Francisco Benitez sues city, two former CPD detectives over wrongful murder conviction
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A man has filed a federal lawsuit against the city and two Chicago police officers, after he spent 34 years wrongfully imprisoned for murder.
Francisco Benitez was 18 years old when he was arrested in 1989, and charged with the murders of two teenagers, Willaim Sanchez and Prudencio Cruz, but Benitez has said he was innocent all these years.
In August of this year, he was released after presenting substantial evidence proving his innocence. Two eyewitnesses now say they saw who actually committed the murders, and it wasn't Benitez.
Benitez's attorney, Anand Swaminathan, said those witnesses were afraid to come forward until recently because of what could happen to them.
"Those boys came forward now, and told the story of who committed this crime, and no witness ever identified Frankie Benitez as the shooter," he said. "There is no witness who at trial ever said they had seen the shooting, or even saw a gun, who identified Frankie Benitez. So those two boys gave very powerful evidence demonstrating that, in fact, the real shooters are two other individuals, and that the evidence used against Frankie Benitez was all fabricated. It was fake, it was made up, and it was used to put a case on a young man, because they couldn't figure out who had actually done it."
In September, Cook County prosecutors formally dropped the charges against him.
On Tuesday, he filed a federal lawsuit accusing former detectives Jerome Bogucki and Raymond Schalk of framing him for murder. Bogucki and Schalk are no longer on the force.
The lawsuit accuses Bogucki and Schalk coerced witnesses into falsely implicating Benitez in the murders. The lawsuit claims those witnesses "got only a fleeting glimpse of a person running by their window after the shooting."
"In fact, the person that ran by their window was not the perpetrator, but one of the victims stumbling back home after being shot," the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit also claims Benitez was coerced into a false confession that was later used against him at trial.
Bogucki and Schalk obtained that confession "through a psychologically abusive interrogation in which they repeatedly rejected Plaintiff's denials and his alibi, threatened him, and eventually promised him that if he signed a statement confessing to a version of events they provided to him, he could go home to his family," according to the lawsuit.
"The confession statement was obviously false. It was a bizarre, rambling story that did not comport with the known facts of the crime," the lawsuit states. "Defendants' promise that Plaintiff would be released if he signed the statement was also false. Instead, they charged Plaintiff with murder."
Swaminathan said Bogucki and Schalk have been accused of framing others.
In 2012, a federal jury awarded Thaddeus "T.J." Jimenez $25 million in damages in a wrongful conviction lawsuit against Bogucki and Schalk according to court records. Bogucki and Schalk are no longer on the force.
Jimenez was later convicted of shooting another gang member in 2015, after prosecutors said he used the $25 million award on his gang, the Simon City Royals, and to recruit members of another gang, the Vice Lords.
