CHICAGO – Late yesterday a federal jury delivered one of the state’s largest-ever wrongful conviction verdicts against a Naperville police officer for framing William Amor for an alleged 1995 arson-murder that turned out to be an accidental fire.
Amor, who died in January of last year, wrongfully served more than two decades in prison before he was acquitted in 2018 based on updated fire science that showed that the fire that killed his mother-in-law was accidental.
Amor falsely confessed to setting the fire after a marathon 15-hour interrogation by Naperville Police during which police allowed divorce papers to be served on him.
For many years “junk science” plagued investigations of suspected arson, resulting in many wrongful convictions where police attempted to “solve” crimes that didn’t happen. As fire science developed, in 2012 the Illinois Innocence Project began re-investigating the case that had landed Amor with a 45 year sentence in an Illinois prison. Based on that updated science, in 2017 a DuPage County judge tossed Amor’s conviction and ordered a new trial.
“On May 30, 2017, Amor was released on bond pending a retrial,” according to veteran criminal justice journalist Maurice Possley. “He went to trial a second time in February 2018, represented by a team of lawyers from the Illinois Innocence Project, the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, and the law firm of Cozin O’Connor.”
After Amor was acquitted, he filed suit against Naperville in 2018, represented by Jon Loevy, Locke Bowman, Tara Thompson and Alyssa Martinez of the civil rights law firm Loevy + Loevy.
“Prior to trial, the City of Naperville offered a maximum of $500,000 to settle this case, believing they were going to win,” said lead trial attorney Jon Loevy. “They miscalculated.”
Loevy + Loevy is one of the largest civil rights law firms in the country. Over the past decade, Loevy & Loevy has won more multi-million-dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the country.
