On the heels of the Chicago City Council approving a record $50 million settlement to a group of men once known as the “Marquette Park Four,” the Cook County Board will consider a $7.25 million settlement for one of those men who accused county prosecutors of wrongful incarceration and detention.
It is one of several costly settlements on Wednesday’s Finance Committee agenda, which together total $24 million. Other proposed multi-million dollar settlements are related to the county-run Stroger Hospital.
In 1995, Charles Johnson was one of the group of teenagers convicted of a double murder at a used car dealership, Elegant Auto. Johnson was identified by a witness as one of the shooters and was sentenced to life in prison.
But Johnson, along with Lashawn Ezell, Troshawn McCoy and Larod Styles were exonerated and certified as innocent after new fingerprinting technology implicated a different person.
In a recent federal suit, the four alleged police threatened them and that an assistant state’s attorney “tricked” Johnson “into signing a false confession” related to the shooting and robbery of the two men at the dealership, Khaled Ibrahim and Yousef Ali.
Johnson believed he was signing routine paperwork attesting that certain photos matched the prosecutor’s description, the suit claimed. The attorney’s hand was covering the writing on the pages, which Johnson did not know “contained a confession attributed to him,” the suit said. Johnson also claimed the police questioned him for more than ten hours and prosecutors denied his requests for a lawyer.
The four sued the city and county both. The Chicago City Council approved a $50 million settlement earlier this month, a record sum. Johnson is represented by Illinois office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit focused on civil rights.
“No amount of money can ever return the years we lost due to Chicago Police misconduct that caused our collective 73 years of wrongful imprisonment,” the group said in a statement following the City Council approval of their settlement.
Several other costly settlements are on the board’s agenda, including $3.4 million to the family of Rocio Santa Maria, who died from complications from a pelvic surgery roughly six months after surgeons severed arteries during a pelvic surgery at Stroger Hospital in 2017.
Also on the agenda: a $4.5 million settlement to the family of Jose Lopez for his wrongful death. Lopez was performing repairs on staff elevators at Stroger Hospital when the elevator car dropped, pulling Lopez down with it, according to a suit. The suit claims he was not warned the elevator car was not locked.
The committee is also expected to consider an $8.1 million settlement to the family of Christian Garcia Salas for medical malpractice. Salas reported to Stroger a couple days after a car crash and complained about shoulder and abdominal pain in the fall of 2022, according to the suit his family filed. Doctors determined he had an injured spleen, but the lawsuit claimed staff failed to check whether he was bleeding into his abdomen, to closely monitor him, or remove his spleen. He died the day after he checked into the emergency room.
aquig@chicagotribune.com
