$18.5 million settlement proposed for man who spent 34 years in prison for wrongful murder conviction
By Todd Feurer
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CHICAGO (WBBM) — Chicago aldermen will soon be asked to approve an $18.5 million settlement with a man who wrongfully spent 34 years in prison before he was cleared of murder charges, claiming he was framed by Chicago police detectives.
The City Council Finance Committee on Thursday will vote on the settlement that city attorneys have recommended for Francisco Benitez, who filed a federal lawsuit against the city in 2023, accusing former detectives Jerome Bogucki and Raymond Schalk of framing him for murder. Bogucki and Schalk are no longer on the force.
Benitez was 18 years old when he was arrested in 1989, and charged with the murders of two teenagers, Willaim Sanchez and Prudencio Cruz.
Benitez has accused Bogucki and Schalk of coercing witnesses into falsely implicating Benitez in the murders. The lawsuit claims those witnesses “got only a fleeting glimpse of a person running by their window after the shooting.”
“In fact, the person that ran by their window was not the perpetrator, but one of the victims stumbling back home after being shot,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also claims Benitez was coerced into a false confession that was later used against him at trial.
Bogucki and Schalk obtained that confession “through a psychologically abusive interrogation in which they repeatedly rejected Plaintiff’s denials and his alibi, threatened him, and eventually promised him that if he signed a statement confessing to a version of events they provided to him, he could go home to his family,” according to the lawsuit.
“The confession statement was obviously false. It was a bizarre, rambling story that did not comport with the known facts of the crime,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants’ promise that Plaintiff would be released if he signed the statement was also false. Instead, they charged Plaintiff with murder.”
In August of 2023, Benitez was released from custody when a judge tossed his murder conviction, after he presented substantial evidence proving his innocence. Two eyewitnesses now say they saw who actually committed the murders, and it wasn’t Benitez.
Benitez’s attorney, Anand Swaminathan, said those witnesses were afraid to come forward until recently because of what could happen to them.
“Those boys came forward now, and told the story of who committed this crime, and no witness ever identified Frankie Benitez as the shooter,” he said. “There is no witness who at trial ever said they had seen the shooting, or even saw a gun, who identified Frankie Benitez. So those two boys gave very powerful evidence demonstrating that, in fact, the real shooters are two other individuals, and that the evidence used against Frankie Benitez was all fabricated. It was fake, it was made up, and it was used to put a case on a young man, because they couldn’t figure out who had actually done it.”
In September 2023, Cook County prosecutors formally dropped the charges against Benitez.
“It feels great,” Benitez said after the hearing. “The state dropped the charges, and I’m done, free.”
If the $18.5 million settlement is approved by the Finance Committee, it would go to the full City Council for final approval on Oct. 16.
Benitez and his attorneys said Bogucki and Schalk have been accused of framing others.
“I’m not bitter. I just … this system needs to be fixed. It’s very, very broken,” he said after his exoneration in 2023. “There’s more guys like me going through this.”
In 2012, a federal jury awarded Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez $25 million in damages in a wrongful conviction lawsuit against Bogucki and Schalk according to court records. Jimenez was later convicted of shooting another gang member in 2015, after prosecutors said he used the $25 million award on his gang, the Simon City Royals, and to recruit members of another gang, the Vice Lords.
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