Chicago City Wire

A settlement has been reached in the wrongful conviction cases of the so-called Marquette Park Four, convicted of a 1995 double murder at a car dealership on the Southwest Side.

“Joint motion to stay pretrial briefing and deadlines is denied as moot,” a March 27 filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District said. “The Parties reported to the Court that settlement has been reached.”

The amount of the payout is not yet public.

The four, Charles Johnson, Larod Styles, TroShawn McCoy and LaShawn Ezell, were exonerated by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx just weeks after she first took office in December 2016.

Prosecutors in her office reportedly pushed for a new trial with the introduction of new evidence in the case, but in early 2017 Foxx dismissed the charges.

Foxx has since exonerated over 250.

The four filed wrongful conviction lawsuits in federal court in 2018.

Their stories in the complaints were remarkably similar to dozens of others filed in other wrongful conviction complaints over the past ten years: former underlings of Commander Jon Burge, convicted in 2010 for perjury surrounding allegations that he tortured suspects, coercing the four into false confessions.

One of those detectives named— and also named in other lawsuits— is the now retired Kenneth Boudreau. And like the others, Boudreau says the claims are false.

“I didn’t arrest anyone. I didn’t interview anyone,” he told Chicago City Wire referring to the Marquette Park Four. “My only involvement was to assist in the lineup. Nothing improper occurred here.”

In a 2018 statement, the McArthur Justice Center, representing Charles Johnson, likened the case to the Englewood Four, convicted of the 1994 rape and murder of prostitute Tina Glover. Their convictions were vacated in 2011 and in 2017 Chicago City Council awarded them $31 million. The McArthur statement said that Boudreau was one of the detectives who forced them into false confessions.

For an earlier story, Boudreau told Chicago City Wire that his work on the case involved interviewing one of the four, Terrill Swift, for 20 minutes.

Moreover, during his criminal trial in 1998 in Cook County Circuit Court, Swift said on three separate occasions that he was treated well by police.

One back-and-forth between prosecutor Robert Hovey and Swift:

Q. Were you mistreated by the police in any way?

A. I wasn’t mistreated at all.

Q. Did they beat you up or anything?

A. No sir.

Q. Did they verbally threaten you?

A. No sir.

Q. Were they pretty nice to you?

A. Yes sir.

In finding Swift guilty, Judge Thomas Sumner acknowledged the scant physical evidence in the case but found the details of the crime iterated in Swift’s confession convincing. And he found the defense’s assertion that the confession was somehow extracted or fabricated by police to be absurd.

“But the defense in this case is, and this is rather novel, I must admit that the defense in this case is that we have a 22-page confession because the police were too nice,” Judge Sumner said. “I will tell you what. If that is true then the police have found a new method by which to get confessions and certainly eliminate any possibility of lawsuits and motions to suppress, by golly. I don’t know why they didn’t think of this before. All they have to do is just inundate the accused with niceties; feed him, treat him like a king and he’ll just come clean.”