Chicago City Wire

City Council is on the verge of approving a controversial wrongful conviction payout of $25 million to two convicted of the 1993 murder of college basketball start Morgan Marshall Jr. on the South Side.

On Monday, the Council’s Finance Committee approved a $17.5 million settlement for Tyrone Hood, who served 22 years in prison, and $7.5 million for Wayne Washington, who served 14 years. In nearly all past wrongful conviction settlements, City Council quickly followed suit and put its stamp of approval on the payouts.

Hood and Washington claimed that the detectives in the case, Kenneth Boudreau and Jack Halloran, fabricated evidence, and pressured witnesses to testify against them. Washington also said he was beaten into a false confession.

Kim Foxx

For past stories on the case, Boudreau has told Chicago City Wire that he and his former partner Halloran, who are both named in other wrongful conviction suits, never abused or framed any suspects. Boudreau also said he was looking forward to testifying in the Hood and Washington cases, but a settlement was announced in July just weeks before the cases were scheduled to go to trial.

The Hood/Washington cases follow the pattern of dozens of other wrongful convictions cases that have been settled or are awaiting trial. Claims of police abuse have led to exonerations, and then to wrongful conviction lawsuits. In some of the cases, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who has vacated many convictions based on the abuse claims, has not opposed Certificates of Innocence (COI) for the once convicted murderers – strengthening their cases in civil court.

In 2015, former Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, commuted Hood’s sentence, relying, he said, on the facts in a 2014 New Yorker magazine story, according to a court filing by city attorneys representing the former detectives. But when deposed in the case, Quinn told a different story.

“At his deposition, Gov. Quinn could not remember anything about Hood except that he was sure he did not read The New Yorker story about Hood before he commuted Hood’s sentence,” according to city attorneys who were responding to Hood’s attorneys' motion to bar the evidence from the trial.

But Quinn admitted in a 2015 panel discussion at the University of Chicago Law School that the New Yorker story strongly influenced his decision to commute Hood’s sentence. In the story by Nicholas Schmidle, Hood claimed that detectives “slapped him in the head and thrust a gun in his face” in an attempt to get him to confess. Schmidle also pointed to Morgan’s father as the real killer. But the story, the city attorneys say, omitted key facts, and misquoted Morgan’s mother implicating her son’s father in the murder.

In addition, a key witness in the case was pressured by a gang member to recant his testimony, and that evidence should have been allowed in the civil trial, city attorneys argued in one motion.

Three Finance Committee members voted against the settlement, objecting to the amount of the award, according to reports.

Between 2019 and 2023, city taxpayers have shelled out $153 in payouts in wrongful conviction lawsuits, according to an analysis of city data by WTTW News.