Chicago taxpayers will be asked to pay a combined $26.5 million to compensate two men who collectively spent a half-century in prison for murders they did not commit.
The largest of the two settlements on Thursday’s agenda for the City Council’s Finance committee — $18.5 million — would go to Francisco “Frankie” Benitez, who was convicted of the 1989 murder of two Humboldt Park teenagers solely on a confession allegedly coerced by a pair of Chicago police detectives.
Benitez’s lawsuit claims he was arrested and “kept in a locked interrogation room all night without sleep,” and that the detectives “brandished a flashlight menacingly” during the interrogation, feeding Benitez details about the crime.
After hours of interrogation, a “scared” and “exhausted” Benitez agreed to sign a statement confessing to the crime, believing that the detectives would keep their promise to let him go home if he did what they wanted, the suit claimed.
Benitez spent 34 years in prison. His conviction was overturned in August 2023, and he was released a month later after the Cook County state’s attorney’s office refused to retry him.
The second of the two settlements — for $8 million — would go to Eric Blackmon.
Blackmon was sentenced to 60 years in prison after being convicted of the 2002 murder of a man. He spent more than 15 years behind bars.
His lawsuit claimed there was “not a single piece of physical or forensic evidence” that linked him to the murder. Blackmon’s attorney Ronald Safer said the conviction was based entirely on evidence fabricated by Chicago police officers who “rigged a line-up.”
One of two eyewitnesses identified Blackmon as the man she saw while driving by the scene of the murder, but only after being “coerced” by detectives who “threatened to report her to [the Department of Children and Family Services] and have them take her children,” Safer told the Sun-Times.
“This all happened on the 4th of July. Eric was hosting a barbecue a mile away with 20 or more friends, family — people who would tell the police he was there and not at the murder. But the police didn’t talk to any of those people,” Safer said. “It’s terrible. It’s not an unfamiliar story, unfortunately.”
Blackmon was 21 at the time of his conviction. He worked for nearly 20 years to clear his name, mostly on his own and from inside prison, where he studied to be a paralegal. He continues to work as a paralegal today.
On the day in 2019 when the charges against him were finally dropped, a smiling Blackmon walked through the lobby of the Leighton Criminal Courthouse dressed in a gray, pinstriped suit.
“It’s great for me to be here, but I just think about all the other guys out there,” Blackmon said on that day. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to change the system, so that you don’t see other guys like me.”
Last month, one of the most sordid chapters in the history of the Chicago Police Department came to an end with City Council approval of a $90 million settlement for more than 180 shakedown victims — a resolution viewed by Council members as a relative bargain for taxpayers.
The settlement, approved unanimously, put to rest 176 lawsuits tied to one of the city’s most corrupt police officers, former Sgt. Ronald Watts, who was accused of framing hundreds of people on drug charges at the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells housing complex. Individual victims will get anywhere from $150,000 to more than $3 million for a man who spent a decade in prison on a Watts case.
The tab for settlements tied to allegations of police wrongdoing approached $146 million for the first seven months of this year alone. The global settlement in the Watts case will be paid in 2026.
Mayor Brandon Johnson is already struggling to close a $1.15 billion shortfall after two straight years of deficit spending.
Alderpersons have been told the Johnson administration plans to use a line of credit retired by “general funds,” and that the mayor’s finance team has various options to retire that debt as part of the 2026 budget that the mayor is scheduled to unveil next Thursday.