Attorney: Waukegan agrees to its share of $9 million settlement in wrongful-conviction lawsuit

Lake County News-Sun (IL)

Aug. 29--A man who served more than 15 years in prison for murder before being cleared of the crime would receive $9 million under a proposed settlement the Waukegan City Council has agreed on, the city's attorney said.

Jason Strong filed the lawsuit in May 2016 against Waukegan, the Lake County Major Crime Task Force and other municipalities whose officers were involved in the case through the task force. It was filed less than a month after a Lake County court granted him a certificate of innocence.

Waukegan would end up paying about $100,000 of the proposed settlement, city attorney Robert Long said. The city's insurance would cover the rest of Waukegan's $6 million share, and the other entities named in the lawsuit would be responsible for the remainder, Long said.

A settlement conference with the federal judge handling the case was held in July, and a status hearing is scheduled for next week, according to court documents.

A spokeswoman with the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center, which is handling Strong's case, declined to comment Monday.

Strong had been convicted of murder stemming from the slaying of a woman whose body was discovered in a Waukegan-area forest preserve in December 1999. Years later, the woman was identified as Mary Kate Sunderlin, a mentally disabled woman from Kane County, and the case against Strong began to fall apart.

Strong "suffered immeasurable harm as a result of his lengthy, unjust incarceration," according to his lawsuit. "He continues to suffer as he struggles to integrate into the free community and repair his shattered life. He brings this suit seeking justice and compensation from those responsible for his unjust charging and conviction."

"Imagine if you took the last 15 years of your life and say that it never happened -- none of the birthdays, none of the celebrations with family, your children, your career," Strong said in a 2015 interview with the Chicago Tribune. "None of that happened. You miss all those things. You're like in pause mode. Life goes on, but you don't. It's loss, a giant loss that you can't really put into words."

Strong claims in the lawsuit that officers conspired to wrongfully convict him by feeding information to a purported witness, coercing confessions from Strong and his alleged accomplice, and manipulating others into providing false evidence, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit claims that the behaviors that led to Strong's false conviction were "widespread within the Waukegan police department," which "far from disciplining or firing these officers, the City of Waukegan rewarded and promoted them, such that the officers have flourished within the department and within the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force despite their troubled records."

The complaint points to seven other cases where convictions had been overturned after DNA evidence excluded the defendants, and in several instances, confessions were alleged to have been coerced.

Besides Strong's case, the city faces one other pending lawsuit related to a false conviction, filed by Angel Gonzalez, who had been arrested by Waukegan police and convicted of abducting and raping a woman in the mid-1990s.

That case could end up costing the city more than Strong's case, as the city's insurance companies from the time have agreed to front $900,000, the maximum covered under the policies.

The city has two ways of reconciling with its history, Long said.

One is through how the police department moves forward, looking at its practices, providing additional training and, in Waukegan's case, asking the Department of Justice to mediate a review of the department, he said.

The other is through the settlement process, which is a matter of weighing the likelihood that the lawsuit can be won against the potential risks, he said.

The city does not get to participate in the legal process that ultimately results in the granting of a certificate of innocence, Long said. The Lake County State's Attorney's Office is the entity making decisions about how much or whether to challenge the later testing, be it pathologist reports or DNA testing.

That means if a lawsuit is filed against the city after a certificate of innocence is issued, the city has to overcome "a hell of a piece of evidence," Long said.

A certificate of innocence "suggests that he never should have been convicted in the first place," he said. "That might be true, and it might not be true."

If the city decided to fight the lawsuit, it would also have to present evidence on how a case was investigated nearly two decades ago with some of the involved officers now deceased, most retired and others unavailable, Long said.

As is typical, the city does not admit any guilt as part of the settlement, Long said.

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