By Annie Sweeney, Tribune reporter
Nearly 60 years after he says he was forced by police to confess to a rape he never committed, Oscar Walden Jr. stood in a federal courtroom Tuesday as curious jurors gathered around him so he could show them scars from when a police officer bent his hand back, causing excruciating pain.
“Those two scars are still there,” said Walden, 79, who buttoned his olive suit before drawing jurors over to study his middle and index fingers. “That’s half a century old.”
In a remarkable trial playing out in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in Chicago, Walden, who is suing the city, recounted Tuesday how he says he was beaten and threatened into confessing that he raped a woman on Nov. 24, 1951, on the South Side.
Walden is one of many men pardoned by former Gov. George Ryan. But unlike others, his allegations go back so long ago that he is the only remaining witness to them. The seven officers who are alleged to have abused him are dead. So, too, is the rape victim. The police station where the abuse is alleged to have taken place in part doesn’t even exist any longer.
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Walden is still seeking justice six decades later in a proceeding that will rely heavily on his memory of the cold day he was arrested while sitting on the back of a bus on his way to his job at an iron works factory and aged transcripts of what others said happened.
via 60-year-old police-torture case goes to trial – chicagotribune.com.
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