American receives $50 million in compensation after 10 years in prison for murder he did not commit | Crime news

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

A man in the United States has been awarded $50 million in damages after being wrongfully convicted of murder. This is the largest compensation amount of its kind in US history.

Marcel Brown, 34, was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being found guilty of complicity in the shooting death of a 19-year-old man on Chicago's west side in 2008.

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

After a two-week trial, a jury in U.S. District Court in Chicago awarded Brown damages on Monday after concluding that police falsified evidence and coerced him into giving a false confession.

The law firm Loevy & Loevy said police officers locked Brown in an interrogation room for more than 30 hours, withheld food from him, refused his repeated requests to call and prevented him from sleeping.

Police also threatened him with a long prison sentence if he refused to confess and turned away his mother and a lawyer when they came to help him, Loevy & Loevy said.

“I was just a child,” Brown said in a statement released through his lawyers. “They put me in a lion's den and they didn't care or show any remorse.”