Chicago Could Spend A Billion Fighting Wrongful Conviction Suits It Can't Win

Just pay up!

For decades, the city of Chicago had a little (by which I mean huge) problem with cops faking evidence against people and getting them sent to prison for crimes they didn't commit. We're not talking a few people here and there. We're talking at least 226 people so far who were framed by former Sgt. Ronald Watts and his Chicago Police Department team in the early 2000s. We're talking at least 30 false murder convictions thanks to the work of Det. Reynaldo Guevara, and people spending more than 20 years in prison before finally having their convictions overturned.

As a result, there have been a whole bunch of lawsuits against the city from people who have been wrongfully convicted and, rather than settling them, the city's policy has been to spend millions of dollars fighting them for years and years in court and then end up paying several times what the victim would have settled for. It is unclear what the reasoning behind this has been. It is very expensive, and even if they win (which they don't), it's not like it's going to be great PR for them. It's not as if people are going to respond to such a win, if they even hear about it, by going "Phew! Good to see the city isn't at fault for sending that innocent person to prison for 20 years!"

Chicago's ABC7 cited several examples of cases in which the city spent millions more fighting these lawsuits than they would have if they had settled.

Former federal prosecutor Ron Safer said the city is still following the same playbook today. [...]

In April, he settled Arthur Brown's case against the city for $14.5 million. Before filing a lawsuit, Safer sent a letter to the corporation counsel.

"I wrote him a letter and I said, 'you've been quoted in the newspapers saying it is horrendous how much money the city is paying for these cases.' I said here's a perfect opportunity. Arthur is 67 years old. We will go to the jury and we will ask for tens of millions of dollars. But talk to us now, he will take a small fraction of that," said Safer. "They sent me back a letter that I have laminated by my desk that I've kept for years. It was that I had insulted them. I was unprofessional, you know, and they would offer nothing."

Since then, the city has paid outside law firms more than $3.2 million to fight Brown's case, according to information the I-Team received from a public records request.

Another client of Safer's won $25.2 million in court and also would have settled for much, much less.

It's understandable that people may feel frustrated by the fact that taxpayers are expected to foot the bill when police officers and prosecutors send innocent people to prison. But the fact is, these are not flukes and they're not one-offs. This problem is not just about individual wrongdoing. It's a societal problem that we all need to work to fix. We are the ones who serve on juries and elect district attorneys and legislators and we are, to some degree, the ones responsible for creating a society in which cops and prosecutors (and juries) feel that it is better to imprison 20 innocent people than to let one guilty one go.

Right now, there are about 18 cases on deck in which the client has a certificate of innocence from a judge who determined that they were wrongly convicted. The city is not going to win these cases and fighting them could cost taxpayers about a billion dollars that we could be spending on other things. Hopefully, newly minted Mayor Brandon Johnson will decide to take things in a different direction.

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