“Burge 2.0” Cops Responsible for Decades of Wrongful Imprisonment
CHICAGO – Feb. 8, 2018 – After losing nearly half of his life to prison due to a frame-up by high-ranking Chicago police officers and others, today Nevest Coleman today sued the City of Chicago, several officers and Cook County State’s Attorney’s officials for his 23 years wrongful incarceration in maximum security prisons.
Mr. Coleman, 48, and his attorneys will speak at a 2 pm press conference today at the office of his attorneys,
Loevy & Loevy Attorneys at Law, 311 N. Aberdeen Street, 3rd floor, Chicago.
Chicago Police named in the suit include Detectives Kenneth Boudreau, Jack Halloran, and James O’Brien, who trained under the infamous Jon Burge, and have been accused by dozens of men of coercing false confessions, including many Burge-era exonerees. They and other detectives in Coleman’s case have been the subject of investigation after numerous convictions have unraveled due to a pattern of false confessions in their cases.
Kenneth Boudreau and Bill Foley, the lead detectives on Coleman’s case and the detectives who obtained Coleman’s confession, have since been revealed as the detectives who obtained false confessions from the now-notorious “Englewood Four,” which resulted in a $31 million settlement in December.
At the time of his arrest, 25-year-old Englewood resident Nevest Coleman had been working for 2 years as a full-time groundskeeper at Comiskey Park for the Chicago White Sox. He volunteered at his church and was the father of a then 2-year-old daughter and 3-month-old son. He had no criminal history before his false arrest for murder in this case.
While in prison, he not only missed his son’s and daughter’s childhoods, he also lost both of his parents.
Coleman and co-defendant Darryl Fulton were wrongfully convicted of the April 1994 rape and murder of Antwinica Bridgeman in the city’s Englewood neighborhood despite no physical evidence linking them to the crime. Recent DNA testing has matched semen on the victim’s underwear and sweatshirt, as well as DNA from underneath the victim’s fingernails to that of a serial rapist, whose identity is currently undisclosed, and completely excluded Coleman and Fulton.
The sole evidence against the defendants at the time of the trial was Coleman’s coerced confession obtained by notorious Area 1 detectives. All of the forensic evidence excluded Mr. Coleman and the two men implicated by his confession.
Coleman is represented in his suit against the City of Chicago by Attorneys Jon Loevy, Arthur Loevy, Russell Ainsworth and Rachel Brady of Loevy & Loevy Attorneys at Law. Loevy & Loevy is one of the nation’s largest civil rights law firms, and over the past decade has won more multi-million dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the country. A copy of the suit, Nevest Coleman v. City of Chicago, et al., No. 1:18-cv-00998 is available here.
