A federal jury in Chicago awarded $120 million in damages Monday to two wrongfully convicted men who spent more than 15 years in prison, a pair who alleged they were railroaded in a bogus investigation at the hands of Chicago Police detectives and Cook County prosecutors.
John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell were teens when they were arrested in the 2003 murder of Christopher Collazo in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Both were convicted and sentenced to 31 years in prison. In 2019, a Cook County judge vacated both convictions, and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office declined to prosecute the men again.
Both brought a federal lawsuit against the CPD and county prosecutors in 2020.
Attorney Jon Loevy said Fulton spent more than 100 hours being interrogated, at age 18, and Mitchell more than 40 hours under interrogation, at age 17, and were coerced into false confessions that evidence didn’t support. The jury found that both men “were innocent and they were framed by the Chicago Police Department,” Loevy said.
“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,” Loevy added. 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.”
No witnesses or physical evidence connected them to the scene, their lawyers said.
On the night of the death, Fulton was with his fiancée at the University of Chicago hospital, then home at their apartment — where security cameras monitored every doorway. Fulton’s alibi also clears Mitchell, according to the lawsuit, since prosecutors alleged that Fulton was the instigator of the attack and recruited Mitchell for help.
Fulton, now 40, was an 18-year-old high school student on the bowling team when he was arrested. After the verdict, at a press conference held outside the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, he had his arm around his wife, Dominique, as he spoke in front, introducing friends and family including his sons Camron Fulton and Jamari Williams.
“This is what the face of justice looks like like. 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.”
He said he was taken at age 18 to the old Board of Education school building that was temporarily a homicide police station.
“Nobody knew where I was. I got there Tuesday at 5:30 in the morning. I didn’t see nobody until Friday. I was there all the time,” he said, adding: “They had their mind made up what they wanted to do. So I knew my time was going to come one day. I just had to keep my head held high, keep God first, and put one foot in front of the next. And this day finally came.”
Mitchell was 17 when he was arrested. He called the verdict “unbelievable” but remained frustrated that he “put myself in this situation” by falsely confessing.
That led to an exchange between Loevy and Mitchell in which Mitchell again told reporters he still blamed himself for falsely confessing, with Loevy responding: “It’s not your fault. You’ve got to forgive yourself. You were 17. They were adults. They knew what they were doing.”
Mitchell said he wants to donate some of the verdict to help others wrongfully convicted. He said he wants to help “shed light on people that might still be locked up for things they didn’t do, and they might not necessarily be fortunate enough to afford counsel.”