Former Chicago police Detective Richard Zuley once spent time on a special assignment at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, but on the witness stand on Wednesday, the retired investigator took a position seemingly at odds with a facility notorious for the human rights abuses of the interrogations that unfolded there.
“Rapport works,” Zuley said. “Interrogation doesn’t work.”
Zuley spent more than three hours testifying at the Leighton Criminal Court Building after he was called to the stand by Cook County prosecutors fighting off a petition that asks a judge to vacate a murder conviction. He denied beating and coercing witnesses and suspects ¯ saying he favors a more gentle approach — even as defense attorneys grilled him about a history of internal complaints and lawsuits.
Through Zuley, the unusual post-conviction case has linked the troubled U.S. detention center in Cuba with the shooting death of a child in Cabrini-Green in 1992. The retired detective’s account followed testimony by former Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who in November said a team led by Zuley tortured him in the early 2000s until he falsely confessed to planning to attack the CN Tower in Canada.
Anthony Garrett, 67, alleges he was coerced into confessing to murdering Dantrell Davis, a 7-year-old boy who was shot in the Cabrini-Green housing complex while walking to school with his mother on Oct. 13, 1992.
Years after his involvement in the Davis case, Zuley went to Guantanamo Bay on a special assignment while called into duty as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve, though Garrett’s defense attorneys were precluded from questioning him about his time at the detention center.
“Have you ever interrogated a civilian?” Eric Bisby, one of Garrett’s attorneys, asked Zuley on Wednesday.
“Not that I believe, no,” Zuley replied.
“Not that you believe,” Bisby replied, “or no?”
“Let’s just say no, because it doesn’t work,” Zuley answered.
When answering questions from prosecutors about the investigation into Dantrell’s killing, Zuley said he gave Garrett food, and the two talked about their shared military background.
“For lack of a different word,” Zuley said, “I liked him.”
Later, Zuley said, Garrett spoke in a weak voice and said: “You’re right, I didn’t mean to kill him.”
But that account contrasts with Garrett’s, who argued in a motion for post-conviction relief that Zuley and his team of detectives beat him over the course of two days.
Garrett’s attorneys previously told a judge that eight men have been exonerated in connection with Zuley’s investigations, and on Wednesday, they questioned him about a number of his past cases, including the infamous massacre at a Brown’s Chicken restaurant in Palatine.
Zuley was initially part of a task force investigating the attack that killed seven people in 1993, but he served a one-day suspension from the Police Department for filing a false report.
Garrett has alleged Zuley has exhibited a pattern of misconduct, in part relying on Slahi’s account of the former detective’s time in Guantanamo. His attorneys have alleged that Zuley exported a “sadistic interrogation plan” from his time at the Chicago Police Department and used it to torture Slahi, Garrett’s attorneys have alleged.
Cook County prosecutors are defending the conviction, arguing that evidence supports Garrett’s guilt.
In November, Slahi described almost dying while having water poured on him in a freezing cold room.
Zuley sought to emotionally manipulate him, Slahi said, by telling him the U.S. had captured his mother and put her in a prison with men.
He said he was beaten and sexually assaulted.
Slahi said interrogators took him out on a boat at one point, and waterboarded him with saltwater until he threw up.
“I told you not to (expletive) with me,” Detective Richard Zuley reportedly yelled at Slahi after the torture on the boat. “I told you not to (expletive) with me.”
Slahi was never charged with a crime and was eventually released from Guantanamo after a lengthy legal battle. He authored a memoir about his experience that was made into the 2021 film “The Mauritanian.”
After Dantrell was killed, police had arrested Garrett on a tip, though his attorneys argue that he had people who could give him an alibi.
In 2023, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, a body that reviews claims of police abuse, referred Garrett’s case to a Cook County judge for an evidentiary hearing, finding credible evidence of torture.
