Chicago has spent years paying hundreds of millions of dollars in wrongful-conviction civil settlements. Now, for the first time in a decade, the system that produced those payouts is facing real resistance in Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neal Burke and the reaction has been swift. Last week, a prominent Chicago civil-rights law firm publicly urged the appointment of a special prosecutor to prevent Burke from prosecuting misconduct by federal immigration agents during “Operation Midway Blitz.”
That request, ostensibly a narrow dispute about federal immigration enforcement, actually reflects something much larger: a struggle over the future of Chicago’s sprawling conviction-reversal apparatus and the enormous civil litigation industry that follows in its wake.
For roughly a quarter-century, Chicago has been the national epicenter of wrongful-conviction litigation. When decades-old convictions are vacated, ensuing civil-rights lawsuits against the city routinely end in multi-million-dollar taxpayer-funded settlements, collectively approaching/exceeding a billion dollars.
For the private lawyers who specialize in bringing these cases, the incentives are all-to obvious. Successful lawsuits generate enormous contingency-fee recoveries, typically 33 to 45%. The faster convictions are overturned, the faster the civil litigation begins. But the gravy train leans heavily on one critical step: a prosecutor willing to concede that a conviction was wrongful. When that happens, the legal pathway to civil liability becomes dramatically easier. That is why the posture of the elected State’s Attorney matters so much.
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