Politics
City Council Votes to Pay $50M to 4 Men Who Each Spent Nearly 20 Years in Prison for Double Murder They Didn’t Commit
The Chicago City Council unanimously voted Wednesday to pay $50 million to four men who each spent 20 years in prison after being convicted in connection with a 1995 double murder based on confessions coerced by Chicago police detectives trained by Jon Burge, a disgraced Chicago police commander.
The settlement calls for taxpayers to pay $21 million and the city’s insurance company to pay $29 million.
Lashawn Ezell, LaRod Styles, Charles Johnson and Troshawn McCoy were all teenagers when they were charged with the murders of Khaled Ibrahim, 30, and Yousef Ali, 32, who owned a car sales business near 70th Street and Western Avenue on the city’s Southwest Side.
All four defendants, who became known as the “Marquette Park Four,” were exonerated in 2017 after Cook County prosecutors dropped the charges against them. Styles, who was 16 at the time of the murder, and Johnson, who was 19 at the time of the murder, had been sentenced to life in prison.
Ezell, who was 15 at the time of the double murder, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of robbery. McCoy, who was 17 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to 55 years in prison after pleading guilty to murder.
All have received certificates of innocence from a judge.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is the same age as the four men, said efforts to reform the police department will continue.
“Many Black men have been falsely accused and spent their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit," Johnson said. “Unfortunately, this is the experience of many Black men who, whether they get accused of a crime or they are reduced to some sort of caricature. So there is a lot of work that obviously has to be done to reform our police department. Keep in mind the cases we are settling are the direct result of what previous administrations ignored.”
In a joint statement, the men called for city officials to renew efforts to protect teens from police misconduct.
“We are grateful that the City of Chicago has chosen to resolve our case and allow us to move on with our lives,” the men said. “No amount of money can ever return the years we lost due to Chicago Police misconduct that caused our collective 73 years of wrongful imprisonment.”
McCoy was the first of the group to be arrested, based on an anonymous tip, court records show. After McCoy implicated Styles, Johnson and Ezell, all four confessed after questioning by former Detective James Cassidy.
The lawsuits also name former Detective Kenneth Boudreau, who also reported to Burge.
Detectives trained by Burge have faced dozens of lawsuits and complaints alleging they physically abused those they suspected of committing crimes to coerce confessions.
No physical or forensic evidence linked the four to the crime, making their confessions the only evidence against them, records show.
The City Council also agreed to pay $2 million to the family of a man shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in 2014 after a foot chase, as city lawyers recommended.
Ronald “Ronnieman” Johnson, 25, was shot and killed by Officer George Hernandez in the early morning hours of Oct. 12, 2014, near 53rd Street and King Drive.
Johnson died eight days before now former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots at 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, killing him. In both shootings, cameras mounted on the dashboards of police cars show officers opening fire within seconds of arriving at the scene. Neither video has audio, as required by department regulations.
The video of Johnson’s shooting was released several weeks after the video of Laquan’s shooting was released, touching off a furor that led to a federal probe and a renewed push to reform the beleaguered Chicago Police Department, which has faced decades of scandals, misconduct and brutality.
While Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder, Chicago’s police misconduct agency cleared Hernandez of wrongdoing and Hernandez, an 18-year veteran of CPD, remains an active member of the police department earning $110,000 annually, according to a police database.
In other action, the City Council agreed to pay $5.8 million to four Black employees of Chicago’s water department who claimed they faced racial discrimination.
The lawsuit, filed in 2017, was on the verge of going to trial when the settlement agreement was reached, records show.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly ruled there was enough evidence for a jury to conclude “that the city had a custom or policy of condoning racial harassment and discrimination at (the Water Department) as well as inaction in the face of a risk of potential constitutional violations.”
In addition, alderpeople agreed to pay $1.25 million to a 25-year-old woman who suffered a concussion in 2020 when a light pole fell on her car near Illinois Street and McClurg Court.
The pole that crashed into the woman’s car was rusted at the bottom, according to a police report.
City officials had long known that dozens of poles across the city had become dangerously rusted, but took no action, according to CBS2-TV, which has reported extensively on the issue.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
