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…