Chicago Torture Case Will Cost City Millions

June 29, 2010— -- The perjury conviction of a former Chicago police lieutenant for lying about torturing suspects with electric shocks and Russian roulette is expected to ripple through the city's prisons and courts, stirring up appeals and lawsuits worth millions of dollars, legal experts said today.

A federal jury found former Lt. Jon Burge guilty of perjury and obstruction of justice Monday after a five-week trial in which five men convicted of crimes said the decorated former officer and cops under his command used an array of tortures to make them confess to crimes in the 1970s and 1980s.

"This is a midpoint in this whole process, not an endpoint," Jonathan Masur, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School, told ABCNews.com. "First of all, there are most likely dozens, maybe even a hundred people, still in Illinois prison who were convicted pursuant to confessions they say were obtained through torture when Burge was still head of that police district."

Prosecutors alleged that Burge didn't act alone. One witness said Burge didn't actually participate in the torture, but looked on as other officers beat and suffocated him.

Others described Burge's men playing a version of Russian roullette with them, burning them, using electric shock on sensitive areas of their bodies, and suffocating them with typrewriter covers during their interrogations. Most of the victims were black men from the Chicago's South Side.

"I'm confident that as an attorney in any of these cases I would be raising hell," said Bernard Harcourt, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, told ABCNews.com.