Chicago taxpayers must pay $4.17 million in attorneys' fees to the legal team that won a record $120 million wrongful conviction verdict for two men falsely imprisoned for a 2003 murder, a federal judge ruled Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow rejected the city's attempt to cut lead attorney Jon Loevy's hourly rate in half, finding his $1,500 rate reasonable given his trial record and leadership in civil rights litigation.
The fee order closes out one chapter of a case that has already reshaped the record books for police misconduct litigation in Chicago. As reported by WTTW News, a federal jury found in March 2025 that John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were wrongfully convicted of the 2003 murder of Christopher Collazo, awarding $60 million each — the largest verdict ever in a lawsuit alleging Chicago police misconduct. The city has appealed that verdict.
Loevy and Loevy, the civil rights firm that represented Fulton and Mitchell, had asked Lefkow to award $4.4 million in fees; Chicago had countered that no more than $1.8 million should be authorized. Federal court records show the city's own defense team logged more than 3,000 additional attorney hours than the plaintiffs' lawyers spent prosecuting the case — a disparity Lefkow highlighted in writing that the plaintiffs won handily and the city lost badly, describing the outcome as a stunning victory for Fulton and Mitchell.
A Confession Coerced, a Conviction Overturned
Collazo, 18, was murdered on March 10, 2003; his body was discovered bound with duct tape and partially burned in an alley in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Fulton, then 18, and Mitchell, then 17, were identified as the killers by a 17-year-old girl and were convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping in 2006, receiving 31-year sentences. No physical evidence tied either man to Collazo's death.
Fulton and Mitchell testified that Chicago police detectives coerced their confessions, promising leniency while threatening and physically abusing them. According to Fulton's lawsuit, the same police officer claimed to have witnessed a spontaneous confession from Fulton before a polygraph test — a claim the officer reportedly made more than 100 times over five years in unrelated cases. The girl who identified the two men later recanted her identification.
Hidden Evidence and a New Trial
A camera surveilling the back door of Fulton's home did not capture him leaving before the murder or returning before school the next day, and an electronic key system would have shown his key was not used to enter the door around the time of the killing. Fulton and Mitchell's lawyers accused Cook County state's attorney's office prosecutors of obscuring that camera footage and electronic-key evidence. A Cook County judge overturned their convictions in 2019, and Judge Lawrence Flood granted them a new trial before prosecutors dropped the charges the same year. By the time they were released, Fulton and Mitchell had spent a combined 32 years in prison.
Fulton and Mitchell sued both the city of Chicago and Cook County. The county board of commissioners agreed to pay $15 million to settle its share of the claims separately, reflecting the allegations against state's attorney's office prosecutors distinct from the city police detectives named in the federal suit, per the same WTTW News account. A spokesperson for Chicago's law department declined to comment on Lefkow's fee order.
Settlement Talks Stall as the City Appeals
Municipal records reviewed by the outlet show that post-trial settlement talks aimed at avoiding a costly, uncertain appeal have stalled below a target of $105 million — well under the jury's $120 million award. Lefkow ordered both sides to try to reach an agreement on an additional $256,000 in disputed trial costs but did not resolve whether the city must pay that amount.
Loevy and Loevy's track record helps explain the fee dispute's stakes. The firm has secured some of the largest jury verdicts in U.S. history for police misconduct, including Marcel Brown's $50 million verdict in September 2024 and a $25 million award for Thaddeus Jimenez in 2009, according to the same WTTW News reporting.
A Budget Under Growing Strain
The Fulton and Mitchell case lands amid a broader financial reckoning for Chicago. During the first six months of 2026, the city spent more than $225 million resolving police misconduct lawsuits — far exceeding its $82.5 million annual settlement budget and forcing officials to authorize $283.3 million in additional borrowing, WTTW News has reported. In all of 2025, Chicago paid $252 million to resolve 136 police misconduct lawsuits, with nearly 60 percent of those funds going to people wrongfully imprisoned for decades.
Before Fulton and Mitchell's verdict, the city's previous record for an individual wrongful conviction jury award was Marcel Brown's $50 million win in September 2024, which Chicago later negotiated down to a $27.5 million payout. Cook County's status as the nation's leader in exonerations — 488 recorded as of July 2025, according to National Registry of Exonerations data cited by CBS News — reflects decades of coerced confessions and officer misconduct dating to the 1990s and 2000s.
The mounting costs have already spurred political pushback at City Hall. In August, twelve Chicago aldermen introduced a proposal, reported by Hoodline, to reform municipal wrongful conviction payouts by shifting to quarterly installments and adding clauses that would suspend compensation if an exoneree is later arrested for a felony. That debate has unfolded alongside other high-dollar cases working through the courts, including a $9 million payout to a Little Village man caged for 17 years.
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