The Case of Kevin Bailey

When Jarrett Adams was an attorney with the Innocence Project, he was part of the team that helped free Kevin Bailey from a wrongful conviction of first-degree murder, armed robbery, and burglary.

Bailey, along with Cory Batchelor, were exonerated on January 30, 2018, when a Cook County judge dismissed their 1991 convictions after newly acquired DNA proved they were innocent. Bailey spent 28 years in prison of an 80-year sentence based on false confessions and government misconduct that included being tortured into confessing a crime they did not commit.

2019

In January 2019, Bailey and Batchelor filed a federal civil rights suit seeking compensation for their wrongful convictions.

2022

 In January 2022, the lawsuit was settled for $14 million.

When just 19 years old, the two young Black men were subject to physically coercive techniques used during the infamous Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge era, to get the teens to falsely confess to the 1989 stabbing death of Lula Mae Woods. According to their attorneys, there was evidence that the Chicago officers interrogating Bailey and Batchelor choked and beat the suspects. Bailey was questioned for more than 12 hours and only confessed after a detective grabbed him by the neck and threatened him. Woods was the wife of a retired Chicago police sergeant.  

 

Over 120 Black men and women were subjected to torture that was racially motivated and included electric shock, mock executions, suffocation, and beatings by now-convicted former Police Commander Jon Burge and his subordinates. Burge was terminated from the Chicago Police Department in 1993 and convicted for perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from the torture cases in federal court in 2010.