Two men who spent 16 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit were awarded $60 million each by a federal grand jury Monday after a nearly five-year court battle.
It’s one of the largest total awards for a wrongful conviction in U.S. history — larger than the $50 million awarded to Marcel Brown, a Chicago man who was wrongfully convicted in a murder and served 10 years.
John Fulton and Anthony Mitchell, who were 17 and 18 when they were arrested in 2003, were each sentenced to 31 years in prison following their 2006 convictions for the murder of Christopher Collazo. No physical evidence or eyewitnesses tied either man to the crime.
Judge Lawrence Flood vacated their convictions in 2019, and the state’s attorney’s office subsequently dropped all charges. The two brought their suit against the city and county in May 2020, which named at least 17 current and former CPD and Cook County state’s attorney employees as co-defendants.
Fulton was joined by his wife and children at a news conference Monday. He stood with attorneys and others involved in the case and described parts of the 100 hours of interrogation he endured while in custody, saying he was denied his right to a phone call.
“Justice is finally here,” Fulton, now 40, said. “I knew my time was gonna come one day. … [But] you can’t make up for that lost time.”
The Cook County states attorney’s office declined to comment. The Chicago Police Department referred questions to city officials, who didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Fulton and his attorneys also called for investigations into the officers and detectives who coerced their confessions, and Fulton said he planned to help work to free others who have been wrongly incarcerated.
“I would have preferred all the officers involved do 16 years in the state penitentiary and see what I had to go through, and have family members and friends to break away from you because they believed the accusations,” Fulton said. “Our celebration will be when all wrongfully incarcerated people can step foot in the free world.”
Around 3 a.m. March 10, 2003, a man called 911 to report a fire in the alley of the 5200 block of South Peoria Street in Back of the Yards, where Collazo’s partially burned body was soon found. Collazo’s wrists, ankles and mouth were bound with duct tape.
The 911 caller told police he saw two men near the fire, but he wasn’t able to see their faces clearly. A month earlier, Fulton had tried to buy a gun from Collazo, though Collazo and another member of the Maniac Latin Disciples robbed Fulton at gunpoint the last time the two saw each other, according to the original suit.
A mutual friend of Fulton and Collazo’s who brokered the gun sale at first “denied knowing of any connection between that robbery and Collazo’s murder.” That changed during another interview by police.
“Through threats and intimidation, and by feeding her a false narrative that they had concocted, defendants coerced [the mutual friend] into falsely implicating [Fulton] in Collazo’s murder,” according to the original complaint.
Fulton was questioned by detectives for several days, and he initially refused to give a false confession and told police that, at the time of the murder, he was at University of Chicago Medical Center with his fiancée and then at his home in Bronzeville, the suit stated.
Fulton eventually gave a false confession to police that implicated himself, Mitchell and a third person, the suit stated. All three faced murder charges, though they were later dropped against the third person after a judge ruled that his confession had been coerced.
“The city of Chicago continued to insist they were guilty,” said John Loevy, one of Mitchell and Fulton’s attorneys, at Monday’s news conference. “They can’t just close a case to close a case. … Who ever really killed that kid is still out there and got away with it because they focused all their energy on these two kids who didn’t do it.”