Politics
Chicago Taxpayers Paid $27.5M to Man Wrongfully Convicted of 2008 Murder, Setting New Record
Marcel Brown appears on “Chicago Tonight: Black Voices” on Sept. 25, 2024. (WTTW News)
Chicago taxpayers paid $27.5 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 payment to resolve a wrongful conviction case, according to records obtained by WTTW News.
A federal jury awarded Marcel Brown $50 million in September 2024 after his lawyers argued Chicago police detectives denied him food and sleep during an interrogation that lasted for more than 30 hours and prevented him from speaking with an attorney, records show.
Settlement negotiations after that verdict — which was the largest ever awarded to a single person in a wrongful conviction case in the United States, according to Brown’s lawyers — reduced it by 45%, records show.
However, it is still the largest payment Chicago taxpayers have ever made to compensate someone wrongfully convicted based on evidence developed by Chicago police, according to a WTTW News analysis.
“Mr. Brown is grateful to have received his payment in full from the City of Chicago and is working to put his ordeal behind him,” said Locke Bowman, Brown’s attorney, 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 all, Chicago taxpayers are already on the hook to pay more than $131.2 million to resolve dozens of lawsuits triggered by wrongful convictions in 2026, records show.
Wrongful convictions have long been the most expensive kind of police misconduct in Chicago, records show.
A spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Law did not respond to a request for comment from WTTW News.
Brown was 18 when he was arrested in connection with the Aug. 30, 2008, murder of 19-year-old Paris Jackson in Amundsen Park.
Detectives refused seven requests from Brown during an interrogation that lasted more than a day to speak to his mother, who had hired a lawyer to represent him. Police refused to allow that lawyer access to Brown and never told Brown that his attorney wanted to speak with him.
Brown told police 40 times he said he did not know his cousin, 15-year-old Renard Branch Jr., had a gun when he agreed to give him a ride to the West Side park, 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.
In 2011, Brown was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 35 years in prison, records show.
Under a 1994 Illinois Supreme Court decision, statements made after an attorney has requested to speak with their client but is denied access 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.
Brown was released after his conviction was overturned in 2018 and granted a certificate of innocence in 2019.
Until now, the most expensive wrongful conviction verdict against the city of Chicago 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.
Chicago taxpayers paid an additional $5.7 million to Fields’ attorneys, records show.
Note: Loevy and Loevy, the firm that represented Brown, has done legal work for WTTW News.
WTTW News coverage of policing and police reform is supported by The Joyce Foundation.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
