Two men convicted in the slaying of a college basketball standout in Chicago 30 years ago are in line for a $25 million payout from the city under the terms of a settlement agreement in their long-running federal lawsuit, court records show.
Tyrone Hood and Wayne Washington sued the city in 2016, alleging police, including then-detectives Kenneth Boudreau and John Halloran, fabricated evidence and coerced testimony to win murder convictions in the May 1993 killing of Marshall Morgan Jr.
The lawsuit has lingered for more than seven years as the city has paid outside law firms to fight the allegations, including expending hundreds of thousands of dollars to litigate over potential expert testimony and fighting to have former Gov. Pat Quinn answer questions under oath about his decision to commute Hood’s 75-year prison sentence.
A trial in the case had been reset many times before finally appearing to be on track to begin July 10. Two weeks before jury selection was to begin, however, the parties notified U.S. District Judge John Kness that a settlement agreement had been reached.
At a hearing July 12, the lead attorney for the city, James Sotos, told Kness details of the agreement were still being finalized, but he believed it could go before the City Council for approval as soon as September.
“So what I mean by that is, we have an agreement to settle both cases for $25 million, including attorneys’ fees,” Sotos said, according to a transcript. “The problem is, among the plaintiffs, they don’t seem to have been able to work out how that’s supposed to be divided and what kind of settlement documents … they’re going to want.”
Kness said that it appeared “everybody’s interests are aligned,” and told both sides to continue to work together to get it done.
“So I think the defendants understand and have made clear what they need to be able to get this case teed up for a legislative approval,” Kness said, according to the transcript. “The plaintiffs know what they need to do to get that moving down that path.”
Hood’s attorneys could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday. Washington’s attorney, Steve Greenberg, declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for the city Law Department had no immediate comment on the potential settlement.
If approved by the City Council, the settlement would be the latest in a long line of massive payouts and jury awards in wrongful conviction cases involving alleged abuse by the Chicago police.
In May, a federal jury awarded a record $27 million to a man who spent more than two decades in prison after being wrongfully convicted in a double-fatal arson as a teenager, finding that Chicago police coerced his confession, fabricated evidence and violated his civil rights.
That number surpassed the 2021 verdict by another a federal jury awarding $25.2 million to a man who claimed Chicago police detectives railroaded him in a 1994 double murder investigation that put him behind bars for nearly 23 years.
A standout basketball player and honor student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Morgan’s half-naked body was found wedged between the front and back seats of his mother’s abandoned blue Chevrolet Cavalier on South Michigan Avenue in May 1993.
Hood and Washington were arrested two weeks later and charged with Morgan’s murder. Washington told police Hood shot Morgan as the pair robbed him, a statement he later said was false, the result of police punching and slapping him while he was handcuffed.
That version of events prevailed at Hood and Washington’s criminal trials three years later. Hood was convicted of murder and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Washington’s trial ended in a hung jury. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Lawyers for the two defendants argued for years Hood and Washington did not kill Morgan, and that instead the likely suspect is actually Morgan’s father, Marshall Morgan Sr., a man with a troubled past and a potential motive.
Six months before Morgan Jr.’s death, his father took out a life insurance policy on his son and listed himself as the beneficiary of the policy. An Allstate Insurance review of the case ultimately awarded Morgan Sr. a $50,000 payout following the charges against Hood and Washington.
Adding to the suspicion in the years following Morgan Jr.’s killing was the revelation that the father pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter for killing a man in 1977. Two years after his son’s death, Morgan Sr. received $107,000 in life insurance after the shooting death of his fiancee Michelle Soto. No one has been charged in Soto’s death.
Then, Morgan Sr. pleaded guilty to killing his girlfriend Deborah Jackson during an argument on a Chicago street in 2001. Jackson’s body was found inside an abandoned car, a scenario and circumstance with eerie similarities to Morgan Jr.’s case.
Morgan Sr. is in Stateville Correctional Center, serving a 75-year sentence for shooting and killing Jackson. Morgan Sr. admitted killing Jackson but has repeatedly said that he was not involved in his son’s killing.
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Hood served nearly 22 years behind bars before Quinn commuted Hood’s sentence on his final day in office in 2015. A judge later vacated his conviction. Washington, who was released from prison a few years earlier, also had his conviction vacated.
Quinn told the Tribune in 2018 he tried to look at each individual petition for clemency or sentence commutation during his time in office. Hood’s case stood out.
“With Tyrone Hood, I just thought that it screamed to heaven for justice,” Quinn said. “When you do it wrong, then the person who actually committed the murder goes free.”
Quinn made similar comments as a panelist addressing Hood’s case, describing Hood as “an innocent man who was wrongfully convicted” and saying members of his staff were “appalled by the mistakes made, really by the prosecution.”
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[ READ MORE: Quinn commutes sentences of 2 men with shaky murder convictions ]
Quinn was subpoenaed by defense attorneys to testify about his comments at a sworn deposition — a move he fought and ultimately lost, court records show.
Meanwhile, as the lawsuit was pending, Washington was denied a certificate of innocence by Cook County Circuit Judge Dominica A. Stephenson, who ruled his claims of police abuse were “vague” and that defendants who voluntarily pleaded guilty are not in line for such relief under the law.
But the Illinois Supreme Court rejected Stephenson’s reasoning, writing in a ruling last month she had ignored “unrebutted and compelling evidence of police coercion that resulted in him confessing to a crime he did not commit and subsequently agreeing to plead guilty to it.”
The unanimous opinion stated the behavior by detectives Boudreau and Halloran was “coercive conduct at best and torture at worst.”
“(Washington’s) unrebutted evidence established that the detectives isolated him, handcuffed him to his chair, kicked his chair over, and pushed and slapped him,” the ruling stated. “He signed the prewritten confession because the officers told him he could go home if he did and because he could no longer withstand the physical and psychological abuse.”
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
