Gerald Reed says he confessed to a double murder, which he later retracted, after being repeatedly kicked and stomped – he has maintained his innocence but has been behind bars for 28 years

On 3 October 1990, 27-year-old Gerald Reed was arrested and detained for questioning over a double murder by two Chicago police detectives. During the interrogation, Reed’s chair was kicked out from under him and he was repeatedly kicked and stomped. A metal rod he previously had in his thigh from a gunshot wound sustained in 1985 was broken during the beating.

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Reed signed a confession to the killings to stop the torture, which he later retracted during his trial. He has maintained his innocence ever since but has been behind bars for 28 years.

“He got tired of beating on him and he was afraid they were going to do something to me,” Armanda Shackelford, Reed’s mother, told the Guardian.

But now Shackelford and her son are hoping their long nightmare could be about to come to an end as part of a process of looking at a raft of cases involving several notorious Chicago police officers who beat confessions out of suspects.

Late last month Reed began an evidentiary hearing more than six years after the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission ruled that his case needed to be looked at due to his credible claims of torture. The hearing’s final arguments are scheduled to begin this week and could eventually lead to Reed being freed.

Gerald Reed. Photograph: Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression

“The judge is deciding the first question, was there torture? If he finds that there was torture, the remedy generally would be to disqualify the confession and give a new trial,” said Elliot Zinger, the attorney representing Reed. “It’s my position that without the confession there’s not really much of a case against Gerald, so that would be extremely helpful to us.”

Medical records show that the broken rod in Reed’s leg from the torture has yet to be repaired. The broken metal rod has caused Reed severe pain ever since he was beaten by the two police detectives, but it took until 2016 for the Illinois department of corrections to authorize a surgery to repair the damage. Reed still has not been given a required follow-up surgery to complete the repair.

“Here is an extraordinary case, where somebody has been subjected to 28 years of imprisonment as a result of being tortured and forced to confess to a crime he didn’t commit. What we are demanding is enough is enough, he needs to be freed,” said Frank Chapman, educational director and field organizer at the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

The CAARPR has held several protests and submitted petitions demanding Reed’s exoneration over the past several years.

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The detectives involved in Reed’s torture were under the supervision of the notorious former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. The Chicago police department conducted an internal investigation into Burge in 1990, finding systematic evidence of abuse in which Burge or officers under his supervision beat, suffocated and shocked individuals to coerce confessions out of them. Burge was fired in 1993 but never faced criminal charges until federal prosecutors charged him in 2008 for lying under oath about using torture to coerce confessions. In 2011, Burge was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.

Burge is tied to more than 100 allegations of torturing criminal suspects into confessions throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He was prosecuted for perjury because the statute of limitations had passed once substantive evidence surfaced of Burge’s role in torture.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Armanda Shackelford, Gerald Reed’s mother, says her son confessed because ‘He got tired of beating on him.’ Photograph: Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression

In 2003, Governor George Ryan of Illinois commuted 167 sentences and exonerated four men owing to widespread concerns that several men on death row were wrongfully convicted because of confessions coerced through torture. In 2015, a historic reparations fund of $5.5m was set up by the city of Chicago to pay up to $100,000 to 60 victims of torture by police under Burge’s command.

Chicago has been dubbed the false confession capital of the world by prison reform advocates because of the high rate of wrongful convictions facilitated by false confessions; out of 284 exonerations in the United States since 1989 that involved false confessions, 87 were in Illinois, 66 of which occurred in Cook county.

One of the detectives involved in Reed’s torture, Michael Kill, is linked to more than 20 other torture cases, including one case where he electroshocked a 13-year-old in 1991. In a deposition under oath, Kill defended using the N-word “more than a million times” during his police career.

The other detective involved in Reed’s torture, Victor Breska, was involved in the coerced confession of Eric Johnson, who was released in 2012 for time served.

Burge and Kill died earlier this year.

The Chicago police department declined to comment.