Crime & Law
Lawsuit Filed by Man Who Spent 17 Years in Prison After Being Wrongfully Convicted Set for Trial After City Council Refuses to Settle
(WTTW News)
A federal judge is poised to set a trial date in a lawsuit against the city filed by a Chicago man who spent 17 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder. That comes after a key city panel rejected a recommendation from city lawyers to settle the case for $7.6 million.
The Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee voted 9-14 on July 15 not to advance the recommendation from the city’s lawyers to pay $7.6 million to John Velez, who spent 17 years in prison before his conviction in the murder of 26-year-old Anthony Hueneca in Little Village was overturned.
If the city loses that trial, it could cost taxpayers between $18 million and $34 million, according to public warnings from Deputy Corporation Counsel Jessica Felker that most of the Finance Committee ignored.
Russell Ainsworth, Velez’s attorney, said he was “shocked” by the panel’s rejection of the lawyer’s recommendation.
“There is a clear lack of effective risk management by the city,” Ainsworth said, adding that he will ask the jury in this case to award Velez “substantial” punitive damages.
City Council members determined to “grandstand for political purposes” have exposed the city to significant liability, according to Ainsworth, of Loevy and Loevy, which 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.”
In response to the Finance Committee's vote, U.S. District Court Judge Edmond Chang is prepared to set a trial date at a hearing scheduled for July 30, according to court records.
Chang warned lawyers for the city, and members of the City Council, that the window to avoid a costly trial is closing. The lawsuit had been set to go to trial this month, before it was delayed by settlement negotiations.
“It is highly, highly unlikely that the court will ever postpone or vacate a pretrial or trial schedule on just a negotiated settlement in a City of Chicago case,” Chang wrote. “Trial settings are a precious and rare commodity, especially four-week blocks as this one was (and will be). If the city wishes to settle in any case, then the Council will simply need to consider the settlement at the full-Council level at a sufficiently early stage to avoid expending fees on pretrial filings and a trial.”
A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Law told WTTW News the department was prepared to try the case.
The last time the City Council rejected a settlement negotiated by its lawyers in a police misconduct lawsuit, alderpeople reversed course several months later and approved the settlement.
The city and its lawyers will now have to convince a jury that two officers did nothing wrong when they investigated Hueneca’s murder, ultimately arresting Velez after they concluded the shooting was part of an ongoing conflict between two street gangs, the Satan Disciples and the Latin Kings.
The lawsuit filed by Velez poses “a large financial risk to the city,” Felker said.
People wrongfully convicted based on evidence collected by Chicago police typically resolve their lawsuits for between $1 million to $2 million per year spent in prison, Felker said.
Velez was held pretrial for two years before his conviction, followed by another 15 years after.
That means a jury is likely to award Velez between $15 million and $30 million if it finds officers violated his civil rights in a way that led to his conviction. In addition, the city would also be required to pay his attorney fees, which are likely to total between $3 million and $4 million.
That trial will represent a high-stakes gamble for the city that comes after months of growing frustration at the financial toll of police misconduct settlements, which have cost taxpayers at least $69 million between Jan. 1 and July 15 of this year. Annually, the city budgets $82 million to cover the cost of police misconduct lawsuits.
For more conservative members of the City Council, those costs are inflated by what they see as the City Council’s willingness to settle cases before trial, which they say encourages people to sue the city in the hopes of a payday. However, more progressive members of the City Council see the expense as just perhaps the most visible cost of the fact that city officials have only complied with 6% of the court-ordered reforms prompted by a 2017 federal investigation that found officers routinely violated the civil rights of Black and Latino Chicagoans.
The nearly unprecedented vote by the City Council’s Finance Committee included a no vote from Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd Ward), the panel’s chair. That is highly unusual, since she agreed to schedule consideration of the proposed settlement.
Dowell declined to comment when reached by WTTW News. She has a long-standing policy of not commenting on pending litigation in the news media.
The series of events that led to Velez’s conviction began when he was wounded in a drive-by shooting. Detective Michael Bacardo was assigned to that probe, as well as the investigation of Hueneca’s murder.
Bacardo took a picture of Velez, who was then 18, during the probe of his shooting. Bacardo later showed that picture to two people who said a man threatened them shortly before Hueneca was shot and killed.
Those two witnesses, as well as one of their friends who told police he saw the shooting, later identified Velez as the shooter in a photographic lineup, after Bacardo showed one of them Velez’s pictures, according to Velez’s lawsuit.
Bacardo remains an active member of the Chicago Police Department, earning $102,000 annually, according to a city database. He was never disciplined in connection with his investigation of Velez.
Two days after Hueneca’s murder, Christina Izquierdo, Velez’s girlfriend, was shot and wounded. Izquierdo, who was 5 months pregnant at the time, told police that Velez believed he had been the intended target of the shooting because he shot Hueneca, a Latin King, to avenge the killing of his uncle Gent Velez, who police said was a Satan Disciple along with John Velez, according to Bacardo.
But when John Velez went to trial, Izquierdo testified that what she told police was false; she said she only signed a statement after police threatened to take away her daughter. That statement was taken by former Assistant State’s Attorney Megan Goldish, who has been a Cook County judge since 2014.
The witness who said he saw Velez shoot Hueneca and run away also later told officials he lied, after police agreed to give him a break in an unrelated drug possession case. That fact was never shared with the jury, records show.
In addition, the jury never heard evidence that Gent Velez was not a member of the Satan Disciples, but belonged to another gang, undercutting the motive presented by prosecutors.
Nor did the jury hear evidence that Velez was actually in Cicero at the time of the shooting and could not have run from the scene of Hueneca’s murder because he had been shot in the knee several months earlier and was using a cane.
No phyiscal evidence ties Velez to the murder.
After prosecutors moved to vacate Velez’s convictions and dismiss the charges, Velez sued Cook County and Goldish. That suit was resolved for $2.4 million in January.
Velez never sought a certificate of innocence from a judge, and of the four witnesses who testified against Velez, two witnesses are prepared to testify that they saw him shoot Hueneca, Felker said.
One witness is prepared to testify that she lied during Velez’s trial when she testified that her initial statement to police implicating Velez was false, Felker said. The other witness has also given “inconsistent testimony,” Felker said.
The other two witnesses cannot be located, Felker said.
The witnesses who are prepared to testify will actually help Velez make his case to the jury that he was convicted after significant police mmisconduct, Ainsworth said.
Ald. Bill Conway (34th Ward), the only member of the Finance Committee to explain his reasoning for voting to reject the settlement, said it was too much money for a man who never received a certificate of innocence in a case where two people are prepared to testify that he committed the crime he was convicted of, even if he was later exonerated.
“The settlement is too high,” Conway said.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
