$6.3M settlement for Black man in prison 25 years for rape he didn’t commit
/A man who spent 25 years behind bars for a rape he did not commit is the latest wrongfully convicted ex-prisoner to collect a multimillion settlement from the City of Chicago.
The City Council Finance Committee authorized $6,375,000 to settle a federal lawsuit filed by Larry Gillard, alleging the police crime lab distorted evidence in his case.
Gillard, now in his 50s, was convicted of a May 1981 rape after he was identified by the victim in a photo lineup and after a crime lab analyst testified that he was among only 4.4 percent of the African-American population that could have provided the semen recovered.
A jury took less than an hour to convict him, and he was sentenced to 24 years.
A later audit of the city crime lab found it did not comply with standards, and it was shut down and its work was turned over to the State Police.
After Gillard spent decades in prison, the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School took up the case. State Police DNA tests in 2009 definitively excluded Gillard and he was granted a certificate of innocence.
