People v. Gibson

¶ 1 Defendant James Gibson was convicted after a bench trial, and sentenced to life in prison, for the 1989 murders of Lloyd Benjamin and Hunter Wash. By the trial judge's own admission, the key piece of evidence in the State's case was an incriminating admission defendant made to Area 3 detectives under the command of Jon Burge, in which defendant placed himself at the scene of the murders. Though defendant would later claim that he was coerced into giving a false statement after two days of physical abuse at the hands of the police, defendant made no serious attempt to suppress that…