Video: The WTTW News Spotlight Politics team on the $50 million verdict and more of the day’s top stories. (Produced by Andrea Guthmann)
A federal jury ordered the city of Chicago to pay $50 million to a man who was wrongfully convicted of a 2008 murder and spent 10 years in prison, setting a new city record for a wrongful conviction case.
Marcel Brown was 18 when he was arrested in connection with the Aug. 30, 2008, murder of 19-year-old Paris Jackson in Amundsen Park. Brown was convicted in 2011 of first-degree murder after driving his cousin, 15-year-old Renard Branch Jr., to the West Side park.
Convicted in 2011, Brown, now 34, was released in 2018 and granted a certificate of innocence in 2019.
“Justice was finally served for me and my family today,” Brown told reporters after the jury verdict was announced. “We’re just thankful, being able to be here today. Thank you, jurors.”
Brown is represented by Loevy and Loevy, a law firm that specializes in police misconduct litigation and advertises itself by telling potential clients that “no law firm in Chicago has been more successful in litigating police brutality and police misconduct cases.”
A spokesperson for the city’s Department of Law said officials are “reviewing the verdict and assessing its legal options.”
Before the case went to trial, city lawyers attempted, and failed, to settle the lawsuit.
If the verdict is upheld, it would be equivalent to more than 60% of the city’s annual $82 million budget to cover the cost of police misconduct lawsuits.
It also would be significantly more costly than nearly any other lawsuit brought by a Chicagoan who was wrongfully convicted based on evidence developed by Chicago police, spotlighting the risk the city faces by taking police misconduct cases to trial.
By comparison, the most recent wrongful conviction lawsuit settled by the Chicago City Council called for Ricardo Rodriguez to get $5.5 million after spending more than 22 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of a 1995 murder.
Until now, the most expensive wrongful conviction verdict came in 2021, when a jury ordered the city to pay $22 million to Nathson Fields, who was convicted of a 1984 double murder and sentenced to death before being exonerated. That verdict was upheld on appeal.
In all, between January 2019 and June 2024, Chicago taxpayers spent a total of $200 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than three dozen people who were wrongfully convicted based on evidence gathered by the Chicago Police Department, according to an analysis of city data by WTTW News.
Marcel Brown, center, listens as his attorneys address the news media on Monday, Sept. 9, 2024, after a federal jury awarded him $50 million in a case that claimed the Chicago Police Department violated his constitutional rights. (Courtesy of Loevy and Loevy)
Brown was convicted after Chicago police detectives testified Brown told them he knew Branch had a gun and planned to shoot someone who was causing his sister trouble during a video-recorded interrogation that lasted more than five hours. In all, Brown was held in an interrogation room for 34 hours before being charged.
Brown was sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Brown’s conviction was overturned after Karen Daniel, director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, and attorney Greg Swygert, convinced a judge that “Brown falsely implicated himself in the shooting after the lengthy interrogation wore him down to the point that he said what the detectives wanted to hear,” according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
During his interrogation, police refused seven requests from Brown to speak to his mother. Brown told police 40 times he said he did not know Branch had a gun when he agreed to give him a ride to the park and asked to go home more than a dozen times, court records show.
Detectives repeatedly accused Brown of lying, and said he was facing between 35 and 45 years in prison if he did not tell them “the truth,” court records show.
Brown implicated himself after the video showed him “curled up in a ball in a corner of the room, crying,” according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Three hours after police began interrogating Brown, an attorney hired by Brown’s mother to represent her son arrived at the police station and asked to speak with his client. Police refused to allow him access to his client, and never informed Brown that his attorney wanted to speak with him.
Under a 1994 Illinois Supreme Court decision, statements made after an attorney has requested to speak with their client but is denied cannot be used as evidence.
In 2015, the only witness who said he saw Brown and Branch in the park at the time of the shooting said he lied during Brown’s trial after police threatened to take away his children and suggested he would be charged with the murder.
Note: Loevy and Loevy has done legal work for WTTW News.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
