Chicago City Wire

The $50 million wrongful conviction payout recently approved by Chicago City Council to the so-called Marquette Park Four is being called "a travesty of justice" by former Chicago Police Detective Kenneth Boudreau. 

In 2017, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx exonerated the four—Charles Johnson, Larod Styles, TroShawn McCoy and LaShawn Ezell—who were convicted of a 1995 double murder at a car dealership on the Southwest Side. In 2018 they filed wrongful conviction lawsuits in federal court naming Boudreau, other former police officers, and prosecutors. As it has with dozens of other wrongful conviction suits, City Council approved the settlement on June 12, before the case had a chance to go to trial. 

The settlement, one of the largest wrongful conviction settlement ever approved, was reached in mid-April, but the amount was only recently made public.

Foxx exonerated the four despite prosecutors in her office who were reportedly pushing for a new trial in light of the introduction of new evidence in the case.

“The city got into this mess by settling these lawsuits instead of fighting them in court,” Boudreau told Chicago City Wire. “And now there doesn’t seem to be any end to it.”

Boudreau said he was “front and center” on the lawsuits even though he had very little to do with the case.

“I did not process the crime scene. I did not arrest anyone. I did not interview anyone,” he said. “My only involvement was to help with the lineup.”

But Boudreau, like other detectives named in wrongful conviction lawsuits, has a target on this back for his association, however brief, with former Commander Jon Burge. In 2010 Burge was convicted of perjury surrounding allegations that he tortured murder suspects. He died in 2018.

In a 2018 statement, the MacArthur Justice Center, representing Charles Johnson in his wrongful conviction lawsuit, 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 on the Englewood Four, 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.

A USA TODAY analysis of published Chicago Law Department settlements found that the city had paid out nearly $329,000,000 in lawsuits stemming from reversed convictions since 2008.

The Marquette Park 4 settlement is bigger than any in the published records, USA Today reported.

Foxx has exonerated over 250 since taking office.

In April 2023, she announced she would not be running for re-election. This past April, Eileen O’Neill Burke won the Democratic primary and will face Republican Bob Fioretti and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski in the November General Elections.