Chicagoans may breathe a sigh of relief at the news that they won’t be shelling out extra money to cover the $50 million settlement paid to four men who were wrongfully convicted in a 1995 double-murder at a car dealership on the Southwest Side.
The city’s catastrophic insurance will cover $29 million and City Hall will take care of the remaining $21 million under a settlement the City Council is expected to vote on Wednesday. Technically, though, it’s important to point out that anything paid by the city’s coffers comes ultimately from taxpayers.
And Chicagoans, over and over, have had to pay for egregious police misconduct that led to wrongful convictions. The price tage for taxpayers between 2019 and 2023 was $153 million, according to a WTTW analysis.
Many Chicagoans haven’t forgotten these cases and remain disturbed by the repeated injustices, which in this latest case led to the imprisonment of four teenagers now known as the “Marquette Park 4.”
“At age 16 I was imprisoned for a crime I didn’t commit and it was horrific,” Larod Styles said in 2018 when he and his three former co-defendants — Charles Johnson, Troshawn McCoy and LaShawn Ezell — filed a federal lawsuit accusing detectives of eliciting false confessions.
Styles’ parents died while he was serving life in prison for the murders of Khalid Ibrahim and Yousef Ali before fingerprint evidence cleared him and the others in 2017. He, McCoy and Johnson, who were also convicted and imprisoned for murder, and Ezell, who spent 10 years in prison on an armed robbery conviction, received certificates of innocence.
The post-conviction relief rightfully vindicated the men and gave the public the assurance that past mistakes of the criminal justice system were being rectified. The settlement should also provide a sense of justice, at least partially. But the money won’t bring back the combined 73 years the men spent wasting away in prison because of crooked detectives, including two who were trained under the disgraced former Area 2 Cmdr. Jon Burge.
Detectives James Cassidy and Kenneth Boudreau apparently took Burge’s strategies to heart when they handled the hours-long interrogation of the four teenagers. The two have been accused of coercing and manufacturing confessions in other cases.
The tainted Burge era continues to haunt Chicago, and the Marquette Park 4 settlement is yet another example of why police and criminal justice reform is sorely needed in Cook County. Taxpayers shouldn’t continue to shoulder the financial cost of past mistakes and misconduct.
Victims shouldn’t have to pay the price for corrupt behavior either.
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