The Chicago city council voted Wednesday to pay $50 million to four Black men who wrongly spent decades behind bars. It's one of the most expensive police misconduct cases the city has settled, Courthouse News reports. The "Marquette Park Four" — LaShawn Ezell, Charles Johnson, Larod Styles and Troshawn McCoy — were convicted in 1998 on charges related to the 1995 armed robbery and murder of two used car salesmen, Khaled Ibrahim and Yousef Ali, on Chicago's southwest side. The men were between the ages of 15 and 19 at the time of their arrests and claimed Chicago police used hourslong, grueling interrogations to coerce false confessions out of them. In court filings, the men variously describe being hit, shouted at, isolated, deprived of legal counsel, and threatened with sexual abuse in prison. The Cook County State's Attorney's Office dropped the charges against all four in 2017, after new fingerprint evidence came to light that exonerated them. The Cook County Circuit Court granted them Certificates of Innocence in January 2018, and a month later they filed federal lawsuits against Chicago, Cook County, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and numerous Chicago police officers.
The four men said that the state's declaration of their innocence couldn't make up for the collective 73 years they spent behind bars. Johnson, Styles and McCoy all spent nearly 21 years in custody for their murder convictions; Ezell, who was convicted only of armed robbery, was in custody for a decade. In that time the men said they lost loved ones, experiences and the ability to lead normal lives. “We are grateful that the City of Chicago has chosen to resolve our case and allow us to move on with our lives. 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," the men said after the council's approval of their settlement. The men urged the city to stop police from abusing other youth the way they had been. Their case is far from the only incident where policed are accused of framing Black teenagers. . Last July, brothers Reginald Henderson and Sean Tyler sued the city after they each spent 25 years in prison for a murder they didn't commit, claiming they were victims of police retaliation by officers who were trained by or worked closely with deceased and disgraced Chicago police commander Jon Burge. They said members of Burge's infamous "midnight crew" of officers worked to put them in jail after Tyler testified in defense of yet another Black boy the crew was attempting to frame for murder. The brothers' cases are pending in federal court.