G. Flint Taylor

In May 2015, a month after Emanuel was re-elected, Chicago aldermen unanimously approved a 5.5-million-dollar reparations package, agreeing to compensate the approximately 60 living victims with valid claims of torture while in police custody during Burge's command, each to receive up to $100,000. Additionally, the living survivors, their immediate families, and the immediate families of the deceased torture victims would all gain access to services, including psychological counseling and free tuition to the City Colleges of Chicago. The aldermen also approved building a public memorial to the deceased victims. They also established a requirement that Chicago public schools teach students in the eighth and tenth grades about the Burge legacy of police brutality. At the May Council meeting, in the presence of more than a dozen survivors, Emanuel offered an official apology on behalf of the City of Chicago, and the aldermen stood and applauded them. Taylor stated in an interview that the "non-financial reparations make it truly historic."

Taylor and his associates played a significant role in the decades-long campaign to obtain criminal charges against Burge. In October 2008, Burge was indicted by a federal grand jury for lying in a civil case about torturing suspects. He was convicted in June 2010, and subsequently sentenced to 4½ years in federal prison. Burge was released from prison on October 2, 2014, to spend the remainder of his sentence at a halfway house near his Tampa, Florida, retirement home. Burge will still collect his Chicago police pension.

Taylor has continued to be a public advocate in the effort to hold Daley accountable for police abuses during his watch. In March 2014, along with colleague Locke Bowman, Taylor filed a lawsuit accusing members of the Daley family of joining in a civil rights conspiracy with numerous high-ranking police and prosecutorial officials to cover-up facts in the case of David Koschman, who died in April 2004, after an altercation with former Mayor Daley's nephew, Richard J. "R.J." Vanecko.

For more than a year, the reparations ordinance, which had been introduced by Aldermen co-sponsors Joe Moreno and Howard Brookins Jr. in October 2013, had been stalled in the Chicago City Council. Political pressure began to build during the run-up to the 2015 Chicago mayoral primary. Mayor Rahm Emanuel was seeking a second term in office and faced four challengers, two of whom were African American. CTJM, Amnesty International, and other activists collected 40,000 signatures, which they delivered to Emanuel's office in December 2014, suggesting growing public support for the proposal. After a 2015 Valentine's Day Rally that attracted hundreds of supporters, a team of negotiators that included Taylor, fellow People's Law partner Mogul, and advocates from CTJM, and Amnesty International began negotiations with the city of Chicago's corporation counsel, Stephen Patton, on the terms of the reparations ordinance. The city's initial offer did not include any direct payments to victims or their families, a demand on which the team of negotiators refused to yield. Talks at first were strained. Various aldermen and staffers from the mayor's office and the law department got involved, and a compromise that would include financial payments to living victims, but not to the families of those who had died, was eventually brokered.

In 2011, Taylor and his colleagues obtained the first judicial decision holding former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley as a defendant in a civil police torture case, alleging a citywide conspiracy to cover it up.

Taylor, with partners Mogul and Ben Elson, also represented police torture victims Darrell Cannon and Michael Tillman, winning Cannon's freedom in 2007 and Tillman's in 2010.

When, in July 2006, Cook County Special Prosecutor Edward Egan failed to indict Burge for perjury and instead issued a report after four years of investigation of torture cases, Taylor publicly criticized the Special Prosecutor's failure to indict and called the report a cover-up that whitewashed the role of Richard M. Daley and other high ranking police and prosecutorial officials. Egan responded to Taylor's criticism in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. He questioned Taylor's motives, saying his main interest was making money.

In March 2002, Chicago magazine named Taylor to its list of the city's "30 Tough Lawyers".

In 2000, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Patterson was entitled to a new hearing on his claims of torture. In 2003 Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned Patterson and three others on Illinois' death row, saying their torture claims proved the criminal justice system was "terribly broken." He had already conducted a three-year review of the justice system and was disturbed to learn that 13 men on death row had been exonerated as innocent. In 2000 he declared a moratorium on use of the death penalty.

In 1998, the Chicago police accused a seven-year-old boy, along with his eight-year-old friend, of the murder and sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl, Ryan Harris. The boys were exonerated after DNA evidence established that neither boy could have committed the crimes. In 2005, Taylor and his law colleagues Jan Susler and Stainthorp obtained a multi-million-dollar settlement for the seven-year-old defendant. Taylor remarked to reporters that the case showed "systemic misconduct" from the top to the bottom of the Chicago police department. When the children were brought in for questioning, Taylor noted, "No one said, 'Show me how these kids could have done that.' No one was ever disciplined for it. Everyone walked away."

Over the years, more than 100 men had said they were tortured on the South Side under Burge's watch. In addition to suffering electric shock, they told stories of police putting a loaded gun in their mouth or a typewriter cover over their head to make them believe they would die. On the basis of newly discovered evidence, the Chicago Police Department in 1993 fired Burge, having found that there was "systematic" torture at Area 2. In 1994, Taylor, together with law partners Joey Mogul and Tim Lohraff, began representing death row inmate Aaron Patterson, who alleged that he was tortured by Burge and his men into a coerced confession.

In the late 1990s, Taylor joined Wyoming attorney Jerry Spence, now Federal Judge Matthew Kennelly, and former Northwestern School of Law professor Lawrence Marshall to obtain a $36-million-dollar wrongful conviction settlement for four men, who each served more than a decade behind bars for the 1978 murder of a couple in Ford Heights, Illinois, a suburb just south of Chicago. The Ford Heights Four were freed after DNA tests proved they were innocent. The Chicago Tribune quotes Taylor describing the case as another example of "outrageous police misconduct and prosecutorial misconduct." The newspaper reported:

In 1987, Taylor, Haas and law partner John Stainthorp agreed to represent death row prisoner Andrew Wilson in his pro se civil rights suit. Wilson alleged that he was tortured with electric shock by Area 2 Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and forced to confess to the 1982 murder of two Chicago police officers, for which he was convicted and sentenced to death. In 1989, Wilson's case went to trial with Taylor, Stainthorp and Haas as trial counsel.

In short, the Appellate Court found that Federal District Judge Duff's rulings were so unfairly prejudicial to Wilson, and stacked the deck against him so much that Wilson had to be granted a new trial. The appellate court reiterated multiple times in its opinion that it was Defendant's alleged torturing of prisoners that was at issue, not Taylor's crimes. Eventually Wilson was awarded more than $1 million in attorney's fees and $100,000 in damages; the $100,000 went to the estate of the officers who were killed in 1982.

In 1980, a volunteer legal team had filed a civil rights damages case alleging a conspiracy among the Klansmen, Nazis, the Greensboro police, and the FBI in failing to protect protesters when they had knowledge of likely Klan violence. Taylor was one of the lead trial counsel. In the spring of 1985, during a ten-week trial in federal district court in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Taylor and his co-counsel Lewis Pitts and Carolyn MacAllister questioned scores of Nazi, Klan, FBI, police and informant witnesses. At one point in the trial, Taylor interrogated reputed Nazi leader Roland Wayne Wood about five miniature skulls pinned to his lapel. The jury of five whites and one African American was at first deadlocked, then they returned a compromise verdict against some of the defendants. The verdict was cited by the plaintiff legal team as an "historic victory" because it was the first time that anyone had been held responsible for the killings in the Greensboro Massacre.

Taylor's first case before the U.S. Supreme Court was in 1980, when Taylor, Haas and Cunningham successfully defended the Court of Appeals' decision in the Fred Hampton case against several petitions for certiorari. In 1985, Taylor successfully argued before the Court that federal prison guards should not be given immunity from civil rights liability when they sit on prison disciplinary committees. In 1993, he argued a case in which the Court created an exception to a prosecutor's absolute immunity from suit.

In the early 1980s, Taylor worked with New Orleans civil rights attorney Mary Howell to obtain a multi-million-dollar settlement in a series of civil rights cases that arose from the alleged torture and killing of several African Americans by New Orleans police officers in the Algiers section of the city. Taylor also worked in the mid 80's with People's Law Office colleagues Cunningham, Haas, Stainthorp, Michael Deutsch and Peter Schmiedel on the "street files" cases, during which Chicago police detective Frank Laverty brought to light the Chicago Police Department's secret filing system in which detectives concealed evidence that supported a criminal defendant's innocence.

In April 1979, the Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, overturned the dismissal, holding that the evidence introduced at trial supported the allegations of a conspiracy among the Chicago police, the Cook County State's Attorney, and the FBI against the Black Panther members. The appeals court further ruled that the government should be sanctioned for suppression of the FBI documents and that Taylor and Haas were wrongfully cited for contempt. In 1982, the case was settled for $1.85 million. It was never determined who fired the first shot at the apartment.

On November 3, 1979, members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party, with a former FBI and police informant, Edward Dawson, in the lead car, drove into Greensboro, North Carolina. In the absence of police officers, they fired into a crowd of anti-Klan demonstrators, fatally shooting five and wounding ten others. The demonstrators had gathered at a "Death to the Klan" march, sponsored by the Communist Workers Party, which had been organizing among mostly black workers in the textile mills. Six men were charged with murder in the state's criminal trial; three of these and another six were charged with criminal civil rights violations in a federal trial. All the Klansmen and Nazi defendants were acquitted in the two separate trials by independent all-white juries.

In January 1976, the BPP civil lawsuits went to trial with Taylor and law partner Jeffrey Haas as trial counsel. The trial lasted for 18 months, longer than any previous federal court case. During the trial, it was established that the FBI had not turned over 200 volumes of Black Panther documents to defense counsel. Both Taylor and Haas were jailed for contempt when they protested what they claimed were unfair rulings by federal Judge Joseph Sam Perry. At the end of the trial, Judge Perry dismissed the case. Taylor, Haas and colleague Dennis Cunningham appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

In 1970, Taylor and his colleagues sued a wide range of police and prosecutorial officials for $47.7 million in damages on behalf of the families of Hampton, Clark, and the survivors of the police raid. Upon discovering that the FBI also was involved in the raid, under J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program, they later named several FBI officials as defendants. Taylor worked in cooperation with U. S. Senator Frank Church's (D-Idaho) Committee on Intelligence. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations concluded in its 1976 report that the BPP raid by the Chicago police was part of a nationwide FBI program called COINTELPRO that was designed to "destroy" the Black Panther movement.

During his second year in law school at Northwestern, Taylor began to work with a group of lawyers who were representing counterculture political groups, including the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Young Lords Organization, Rising Up Angry and the Weathermen. In August 1969, these lawyers, together with two other law students, established the People's Law Office (PLO) on the north side of Chicago.

One of Taylor's most notable cases involved litigation over the death of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton, killed in what was reported by police as a shootout at his apartment. Taylor and his colleagues at the People's Law Office filed a civil rights suit following a raid on December 4, 1969, conducted by fourteen Chicago police officers, at the direction of Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan. The officers entered an apartment on Chicago's West Side, shooting and killing Hampton and Black Panther activist Mark Clark, and wounding four others. Taylor, together with several other People's Law Office lawyers and staff, were called to the apartment by survivors. For the next ten days they collected evidence at the scene.

G. Flint Taylor (born April 16, 1946) is an American human rights and civil rights attorney based in Chicago, Illinois, who has litigated many high-profile police brutality, government misconduct and death penalty cases. Taylor has pursued public interest law to take on allegations of corrupt police tactics and wrongful convictions in the city of Chicago and elsewhere. Taylor was part of a team of negotiators in the 2015 landmark decision by the City of Chicago to award reparations to the survivors of police torture, becoming the first municipal government to do so.

George Flint Taylor Jr. was born in Farmington, Maine, and was named after his paternal great-grandfather George Flint, a Maine state senator. Taylor's father was a direct descendant of several English Pilgrims who came to Plymouth, Massachusetts, on the Mayflower in 1620. Taylor graduated from Westborough (MA) High School, where he won ten varsity letters in basketball, football, and baseball. He graduated from Brown University with an American History degree in 1968, and from the Northwestern University School of Law in 1972.