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Three men who spent 36 years in prison for a murder they did not commit — they were wrongly arrested as teenagers by Baltimore police and wrongly convicted by a jury — will receive $48 million from the city after a vote Wednesday by the Baltimore City Board of Estimates.

The $48 million payout is the highest ever awarded in Maryland and one of the highest multi-plaintiff settlements nationally, according to Jeffrey S. Gutman, director of the Public Justice Advocacy Clinic at George Washington University Law School, who tracks wrongful-conviction settlements.

The three men also <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2020/03/02/three-men-wrongly-imprisoned-36-years-receive-29-million-each-maryland/" target=_blank>received $2.9 million</a> from the state of Maryland in 2020 under a compensation plan created for exonerees.

Alfred Chestnut, Ransom Watkins and Andrew Stewart were each 16 when they decided to skip school one afternoon in November 1983 and visit their old middle school, Harlem Park Junior High. After walking around the hallways and visiting former teachers, they were ejected by a school security guard around 12:45 p.m., and the doors were locked, evidence at their trial showed.

Arrested as teens, three men exonerated after 36 years behind bars for wrongful murder conviction

But about 30 minutes later, someone else approached 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett in a hallway and demanded his Georgetown Starter jacket, then fatally shot him and took the jacket, police said. Witnesses told police that they had seen Michael Willis, 18, run from the school and discard a handgun, and that he was wearing a Georgetown jacket that night, records would later show.

Instead, lead homicide detective Donald Kincaid focused on Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart because multiple people had seen them there. And when police searched Chestnut’s home at 1 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, they found a Georgetown jacket. Chestnut’s mother had a receipt for it, and witnesses failed to identify Chestnut, Watkins and Stewart in photo lineups, police records show.

The case attracted intense publicity in 1983, as one of the first involving violent theft of athletic gear. Baltimore prosecutors, led by then-Assistant State’s Attorney Jonathan Shoup, elected to try the juveniles as adults.

Shoup told defense attorneys there was no evidence exonerating the teens, despite reports showing that witnesses hadn’t identified them and that Willis had been named as a suspect, defense attorneys said. Several witnesses later told investigators that Kincaid and other detectives coerced statements from them falsely accusing the “Harlem Park Three,” who all were convicted and sentenced to life in prison at age 17.

Their appeals failed, and Watkins and Stewart said in interviews that they had resigned themselves to life behind bars. But Chestnut kept pushing. He said he filed a public-records request to the Maryland attorney general in 2018, and they turned over the reports which the prosecutor said didn’t exist.

“It made me angry,” Chestnut said in a 2019 interview. “Just the fact that everything was concealed all those years. I knew that they didn’t want to reveal those things.”

Amber Ferguson

Chestnut said that he saw then-Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby on television speaking about her Conviction Integrity Unit, designed to correct the wrongs inflicted by her predecessors. Chestnut sent a handwritten letter to Mosby and then sent his files to the unit, which began working on it with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, as well as the Maryland Office of the Public Defender and the University of Baltimore Innocence Project Clinic.

More than 50 such conviction integrity units in prosecutors’ offices around the country have now exonerated at least one defendant, and another 46 units are operating, according to the <a href="https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/Conviction-Integrity-Units.aspx" target=_blank>National Registry of Exonerations</a>.

After reviewing the case, Mosby filed a motion to vacate the convictions of the Harlem Park Three. On Nov. 25, 2019, after a judge apologized to them and granted Mosby’s motion, the three men walked out of the Baltimore City courthouse, onto North Calvert Street and into the arms of their loved ones.

Kincaid told The Washington Post in 2019 he hadn’t done anything wrong. “What would I get out of that?” the retired detective asked. “You think for one minute I want to send three young boys to prison for the rest of their life?” He said: “When I was in the crime scene up at the school, three young girls approached me and told me who did it. I didn’t coerce them for nothing.” Kincaid did not remember Willis as a suspect and denied withholding any information.

In 2020, the three men sued the Baltimore Police Department, Kincaid and Bryn Joyce, another detective. Joyce said in 2020 that he was “flabbergasted” to learn of the exonerations and that “our objective when I was in the homicide unit was to find the truth, no matter where it led us.”

Men who wrongly served 36 years for murder sue Baltimore police, detectives, alleging pattern of misconduct

When the suit was filed, Watkins said: “You take three kids’ lives and tear them apart, nobody wants to talk about it. … I’m struggling to get my life back on board.”

The prosecutor, Shoup, died in 2016, and the suspect Willis was shot to death in West Baltimore in 2002.

Baltimore did not settle the lawsuit easily. Instead, it hired a Chicago law firm, Nathan &amp; Kamionski, to contest the case. One of the original witnesses in the case told <a href="https://thedailyrecord.com/2023/10/12/48-million-wrongful-conviction-settlement-proposed-for-harlem-park-three/" target=_blank>the Daily Record</a> last year that being interviewed by the firm’s lawyers reminded him of the harsh interrogation he faced as a teen when detectives questioned him about the slaying in 1983.

But the Board of Estimates eventually concluded that the 40 years since the arrests had made it “nearly impossible to corroborate or refute Plaintiffs’ allegations or the State’s Attorney’s findings in its reinvestigation,” and recommended the $48 million settlement, city documents state.

“Today our city paid a moral, ethical, and financial debt left on us by a previous generation and decades of injustice,” Board of Estimates Chair and City Council President Nick J. Mosby, the husband of Marilyn Mosby, said in a statement. “First and foremost, our hearts are with Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart, Ransom Watkins and their families. Nothing in this world can make up for the mental and emotional trauma that has been put on these innocent men and their families. No amount of compensation can right the wrongs of 36 years of turmoil and the residual effects on these men, their families, and communities.”

Each of the men will receive $14.9 million and the law firm that represented them, Brown, Goldstein &amp; Levy, will receive $3.3 million, legal documents show. The law firm said the men did not want to comment Wednesday.

Gutman, of the Public Justice Advocacy Clinic, said that “one needs to consider how long the wrongful incarceration was” in analyzing the settlement. They were imprisoned for 36 years, “so their per-year awards are somewhat less than $500,000,” Gutman said. “That is still quite high, higher than the national average, but not chart-topping.”

Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post's breaking news coverage of Virginia Tech shooting, 2008

Pulitzer Prize for The Washington Post's investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, 2022

Rites of Burial

University of Notre Dame, BA in English and American Studies

Tom Jackman has been covering criminal justice for The Washington Post since 1998 and anchors the True Crime blog. He previously covered crime and courts for the Kansas City Star.

Tom Jackman

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Baltimore pays $48 million to 3 men wrongly imprisoned for 36 years

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Ransom Watkins, Andre Stewart and Alfred Chestnut exoneration - Baltimore, MD

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