After being wrongfully convicted and serving 10 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, Marcel Brown has been awarded $50 million in damages in the largest payout of its kind in US history. Brown, now 34, was sentenced to 35 years for being an accomplice in the 2008 shooting of a 19-year-old man in Chicago. However, his conviction was overturned in 2018, and all charges against him were dropped.
A jury at the US District Court in Chicago found that police had fabricated evidence and coerced Brown’s false confession. The law firm Loevy & Loevy, representing Brown, stated that police had locked him in an interrogation room for over 30 hours, deprived him of food, denied his requests for a phone call, and prevented him from sleeping. They had also threatened him with lengthy imprisonment if he did not confess and had turned away his mother and a lawyer who arrived to help him.
In a statement released through his lawyers, Brown expressed his frustration at being placed in such a difficult situation as a young man: “I was just a kid. They put me in a den full of lions, and they didn’t care or show remorse.” The $50 million award is a significant victory for Brown, who has been through a long and difficult ordeal as a result of a wrongful conviction. It serves as a reminder of the importance of ensuring that justice is served and wrongful convictions are rectified.
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