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CHICAGO — Four teenagers confess in 1995 to murders during grueling interrogations by city cops. Now, after growing up in prison, they’re getting $50 million for the decades they wrongly spent behind bars.

The payout for the "Marquette Park 4," as they became known after the infamous murder case, is the largest since at least 2008 for reversed convictions in Chicago, a city that’s racked up over $300 million in lawsuit settlements for wrongfully convicted people, according to a USA TODAY review of documents from Chicago's Department of Law.

Illinois has been dubbed by the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that's helped to successfully overturn over 300 convictions nationwide through DNA-based exonerations, as "the wrongful conviction capital of the country." Illinois’ 540 exonerations of wrongfully convicted people tops the ranking of states, followed by Texas, with 474 exonerations, according to the Innocence Project.

The exonerees in the latest case — LaShawn Ezell, Charles Johnson, Larod Styles and Troshawn McCoy — said in a joint statement that they're grateful the city has recognized the hurt that police did to them. But millions of dollars can't replace what was taken away.

“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,” they said in the statement. “The City of Chicago must take steps to protect our teenagers from police abuses like those we endured.”

Ezell, Johnson, Styles and McCoy were charged in 1995, when they were between the ages of 15 and 19, for the murders of Khalid Ibrahim and Yousef Ali, owners of a used car lot near Marquette Park on Chicago’s South Side who were killed in their office “execution style,” according to court filings. 

Police picked up McCoy first based on an anonymous tip, said Alexa Van Brunt, an attorney on the case and the director of the MacArthur Justice Center, a non-profit law firm that focuses on criminal justice reform and civil rights litigation. Officers subjected McCoy to hours of grueling interrogation without counsel during which he implicated the three others whom he knew from the neighborhood. 

Chicago police coerced the teens into making false confessions and inculpatory statements and withheld evidence that would have proven them innocent, according to the lawsuits. No physical evidence linked the teenagers to the murders. 

DNA evidence analyzed in 2009 proved none of the four were connected to the murders, the complaints say, and in 2017 the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges.

"The City’s willingness to settle this matter restores some measure of faith in the system and the belief that justice can be achieved through perseverance and unwavering commitment,” said Michael Oppenheimer, the lead attorney for McCoy.

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Chicago's history of wrongful convictions

Van Brunt, who has worked on exoneration cases involving dozens of people in Chicago, said intimidation and coercion are common denominators in obtaining false confessions.

"The pattern is officers really hone in on a really vulnerable kid," she said. "And that’s what happened here.”

The four filed lawsuits in the Northern District of Illinois in 2018 that name 13 police officers, a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney, Cook County and the City of Chicago.

Two of the former officers, homicide detectives James Cassidy and Kenneth Boudreau, served under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, a notorious figure in the city who tortured false confessions out of scores of Chicagoans between the ’70s to the ’90s, according to the Chicago Police Torture Archive, a project documenting Chicago police violence against over 100 Black people based on legal cases from the People's Law Office and others. 

None have been charged with crimes related to the Marquette Park 4 exonerations, according to Van Brunt. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office declined to answer questions about whether it would bring charges.

Burge’s tactics over the years have been well documented in court cases, books, public testimony and include burning, suffocation and electrocution, according to the torture archive. 

He was fired in 1993 after the police department’s review board ruled he had tortured people, according to the Illinois Torture and Reflief Commission, a group formed by the state in 2010 to provide assistance to Burge’s victims. He was sentenced to prison for four years for perjury after lying about the torture; he died in 2018. 

Former detective: 'My conscience is clear'

Cassidy, who arrested and interrogated McCoy, according to court records, could not be reached for comment.

Boudreau, named in the lawsuit brought by the four Marquette Park 4 exonerees, told USA TODAY in a rare interview Friday that "my conscience is clear." He said he and he and his co-defendant officers are being maligned in a scheme to make money and free people from prison.

“I don’t believe for a second that any of them did anything improper, certainly nothing in my presence,” he said of the dozen officers named in the lawsuit. 

Boudreau said he was only named in the recent lawsuit because of Burge, but that his connection to the notorious figure was tenuous. He reported to him for about a month and was one of hundreds of detectives who did so, he told USA TODAY.

He defended his actions in the Marquette Park 4 case. “When we arrested them, they never alleged any of those things,” said Boudreau, adding his role was organizing a lineup where a car lot employee who survived the shooting identified one of the teens. “Now all of a sudden, their stories change under the advice of their attorneys and I'll be honest they're desperate men facing life in prison.”

Boudreau, who now helps run a therapeutic horse riding center for veterans and law enforcement, says he is not a crooked detective and that he spent years working to bring dirty cops to justice.

“They make the argument we framed these guys— I worked over 800 murders, you think I got time, why am I going to pick this one person to frame them,” he said, adding that the consolation for the job comes in delivering justice to victims’ families.

Attorneys for the Marquette Park 4 and advocates for police reform say there are many problems with the system.

“One of the very frustrating things about these cases, there’s so many of them, many involve the same officers," Van Brunt said. “The general situation for all these suits are the officers have by this time retired, are taking pensions and living in Florida.”

A review of state pensions data compiled by the Illinois Better Government Association showed at least five of the officers named in the case, including Boudreau, received pensions in 2022, bringing in a collective $469,000. None are active on the police force.

Chicago mayor: Police reforms are happening

Attorneys for the other police defendants deferred USA TODAY to comments from Mayor Brandon Johnson, who said police reform is "ongoing."

“Many Black men have been falsely accused and spent their lives in prison for a crime they did not commit," said Johnson, who is Black. “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."

The cases of the Marquette Park 4 and the Englewood 5 represent just a fraction of the wrongful convictions in Chicago. 

Cook County ranks number one in the country in terms of wrongful convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project from the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society, the University of Michigan Law School and the Michigan State University College of Law. There have been 465 exonerations in America’s second-largest county, more than double the exonerations in Harris County, Texas, which has the second-most with 213.

Of the wrongful convictions in Cook County, 121 came as a result of false confessions, almost as many as the 133 total wrongful convictions in Los Angeles County, according to the exonerations registry. America’s largest county is third in the nation in wrongful convictions.

The city has created new bodies like the Civilian Office of Police Accountability to strengthen police oversight. In 2019, a federal judge ordered the police department to reform in response to civil rights abuses, according to the Illinois Attorney General's Office. But Chicago cops were only in full compliance with 7% of the mandated reforms, a court-ordered monitoring team found in May.

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Financial toll of wrongful convictions

Both sides agree the cases are having an immense impact on city finances.

A USA TODAY analysis of published Chicago Law Department settlements found that the city had paid out nearly $329,00,000 in lawsuits stemming from reversed convictions since 2008. 

The Marquette Park 4 settlement is bigger than any in the published records.

The city borrowed nearly $709 million to cover the cost of all police misconduct between 2008 and 2017, according to the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a nonprofit policy group. The figure is far greater than any of the other cities included in the analysis. For comparison, Los Angeles borrowed $71 million. With interest, Chicago’s grand total was $1.57 billion. 

“All this is is the fleecing of Chicago taxpayers,” Boudreau says.

Police critics argue the massive payouts illustrate how police misconduct impacts the city more broadly.

“We have to think at some point about the material costs of all of these things in addition to what they do to the actual victims of these types of misconduct,” said Simon Balto, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who wrote a book on Chicago cops.

The drain on city finances that police misconduct has become should create some urgency to reform the police department, Balto and others argue. But they say no important changes have come about to prevent police abuses.

“The way that the Chicago Police Department is structured and funded in 2024, it’s not different in a meaningful way than how it was structured and funded more than 40 years ago,” Balto said.