A City Council committee recently approved a $25 million settlement in a case involving two men wrongfully convicted of murdering college basketball standout Marshall Morgan Jr. nearly three decades ago. Assuming the full City Council votes in favor of the payout on Thursday, this would be one of the city's largest police misconduct settlement awards in recent years, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington had spent a combined 34 years behind bars following convictions for the 1993 murder of Morgan Jr., a shining star on the basketball court of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Under the settlement agreement, Hood would receive $17.5 million for his 22 years in prison, while Washington would get $7.5 million for his 12 year term, as reported by Fox 32 Chicago.
These men have long maintained their innocence, placing blame on now-retired Chicago Police Detectives Kenneth Boudreau and John Halloran for concocting evidence and pressuring witnesses to testify against them, Fox 32 Chicago reports. Notably, Boudreau already has 10 misconduct lawsuits pending against him, and the city has previously settled five lawsuits involving reversed convictions connected to the former detective, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The landmark settlement's critics, such as Alderman Brian Hopkins, fear that the unusually high payout could set a fiscally imprudent precedent for the city, driving up the costs of future misconduct cases, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. Yet proponents argue that city officials must take into account the many years Hood and Washington spent wrongfully incarcerated, and the potential for more costly trials should the city not settle these suits.
There is also a growing sentiment among city leaders that the cost of these misconduct lawsuits is simply too high. Alderman Jeanette Taylor said on the matter, "We love talking about the people who will bring the cases before us, but we don't talk about the people that we actually pay and make sure that they get their salaries who are supposed to serve and protect all of us," according to the Chicago Tribune.
The case that ultimately led to this settlement began with the discovery of 19-year-old Marshall Morgan Jr.'s half-naked body wedged between the front and back seats of his mother's abandoned car in May 1993. Hood and Washington were arrested two weeks later and subsequently charged with Morgan's murder. Washington would later claim that his police testimony and involvement of Hood as the shooter was false, and a result of police coercion including being punched and slapped while handcuffed, the Chicago Tribune reports.
The attention in this drawn-out legal battle has never truly stayed away for long from another potential suspect - Morgan Jr.'s own father, Marshall Morgan Sr., who'd taken out a life insurance policy on his son six months before the murder and collected a $50,000 payout after Hood and Washington were charged, furthers the Chicago Tribune. Morgan Sr., who is in Sheridan Correctional Center serving a 75-year sentence for another unrelated murder, has admitted to killing Deborah Jackson in 2001, though he's denied any involvement in his son's killing.
