Some $90 million in judgments or settlements have been ordered this past week, or are up for consideration next week, in cases involving police misconduct.
Last week, a federal jury ordered the City of Chicago to pay more than $50 million to Marcel Brown of Berwyn, who spent nearly a decade in prison for a 2008 murder the jury found was based in part on a false confession.
On Monday, the City Council will vote on settlements totaling $15 million in five police misconduct cases involving complaints about such things as false confessions, coerced witness testimony or fabricated evidence.
And on Tuesday, the Naperville City Council will vote on a proposed $22.5 million settlement with the estate of William Amor, who spent 22 years behind bars in a case that also included an alleged false confession. Amor, who was acquitted in 2018, was at first convicted of arson and murder in his mother-in-law’s death in a 1995 condo fire. Amor died last year. As part of the settlement, Naperville denied all allegations of wrongdoing.
Brown was awarded a certificate of innocence in 2019. The millions he was awarded will help him put his life back together, but it’s impossible to fully compensate a person who spent years behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit.
Reforms, such as the video recording of interrogations, have been put in place since the days when police with bad intentions could extort a confession from a suspect in an interrogation room and walk out assured of an almost certain conviction in court.
Judges and juries have become more skeptical of cases based on confessions and unsupported by other evidence. Even so, video-recorded interrogations, which don’t show what takes place before and after the recording takes place, are not foolproof.
The largest of the settlements to be considered on Monday would go to Anthony Jakes, who spent 20 years in prison after police who were trained by former Police Cmdr. Jon Burge beat a confession out of him when he was just 15. The false confession was the only evidence used against him in court. The Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission found credible evidence Jakes had been physically abused by Chicago police, and he was released from prison in 2012.
Cleaning up old cases, preventing new ones
These cases are part of the legal mess the courts are still cleaning up, from the early 2000s stretching back to the 1980s. And they are only part of the picture. Numerous post-conviction complaints alleging wrongful convictions are still working their way through the courts. The Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission is still processing cases of alleged police torture by Burge — who died in 2018 — and his notorious “midnight crew” and other police officers.
Most wrongful confessions aren’t due to mistakes or inadequate police training. They are caused by bad police officers who extract confessions and then lie about how they obtained them, or find some other way to work around the rules. The long parade of overturned convictions in recent years shows too many police officers were willing to engage in such behavior in the past, and too many prosecutors were willing to build cases based on that police misconduct.
The misconduct of the past cannot be undone, but similar misconduct can be prevented in the future.
Police departments and prosecutors’ offices should ensure no one in their ranks targets innocent people with cases based on official misconduct.
“The main thing that police need to do is to stop coercing people into falsely confessing,” lawyer Joshua Tepfer, who has represented many wrongfully convicted people, told us. “Police departments need to ferret out the cops who violate the Constitution.”
Doing so is of paramount importance. Allowing false charges and wrongful convictions to continue would exact an exorbitant penalty on both the victims and the taxpayers who ultimately must pay for legal fees and any settlements. And misconduct also taints the work of honest police and prosecutors who do their jobs conscientiously.
There’s no reason to let that happen.
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