A Chicago federal jury recently awarded two Illinois men a total of $120 million in damages in their civil lawsuit against the city, marking it as the largest award to wrongfully convicted plaintiffs in U.S. history, their attorney said.
John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were teenagers when the Chicago Police Department arrested them in March 2003 for the murder of Christopher Collazo, who was found bound and partially burned in an alley of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood. The two men spent 16 years in jail before their convictions were vacated in 2019 and prosecutors dropped the murder charges. They each filed civil suits in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in May 2020 for malicious prosecution against the city of Chicago, police and Cook County prosecutors.
On March 10, the federal jury awarded each man $60 million in damages after a monthlong trial—the largest awards to wrongfully convicted plaintiffs. Fulton and Mitchell were coerced into giving false confessions after several days of intimidation, false promises of leniency and physical abuse. Detectives never had evidence to link Fulton or Mitchell to the murder, according to their attorney Joe Loevy of Loevy & Loevy in Chicago.