You can’t slander a dead man, but in any case, Jon Burge is a man beyond slander. The former Chicago Police Department commander and torturer died this week in Florida.

In 2010, Burge was convicted and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Incomprehensibly — or perhaps not — Burge was not convicted for the abuse and torture of over one hundred black suspects throughout his reign over Area 2 on Chicago’s South Side between 1972 and 1988. He was convicted for lying under oath during the course of a federal investigation spurred by civil lawsuits brought by his victims — one of whom, Darrell Cannon, wrongfully convicted (and later exonerated) of murder on the strength of a coerced confession, described Burge’s team of interrogators as a “New Wave Klan.”

It is tempting to treat Burge’s death as a moment to employ metaphor, but just as he’s beyond slander, he defies metaphor. From his Area 2 dungeon, Burge employed torture tactics likely learned in Vietnam to brutally and, according to some of his victims, gleefully coerce confessions from black men to get them convicted of crimes they often hadn’t committed and keep them in cages for the rest of their lives.