The Chicago Tribune, 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 - Friday, August 29, 1997 Edition: MCHENRY COUNTY Section: NEWS Page: 1 Word Count: 919
Carolyn Starks, Tribune Staff Writer.

The jury was lodged in a local hotel for the night and was scheduled to resume deliberations Friday morning in U.S. District Court.

The deliberations began Thursday afternoon on the fourth day of the trial on a suit filed by Michael Blucker, 28, a former prison inmate, against the Illinois Department of Corrections and seven department employees.

Blucker said in his suit and in trial testimony that he contracted HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from repeated sexual assaults by inmates, many of them gang members, who used him as a sex object and as a sex slave.

He said that gang members sold him as a sexual partner to other inmates for the price of coffee and cigarettes.

He also contends that two corrections officers delivered him to gang members to be raped.

Blucker's lawyer, Joseph Condon of Crystal Lake, asked the jury to award his client $1.5 million in damages.

"The facts are horrid. They are hard to listen to, hard to tell," Condon said in his closing arguments Thursday. "Imagine what it's like for a 24-year-old skinny white boy to endure it."

He told the jury that Blucker was at first afraid to report the assaults, but that when he did, prison officials failed to provide him with protection.

Prison guards and other employees shuffled Blucker from office to office, including a prison official, a social worker and a doctor, all of whom knew of the rapes but did nothing to stop them, Condon said in his closing arguments.

"They were in a position to deal with what was in front of them. Sending Michael Blucker from one office to another is not doing something. It's avoiding something," Condon said.

The state's witnesses and lawyers sought to portray Blucker as a manipulative liar, who voluntarily had sex with other inmates in exchange for drugs.

Assistant Illinois Atty. Gen. Terry Corrigan referred in his closing arguments to testimony that Blucker declined protective custody when offered it.

"He is a professional thief. That is something you should consider when wondering whether he is telling the truth," Corrigan said to the jury.

He asserted that Blucker declined to be placed in protective custody because drugs are not as available there, as they are in the general prison population.

Blucker contends, however, that gang members threatened to kill him if he moved out of the general population.

The first rape occurred within 10 days of his arrival at the Downstate Menard Correctional Center in 1993, Blucker testified. He said three gang members cornered him in his cell, brandished homemade knives and wrapped an electrical cord around his neck before raping him.

He testified that in another incident, gang members beat him over the head with bricks, then raped him in a shower room.

The attacks finally stopped about a year later when he was transferred from Menard to Western Illinois Correctional Center, according to the suit.

Blucker showed no reaction to the closing arguments in the federal courtroom. His mother and his wife sat nearby.

Blucker said after the jury began deliberating that, win or lose, he will continue to support mandatory AIDS testing for prison inmates.

"This can never be closed. I'll have to deal with it the rest of my life," he said. "People don't want to believe it because they're scared of the knowledge. Because if they believe this, maybe they would have to do something about it."

His mother, Susan Blucker of Elgin, is a co-founder of Mothers Against Prison Rape, a cause she became interested in after learning of her son's experience.

"Whether he wins or loses, that's irrelevant to me. The whole point is that this whole thing is exposed," she said.

She said she works with terminally ill people, including AIDS patients, in a Lake County hospice program.

"I want Michael's medical costs to be taken care of" by the proceeds from lawsuit, she said.

Blucker's suit said the DOC and its employees were guilty of "deliberate indifference" to his plight. Under a 1994 U.S. Supreme Court decision, that phrase defines the standard that must be met before jail officials can be held responsible for inmate-on-inmate abuses.

Blucker's suit also says the department's policy of placing inmates with HIV in the general prison population put Blucker at risk of contracting the virus.

The DOC denies responsibility for Blucker's contraction of the AIDS virus. Correctional officers and other department officials testified that Blucker had consensual sex with other inmates and that he was involved in smuggling drugs brought in by female visitors.

If the jury finds in Blucker's favor, it would be the first case in which a prison system is held accountable for an inmate contracting HIV while in custody, according to legal experts.

A victory for Blucker could also bolster efforts by state Rep. Cal Skinner (R-Crystal Lake), who has sought unsuccessfully since 1995 to win passage of legislation requiring segregation of HIV-positive inmates and also requiring greater protection against prison sexual assaults.

The Blucker case has become a key component of Skinner's HIV campaign.

CAPTION: PHOTO (color): Michael Blucker sits outside the East St. Louis federal court building during a break in the trial, which is now up to jurors. AP photo.

Copyright 1997/The Chicago Tribune. Reproduced with permission. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the Permissions Desk, The Chicago Tribune, 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611.
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