CHICAGO – John Fulton was only 18, and Anthony Mitchell only 17, when they were wrongfully arrested for the gruesome murder of Christopher Collazo, whose body was found bound and partially burnt in an alley on the South Side of the city. They each spent more than 16 years in jail, before having their convictions vacated in 2019.
Today, more than 20 years after their arrests, Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell’s long quest for justice came to an end, as a federal jury in their civil lawsuit against the City of Chicago found in their favor and awarded them $120 million in damages. Each man will receive $60 million.
These are the largest awards to wrongfully convicted plaintiffs in U.S. history.
As attorneys for the plaintiffs argued, officers of the Chicago police department, in conspiracy with members of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, fabricated a case against the two men despite knowing they were innocent. There was no forensic evidence linking the two men to the crime, and in fact Mr. Fulton had a rock-solid alibi for the time of the murder, verified by video. However, police coerced false statements from witnesses implicating Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell, and then subjected both men to prolonged intimidation and physical abuse, over a period of several days, until managing to coerce false confessions from them.
Both men had their convictions vacated in 2019, and all charges against them were dropped. Still, however—as attorney Jon Loevy says—the City refused to admit its officers got the wrong men.
“The city of Chicago continued to insist that they were guilty, continued to insist that they had confessed to a crime that they didn’t commit because they were guilty,” Mr. Loevy said at a press conference following the verdict. “And they’ve had 3, 4 years, 5 years — 20 years — to find any evidence that they could find that Fulton and Mitchell were guilty. But they’re not guilty.”
Today’s landmark verdict followed four weeks of emotional testimony, and a more than 20 year quest for justice on the part of Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell, who both say they want to use their award to help others like themselves.
“This is what the face of justice looks like,” Mr. Fulton said, at the press conference following the verdict. “Justice is finally here. And we got a lot of work to do. We got a lot of people who are just like me that are wrongfully incarcerated in the justice system, and they need to be brought home too. So the day of celebration will be when all the wrongfully incarcerated individuals, that’s incarcerated, can step in the free world.”
Mr. Fulton and Mr. Mitchell are represented by Jon Loevy, Russell Ainsworth, Julia Rickert, Fatima Ladha, and Isaac Green of Loevy + Loevy, and Andrea Lyon of Lyon & Kerr.
