$56.7 Million Awarded to “Harlem Park Three,” Exonerated of Baltimore Murder After 36 Years in Prison
by David M. Reutter
On September 29, 2023, Maryland’s Baltimore Board of Estimates approved a $48 million settlement for former state prisoners Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart, Jr. and Ransom Watkins, all 56, who were released from prison on November 25, 2019, after serving 36 years for a murder they did not commit. In March 2020, the city’s Board of Public Works approved $8.7 million in compensation, computed from the average Maryland household’s income over the previous five years. The new award brings the total payout for the three to $56.7 million—or about $525,000 per year each man spent wrongfully imprisoned.
A memorandum to the Board from Acting City Solicitor Ebony M. Thompson succinctly detailed the facts. Chestnut, Stewart, and Watkins sued the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) and former BPD Detectives Donald Kincaid and Bryn Joyce after their release, asserting numerous federal and state claims stemming from their wrongful convictions in 1984. All three were just 16 when they were wrongfully blamed for the November 18, 1983, murder of Dewitt Duckett, 14, “a ninth grader who was robbed of his Georgetown Starter jacket and shot while walking the hallways of Harlem Park Junior High School,” Thompson wrote. They were subsequently sentenced to life in state prison for convictions “supported by the testimony of four eyewitnesses, as well as circumstantial evidence.”
But decades later, Chestnut filed a public records request to the prosecutor’s office and discovered evidence not shared with his attorneys during trial: That multiple eyewitnesses identified just one suspect seen running from the building, Michael Willis, 18, who was reportedly wearing the same jacket. The witnesses changed their story to identify the “Harlem Park Three” after a teacher told detectives that he’d seen the teens, who no longer attended the school, in the building at the time of the fatal shooting, and cops then found Chestnut also wearing a Georgetown Starter jacket—ignoring the receipt for it that his mother showed them.
After Chestnut made this discovery, he contacted Baltimore’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), which worked with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) to confirm that prosecutors had indeed “ignored eyewitness evidence and physical evidence that contradicted their chosen narrative,” according to the complaint the trio filed in August 2020, “including evidence pointing to a different suspect”: Willis, who was fatally shot in 2002.
Instead, the complaint continued, prosecutors “shaped” the evidence “to implicate Plaintiffs, including by coercing false testimony from young witnesses”—all of whom then recanted it. Moreover, the trio’s complaint added, the officers’ misconduct reflected “a pattern and practice that existed within BPD at the time of their arrest and prosecution.”
The office of State Attorney Marilyn Mosby agreed with her CIU and MAIP that there was “intentional concealment and misrepresentation of the exculpatory evidence, evidence that would have showed that it was someone else other than these defendants.” She filed a motion to vacate their convictions and then apologized to the men when they were released.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott (D) called the settlement a deserved compensation that “speak[s] to gross injustices” against city residents. “Our city is in a position where in 2023 we are literally paying for the misconduct of (BPD) officers decades in the past,” Scott said. “This is just part of the price our city must pay to right the wrongs of this terrible history.”
The trio’s attorneys from Brown, Goldstein & Levy in Baltimore will receive $3.3 million in fees and costs, leaving each man about $14.9 million from the settlement. That represents less than $1,000 a day that they spent wrongfully imprisoned, and their earlier award from the Board of Public Works adds only about $221 more. As BPD chief legal counsel Justin Conroy told the Board: “These are men who went to jail as teenagers and came out as young grandfathers in their 50s.” See: Chestnut v. Kincaid, USDC (D. Md.), Case No. 1:20-cv-02342.
Additional source: Washington Post
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Related legal case
Chestnut v. Kincaid
| Year | 2023 |
|---|---|
| Cite | USDC (D. Md.), Case No. 1:20-cv-02342 |
| Level | District Court |
| Conclusion | Settlement |
| Attorney Fees | 3,300,000.00 |
| Damages | 56,700,000.00 |