Jury awards $50 million to Chicago man who spent 10 years in prison after wrongful conviction

A federal jury awarded $50 million in damages Monday to a man who was wrongfully convicted in a 2008 murder case, setting a record for the highest amount awarded to a single person in a wrongful conviction case.

Marcel Brown, 34, was convicted of being an accomplice in the murder of 19-year-old Paris Jackson in the Galewood neighborhood, according to the lawsuit Brown filed in 2019 against the city of Chicago, Cook County, an assistant state’s attorney and a slew of Chicago police detectives.

Brown was convicted at age 18, and spent around 10 years in prison before being exonerated in 2018. Information used to convict Brown was “obtained in clear violation of law,” the suit stated, continuing a pattern of Chicago police detectives using coercive interrogation tactics and targeting young Black men.

The lawsuit argued that the defendants violated Brown’s fifth and 14th amendment rights by conducting an unconstitutional interrogation and infringing on Brown’s right to due process.

When deciding on the verdict, the jury deliberated for less than two hours, including lunch, according to Jon Loevy, an attorney for Brown.

“That’s extraordinary,” he said. “This was not a difficult case for the jury to decide.”

The $50 million award, plus $50,000 ordered to be paid directly from one of the detectives to Brown, sets a record for a single plaintiff in this type of case, Loevy said. Last year, a federal jury awarded Adam Gray $27 million after he was wrongfully convicted in a murder and arson case, and in 2021, Eddie Bolden was given $25 million for his wrongful conviction in a double murder on the South Side.

Brown is still processing the win after years of being disillusioned by the court system, Loevy said. He has been working at Cure Violence, an anti-violence organization, for about a year.

“He's a guy who's been let down by the court system for a long time, but he had faith that this jury was going to come through, and they did,” Loevy said.

The case highlights what Loevy says is a need for the city to reevaluate how wrongful conviction cases are handled. He said in the month before the trial began, the city refused to settle the case for more than $3 million.

“The city has never expressed any remorse; they defended their actions right up until the very end,” Loevy said.

The city is reviewing the verdict and “assessing its legal options,” a spokesperson for the law department wrote in a statement.