torture and the Chicago Police Department blew me away, not so much because the torture happened, but because of the seemingly indifferent response and the crocodile tears over the timeframe under the statute of limitations having run out. How is it, anyway, that there isn't a law that gets you around the statute of limitations in a case like this? If the people who are supposed to be doing the investigating are also the people who are being investigated (or at least part of the same machine) then it just becomes another tool in the coverup shed.
It's also interesting that none of the coverage mentioned the possibility of civil suits against the city, which (presumably) would be much more likely to succeed after an official affirmation that torture did occur. As far as I know, the statute of limitations doesn't apply to civil suits.
UPDATE: Will Baude informs me via email that "almost every civil cause of action has a statute of
limitations." He can't speak authoritatively about this case, however.
As someone smarter than me pointed out: doesn't the ongoing coverup of the abuse negate the statute of limitations? Or can the law be effectively broken by those in authority as long as they can use their positions of power to keep a lid on it long enough?
Without reading much of the underlying facts, the usual rule is that the statute of limitations can in some circumstances be "tolled" if for some reason the victim who is supposed to bring the suit doesn't find out about the conduct for a long time. (E.g., because my employer has been negligently using asbestos, but hasn't told me until ten years after my retirement when I got sick).
But I can't imagine that's true here so long as the torture victims survived-- they presumably knew that they had been the victims of torture, and no cover-up would hide that from them.
I've never seen that usage of the word "tolled" before... cool.
I don't know how far the victims went in pursuit of legal remedy, but I get the sense that they weren't taken very seriously by the authorities, probably because of their low socioeconomic status or because they were criminals (or presumed criminals).
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