US man wins $50m after 10 years in prison for murder he didn’t commit

Marcel Brown was wrongfully convicted over 2008 shooting of 19-year-old man in Chicago.

A man in the United States has been awarded $50m in damages after being wrongfully convicted of murder in the largest such payout in US history.

Marcel Brown, 34, was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted of being an accomplice in the 2008 shooting of a 19-year-old man on the west side of Chicago.

Brown served 10 years in prison before being released in 2018 after a court vacated his conviction and prosecutors dismissed all charges against him.

After a two-week trial, a jury at the US District Court in Chicago on Monday awarded Brown the damages after finding that police had fabricated evidence and coerced his false confession.

Law firm Loevy & Loevy said police officers had locked Brown in an interrogation room for more than 30 hours, deprived him of food, denied his repeated requests for a phone call, and prevented him from sleeping.

Police also threatened him with lengthy imprisonment if he refused to confess and turned away his mother and a lawyer when they arrived to help him, Loevy & Loevy said.

“I was just a kid. They put me in a den full of lions, and they didn’t care or show remorse,” Brown said in a statement released through his lawyers.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies