Baltimore’s spending board is poised to approve a $48 million settlement in a case of three men who spent a combined 108 years in prison for a murder they did not commit — a span their attorneys argued is more years served for a wrongful conviction than any in American history

The “Harlem Park Three” — Alfred Chestnut, Andrew Stewart and Ransom Watkins — were freed in 2019 by the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office after each served 36 years in prison for the notorious 1983 murder of a Baltimore junior high school student over a Georgetown University basketball jacket.

In 2020, the trio sued the city alleging former police detectives Donald Kincaid, John Barrick and Bryn Joyce coerced false statements and manufactured a narrative that implicated the three youths in the crime.

The Board of Estimates will meet next week to consider the settlement, which well exceeds the $6.4 million that Baltimore paid out to the family Freddie Gray in 2015. Gray, 25, suffered a spinal injury while in police custody and his death triggered days of protests earlier that year.

It also eclipses an $8 million settlement reached in 2020 with Umar Burley and Brent Matthews, who both went to federal prison for drugs that were planted in their vehicle by members of the disgraced Gun Trace Task Force in 2010.

An attorney representing Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins declined to comment Thursday.

The settlement stems from the 1983 death of DeWitt Duckett, a ninth grader at Harlem Park Junior High School, who was shot in his neck inside the West Baltimore school. School officials called his death the first homicide in a Baltimore public school, and his killing touched off a storm of debate over school safety.Turn to Payment, Page 5

The city State’s Attorney’s Office re-investigated the case along with two nonprofit innocence projects. They determined that Kincaid and the prosecutor coached the testimony of four students who identified Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins as the killers — and the students later recanted that testimony. Prosecutors said police discounted interviews from other students who identified another person as the killer. The man identified by the other witnesses has since died. Chestnut, Stewart and Watkins were granted writs of actual innocence and freed just before Thanksgiving in 2019.

The Board of Estimates agenda said the city’s settlement committee recommended reaching an agreement to close the claim,after years of fighting the lawsuit and seeking to get it thrown out. The agenda’s description blamed how much time had passed since the investigation into Duckett’s death.

“Unfortunately, the age of the underlying convictions in this case has led to lapses in memory, unavailable witnesses, and incomplete or missing records, thus making it nearly impossible to corroborate or refute Plaintiffs’ allegations or the State’s Attorney’s findings in its reinvestigation, as was evidenced by the protracted and intense litigation of this lawsuit,” the agenda states.

If approved, the settlement will be the second for the trio. In 2020, the state Board of Public Works approved awarding $8.7 million — $2.9 million each — to the men.

Baltimore hired Nathan & Kamionski, a Chicago-based law firm, to represent several officers in the case. The outfit, known for defending wrongful-conviction cases, has won dismissals of other lawsuits against Baltimore. Former State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who sought the exoneration for the three men, said Thursday that she was “extremely proud” of the group’s “relentless pursuit of truth and justice.”

“While the $16 million dollars awarded to each of them is a significant step towards redress and a means to facilitate the process of healing, no amount of money can ever truly compensate for the immeasurable losses they suffered,” Mosby said. “These men, through no fault of their own, were robbed of the most precious and irreplaceable elements of life. They deserve more than any sum can offer in exchange for what was wrongfully taken from them.”

In an amended complaint filed in 2021, attorneys for the men alleged the conduct that led to the wrongful convictions was the result of a “longstanding pattern and practice” at the Baltimore Police Department.

They wrote that BPD used coercive techniques to “obtain false confessions and false statements from minors and others,” and withheld exculpatory evidence from other parties, including prosecutors.

Baltimore Police did not respond Thursday to a request for comment sent by email.

In this case, Kincaid threatened to “put” a 14-year-old’s “goddamn head through [a] window” after he said the three suspects that police preferred weren’t involved, according to a 2022 court filing from the plaintiffs. The same detective yelled and screamed at another young witness, who was 16 years old at the time, the filing said, both calling him a liar and threatening to charge him as an accessory to murder, the filing said.

In a transcribed deposition included as evidence in the 2022 filing, one of the witnesses whom police are accused of pressuring said he was “scared” when he was told he could be charged.

“He told me that he would charge me, had me put in prison, separated from my family. He became — he became a god right there,” the witness said in a January 2022 deposition. “This is a detective in a police department. I ain’t had no power. I ain’t got no say-so. I don’t have nothin’. I’m just sittin’ there quiet, following directions.”

Plaintiffs’ attorneys also argued police concealed evidence that would have supported the teens’ innocence, evidence identifying another suspect and details about the “coercive conduct” that led to fabricated statements by witnesses.

In court filings, attorneys accused Kincaid of telling one of the plaintiffs, after he’d been arrested, “I’m white, you Black, and I have a badge. Who do you think they going to believe at the end of the day?”

An attorney representing the former police detectives in the lawsuit directed a reporter to the city’s law department. That agency did not respond to a request for comment sent Thursday afternoon.

In a 2022 motion for summary judgment, attorneys for Kincaid and Joyce said Kincaid “adamantly” denied any “impropriety” in interviews with witnesses. It went on to argue that even without their testimony, there was probable cause to arrest the three plaintiffs. The officers’ attorneys also argued police had disclosed to prosecutors reports identifying the other suspect, which had been sealed by the trial court. They called the subsequent city State’s Attorney’s Office reinvestigation of the “Harlem Park Three” case “deeply flawed.”

That reinvestigation began when one of the three, Chestnut, received documents in response to a public records request, including police reports and investigative notes about the other potential suspect. He wrote to the State’s Attorney’s Office to request an examination of the discovery.

“The things I read in my police report, I’ve never seen [before], all of this is newly discovered evidence,” Chestnut wrote to Mosby, according to court filings.

Watkins said after his release in 2019 that people in high positions ought to “pay for stuff when they do it like this.”

“Us three standing here should’ve never happened,” Watkins said. “Somebody else got to pay for this when they do this. They just can’t keep walking away, because people are still suffering.”

Baltimore Sun reporter Alex Mann contributed to this article.