Chicago pays $50 million to 4 black men who were wrongfully imprisoned for 73 years

CHICAGO — Four teenagers confessed to murders during brutal interrogations by city police in 1995. Now, after growing up in prison, they will receive $50 million in compensation for the decades they wrongfully spent behind bars.

The settlement amount for the “Marquette Park 4,” as they were called after the infamous murder case, is the largest since at least 2008 for overturned convictions in Chicago, a city that has amassed more than $300 million in settlements for wrongfully convicted people, according to a USA TODAY review of Chicago Department of Justice documents.

Illinois has been called the “wrongful conviction capital of the country” by the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that has used DNA-based acquittals to help overturn more than 300 convictions nationwide. According to the Innocence Project, Illinois tops the list with 540 wrongfully convicted acquittals, followed by Texas with 474 acquittals.

Those exonerated in the latest case – LaShawn Ezell, Charles Johnson, Larod Styles and Troshawn McCoy – said in a joint statement that they were grateful the city recognized the pain the police inflicted on them. But millions of dollars cannot replace what was taken from them.

“No amount of money can ever repay the years we lost due to Chicago police misconduct that left us with a total of 73 years of wrongful incarceration,” the statement said. “The City of Chicago must take steps to protect our teenagers from police violence like the one we endured.”

Ezell, Johnson, Styles and McCoy were charged with the murders of Khalid Ibrahim and Yousef Ali in 1995, when they were between 15 and 19 years old. The two owned a used car lot near Marquette Park on Chicago’s south side and were killed in their office “execution-style,” according to court documents.

Police initially arrested McCoy based on an anonymous tip, said Alexa Van Brunt, an attorney on the case and director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit law firm specializing in criminal justice reform and civil rights litigation. Officers subjected McCoy to hours of grueling interrogations without legal representation, during which he incriminated the three other people he knew from the neighborhood.

According to the charges, Chicago police coerced the teens into making false confessions and incriminating statements and withheld evidence that could have proven their innocence. There was no physical evidence linking the teens to the murders.

An analysis of DNA evidence from 2009 showed that none of the four were connected to the murders, the indictment states. In 2017, the Cook County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges.

“The city’s willingness to settle this matter restores a level of trust in the system and the belief that justice can be achieved through persistence and unwavering commitment,” said Michael Oppenheimer, McCoy’s lead attorney.

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Chicago’s history of wrongful convictions

Van Brunt has worked on exoneration cases in Chicago with dozens of defendants. He said intimidation and coercion are the most common causes of obtaining false confessions.

“The pattern is that officers focus on a really vulnerable child,” she said. “And that’s exactly what happened here.”

The four filed lawsuits in the Northern District of Illinois in 2018, naming 13 police officers, a Cook County deputy district attorney, Cook County and the city of Chicago.

Two of the former officers, homicide detectives James Cassidy and Kenneth Boudreau, served under Chicago police commander Jon Burge, a notorious figure in the city who tortured dozens of Chicagoans into making false confessions between the 1970s and 1990s, according to the Chicago Police Torture Archive, a project that documents Chicago police violence against more than 100 black people based on legal cases from the People’s Law Office and other organizations.

According to Van Brunt, none of the defendants have been charged with crimes related to the acquittals in the Marquette Park 4. The Cook County District Attorney’s Office would not answer questions about whether charges would be filed.

Burge’s methods have been extensively documented in court cases, books and public testimony over the years. According to the Torture Archives, they include burning, suffocation and electric shock.

He was fired in 1993 after a police department investigation board ruled he had tortured people, according to the Illinois Torture and Relief Commission, a group created by the state in 2010 to provide assistance to Burge’s victims. He was sentenced to four years in prison for perjury after lying about the torture; he died in 2018.

Former detective: “My conscience is clear”

Cassidy, who arrested and interrogated McCoy according to court records, could not be reached for comment.

Boudreau, who is named in the lawsuit filed by the four acquitted Marquette Park 4 defendants, told USA TODAY in a rare interview Friday that “my conscience is clear.” He said he and his co-defendants are being framed to make money and get people out of prison.

“I don’t believe for a second that any of them did anything wrong, especially not in my presence,” he said of the 12 officers named in the lawsuit.

Boudreau said he was named in the latest lawsuit only because of Burge, but his connection to the notorious figure was tenuous. He reported to him for about a month and was one of hundreds of detectives who did so, he told USA TODAY.

He defended his actions in the Marquette Park 4 case. “When we arrested them, they never said anything about it,” Boudreau said, adding that his role was to set up a lineup in which a dealership employee who survived the shooting identified one of the teens. “Now, all of a sudden, their stories are changing on the advice of their lawyers, and I have to say, frankly, they are desperate men facing life in prison.”

Boudreau, who now runs a therapeutic riding center for veterans and police officers, says he is not a corrupt detective and has worked for years to bring corrupt police officers to justice.

“You argue we have framed these guys – I have worked on over 800 murder cases, you think I have time, why would I pick this person to blame,” he said, adding that the consolation of the job is getting justice for the victims’ families.

Lawyers for Marquette Park 4 and police reform advocates say there are many problems with the system.

“The frustrating thing about these cases is that there are so many of them and many of them involve the same officers,” Van Brunt said. “The general rule in all of these lawsuits is that the officers are now retired, on pensions and living in Florida.”

A review of state pension data by the Illinois Better Government Association found that at least five of the officers named in the case, including Boudreau, received a pension in 2022 that totaled $469,000. None of them are active police officers.

Mayor of Chicago: Police reforms are taking place

Attorneys for the other defendants in the police crime referred USA TODAY to comments from Mayor Brandon Johnson, who said police reform is “underway.”

“Many black men have been falsely accused and spent their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit,” said Johnson, who is black. “Unfortunately, this is the experience of many black men who, whether they are accused of a crime or they are reduced to some kind of caricature. So there is obviously a lot of work to be done to reform our police force.”

The cases of the Marquette Park 4 and the Englewood 5 represent only a fraction of the miscarriages of justice in Chicago.

Cook County ranks first in the nation in wrongful convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. America’s second-largest county has seen 465 acquittals, more than double the number of Harris County, Texas, which has the second-most acquittals with 213.

Of Cook County’s wrongful convictions, 121 were the result of false confessions. That’s nearly as many as the 133 wrongful convictions in Los Angeles County overall, according to the Registry of Exonerations. America’s largest county ranks third in the nation for wrongful convictions.

The city has created new bodies, such as the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, to strengthen police oversight. In 2019, a federal judge ordered police to make reforms in response to civil rights violations, according to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. But Chicago police only complied with 7% of the required reforms, a court-appointed monitoring team found in May.

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Financial consequences of wrongful convictions

Both sides agree that the cases have a huge impact on the city’s finances.

A USA TODAY analysis of Chicago’s Department of Judicial Review’s published settlements found that the city has paid nearly $32.9 million in lawsuits related to overturned convictions since 2008.

The Marquette Park 4 settlement is larger than any other in published records.

According to the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a nonprofit policy organization, the city borrowed nearly $709 million between 2008 and 2017 to cover the costs of all police misconduct. The amount is far higher than any other city included in the analysis. By comparison, Los Angeles borrowed $71 million. With interest, Chicago’s total was $1.57 billion.

“This is nothing more than a rip-off of Chicago taxpayers,” says Boudreau.

Critics of the police argue that the huge compensation payments illustrate the impact that police misconduct has on the entire city.

“At some point we have to think about the material costs of all this, in addition to the impact on the actual victims of this kind of misconduct,” said Simon Balto, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who has written a book about Chicago police officers.

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