Just one month into the year, the city of Chicago already has run through well over half of the $82 million that Mayor Brandon Johnson set aside for 2025 to cover police misconduct settlements and judgments.
There still are more than 220 wrongful conviction lawsuits pending against two disgraced former Chicago cops, Reynaldo Guevara and Ronald Watts.
And City Hall faces other suits tied to the late Jon Burge, who, as the Chicago Police Department’s Area 2 commander presided over a “midnight crew” of South Side detectives who were accused in lawsuit after lawsuit of torturing confessions from suspects in violent crimes in the 1970s and 1980s.
The average payout for a wrongful conviction case in Illinois is more than $5 million, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
At that rate, Chicago’s beleaguered taxpayers might end up having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more for those 220 pending lawsuits.
“I am concerned about finding the resources to pay these settlements long-term,” says Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd), who chairs the Chicago City Council Finance Committee. “We have to find resources for this.”
Mary Richardson-Lowry, who as Johnson’s City Hall corporation counsel is the city’s chief lawyer, says changes in training, supervision and accountability imposed by police Supt. Larry Snelling — and mandated under a federal consent decree — will result in fewer police misconduct cases in the future.
But she says, “We certainly know that there are some individuals who have, unfortunately, gone afoul of good policing, and we’re living the results of those very cases.”
Richardson-Lowry says she has created a mass torts division in her office to minimize the city’s future liability while “negotiating cases in clusters” rather than individually. She also points to other changes.
“We do risk-mitigation analysis formally,” Richardson-Lowry says. “That hasn’t existed. We set aside reserves. That hasn’t existed before. The idea behind setting aside reserves is to create those kinds of funds to, as we go through these very aged cases, that we have a vehicle for paying for any settlements that we reach.
Ald. Chris Taliaferro (29th), a former Chicago police sergeant who chairs the City Council’s Police Committee, says police officers were “very emboldened” years ago. “If you got a confession out of someone, state’s attorneys trusted that,” he says. “Now, there’s a lot more scrutiny.”
Taliaferro says that what the city is doing now to manage risk won’t pay dividends for at least 10 years.
In recent decades, the city has spent a fortune to compensate people who accused Chicago cops of misconduct. The accusations against Burge, Watts and Guevara by far have been the costliest.
Federal lawsuits against Burge, who died in 2018, have cost the city roughly $130 million in legal settlements and judgments, not including millions in lawyers’ fees. Four lawsuits involving Burge are still pending, according to the city.
Former Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a separate $5.5 million fund to pay reparations to Burge torture victims and create a memorial to them, but it hasn’t yet been built.
Guevara, 81, is accused in lawsuits of framing people for murder. Forty-three people, including three women, have been exonerated after they were sent to prison on murder convictions in cases handled by Guevara in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of them lived in Humboldt Park.
Lawsuits targeting him have cost the city and Cook County at least $80 million. And 40 lawsuits against Guevara are still pending, City Hall says.
Most of the exonerations in the Guevara cases came between 2016 and 2024, while Kim Foxx was Cook County’s state’s attorney. One man, Jacques Rivera, was exonerated in 2011, under Foxx’s predecessor Anita Alvarez.
Guevara, who couldn’t be reached for comment, now lives in Texas — and, never having been charged with any crime, is collecting a Chicago police pension.
Ex-cop Watts faces 182 suits
Watts, a former police sergeant, was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison for shaking down an FBI informant. He was accused of framing hundreds of people on drug charges from 2003 to 2008 while he ran a tactical unit in the now-demolished Ida B. Wells public housing complex on the South Side. Foxx tossed out more than 200 drug convictions involving Watts.
Last month, Ben Baker and the mother of his children got a $7.5 million legal settlement from the city for the 10 years Baker spent in prison. Baker, who admitted he was a drug dealer, said he refused to pay Watts $1,000 in “protection money,” so Watts framed him in a drug case.
According to the city, 182 lawsuits targeting Watts remain pending.
Jeffery Gutman, a George Washington University law professor, says a small number of “bad actors” like Burge, Guevara and Watts are responsible for many of the legal payouts in Illinois and other states, including Texas. Cities would be wise to have “early-warning” systems to root them out, he says.
For years, there has been talk about implementing an early-warning system within the Chicago Police Department to identify officers acing patterns of complaints and disciplinary actions. But City Hall Inspector General Deborah Witzburg says she has “no indication of that system in operation” and that the department “cannot improve what we cannot measure.”
“There are gaps in data and data quality on which members are involved in these cases and whether there have been disciplinary investigations into the conduct at issue,” Witzburg says. “We ought to be learning lessons from these very big checks that are going out the door.”
Illinois leads the country in the number of exonerations — 549 — dating to the late 1980s, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. More than half of those cases involved murder convictions. Most of the rest were over drug convictions. Most of those cases were in Chicago. Texas and New York are a distant second and third in exonerations.
“Illinois has a cadre of very good, skillful, smart lawyers who have advanced these cases and sought certificates of innocence for lots of these folks,” says Gutman, who analyzes compensation that people get from wrongful-conviction lawsuits.
In a report last month, he found New York led the nation with $899 million in such payouts in all years. Illinois was No. 2 with $879 million and California third with $307 million.
But that’s only part of the financial picture involving wrongful convictions. Many state governments also pay compensation to people who are exonerated of crimes. New York has led the nation with $362 million in those payouts, while Illinois is seventh with $49 million. Illinois pays up to about $200,000 to people who’ve received a certificate of innocence.
The average payout in Illinois that exonerees get from lawsuits is $5.6 million — about $418,000 for every year served in prison, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Depending on how much time they spent in prison or jail, the Guevara and Watts exonerees whose lawsuits are still pending could cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The taxpayers of today are paying for the sins of yesterday,” Gutman says. “One hopes that police departments, whether required by legislation or other means, are shaping up.”
Vanderbilt University law professor Mark A. Cohen has written that there’s a cost, though, to reducing the number of wrongful convictions.
“While we all wish for zero wrongful convictions, there will inevitably be a small percentage of individuals who are convicted and punished for crimes they did not commit,” according to Cohen. “From a policy perspective, the question one needs to ask is at what cost? Put differently, how much should society spend on DNA evidence, criminal investigations and other costly mechanisms to reduce the risk of wrongfully incarcerating an individual?”
Ald. Bill Conway (34th) is a former assistant state’s attorney who ran against Foxx in 2020. Conway says he worries the city is too quick to settle, encouraging even more lawsuits.
“If there are people whose rights have been violated, and clearly there are, we need to make sure they’re fairly compensated,” Conway says. “But the flip side is you don’t want to be incentivizing frivolous lawsuits because they think we’ll settle everything.”
David B. Owens, who teaches at the University of Washington School of Law and is a staff attorney for The Exoneration Project, has represented people in Chicago who ended up bing exonerated. Among them: Ariel Gomez, who was serving a 35-year prison term for murder in a case handled by Guevara.
Despite decades of such cases costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in Chicago, Owens says he doesn’t think the city is seriously addressing issues that lead to wrongful convictions. He points to the five-year-old federal consent decree that requires reforms in the Chicago Police Department.
“There is still a lot to do,” Owens says of that agreement. “People don’t seem to understand an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
He says the handling of the investigation of the killing of Hadiya Pendleton points up troubling evidence that things haven’t changed enough since the Burge cases decades ago. In 2013, the 15-year-old girl was shot to death on the South Side a week after she performed at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
Micheail Ward was sent to prison for shooting Hadiya. But Ward’s murder conviction was reversed in 2023 after an appeals court ruled that his confession shouldn’t have been considered as evidence. Last month, the Illinois Supreme Court upheld that decision. Ward’s lawyers say his confession was coerced by police.
Owens says this when asked whether he thinks there will be fewer wrongful conviction cases in the future because of reforms and technological advances such as required videotaping of murder confessions and a ban on deception by detectives conducting interviews: “Part of me wants to say I hope so. And another part of me says I am not so sure because of the inability to depart from a lot of practices in the past.”