Man who claimed he was Burge victim at 13 is freed after decades in prison for another murder

Marcus Wiggins. | Illinois Department of Corrections

One of the youngest murder suspects to accuse the late Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge of torture was paroled Friday after more than two decades in prison for an unrelated murder conviction.

Marcus Wiggins, 42, plans to seek vindication for what he says was a wrongful conviction that put him in prison, according to his attorney, Justin Bonus.

“They destroyed this man’s life,” Bonus said of the Chicago Police Department investigation into the killing that led to Wiggins’ 1999 conviction.

Bonus is a New York lawyer who said he decided to represent Wiggins after watching a documentary about Northwestern University students re-examining his murder conviction. Bonus said he plans to file a request to vacate the conviction.

Wiggins was 13 when he was arrested in 1991 in the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy on the South Side. A Cook County judge threw out Wiggins’ confession, and the case was dismissed.

Wiggins sued the city, saying Burge and his detectives tortured him into confessing by using electrical shocks. The lawsuit was settled for $95,000.

Bonus said police initially considered Wiggins a suspect in the 1994 killing of a 10-year-old boy, but Wiggins — who Bonus said was in Wisconsin — wasn’t charged.

In 1999, Wiggins was convicted of murder in the fatal shooting of Theopolis Teague after a supposed traffic altercation the previous year on the South Side.

Acting as his own lawyer, Wiggins filed a post-conviction request to overturn his conviction. But the federal appeals court in Chicago ruled against him, citing three witnesses who identified Wiggins as the shooter and calling the evidence “overwhelming.”

Still, Bonus said the police framed Wiggins in Teague’s killing.

“This is a conspiracy,” Bonus said.

Burge, who died in 2018, was accused of overseeing the torture of suspects to obtain confessions to violent crimes on the South Side in the 1970s and 1980s. Fired in 1993, he was never criminally charged until being accused of and later convicted of perjury in federal court in 2010 for lying about the torture allegations. He was sentenced to more than four years in prison.

Jon Burge in 2010.