Andrew M. Stroth

It rained in Chicago on Wednesday, June 18, 2025, the day the City Council ratified a $14.75 million settlement with James Gibson. Outside the council chambers Gibson stopped and, through tears, spoke to his mother: “I’m here, mama, I made it. I’m here, mama, they couldn’t break me.” She had died in April 2002, twelve years into his imprisonment. “She told me I was coming home and I believed that,” he said. He has also said, “Every time I get a blessing, it rains. It be my mama.”

Six days earlier, lawyers for the City of Chicago had recommended paying Gibson $14.75 million to settle the civil-rights lawsuit he brought after twenty-nine years and four months in prison for two murders committed in December 1989. Gibson had been convicted on the strength of his own statement, given after an interrogation at the Area 3 Violent Crimes unit during which, he alleged, detectives under the command of Jon Burge beat him and burned a tattoo off his arm with an iron. No jury heard the case. By then Gibson’s lawyer was Andrew M. Stroth, who said on the day of the vote that no amount of money would make Gibson whole. “There’s no dollar amount that can make up for what I lost,” Gibson said.

A Fence on West Grenshaw and $1.2 Million on the Verge of Trial

Pierre Loury was 16. At about 7:40 p.m. on April 11, 2016, Chicago police officers approached a car he was riding in on the 3400 block of West Grenshaw in North Lawndale. Loury got out and ran, through a vacant lot and down an alley, and he was on a fence when Officer Sean Hitz shot him.

Nine days later Stroth filed a federal civil-rights suit for Loury’s mother, Tambrasha Hudson, against the City and the officers. It alleged that Loury “presented no threat” as officers chased him and that police shot him “without lawful justification.” Stroth pointed to a report a mayoral task force had released on April 13, which found that Chicago police had “no regard for the sanctity of life” where people of color were concerned. A month later an amended complaint named Hitz and Officer Jeff Riordan. It alleged that Hitz shot Loury in the torso as he climbed the fence, that Riordan did nothing to stop him, and that the two officers conspired to give a false account claiming Loury had put them in imminent fear of bodily harm.

Five years later the City’s own lawyer told aldermen what the evidence showed. On July 19, 2021, Jeff Levine, the City’s chief assistant corporation counsel, told the Finance Committee that Loury’s fingerprints were on neither the gun police said they found near his body nor its magazine, that the magazine held no bullets when it was examined, and that the bullets that struck Loury’s chest had traveled upward, which put him at the top of the fence when he was shot. Hitz had not been equipped with a body camera. Levine said the City would have a hard time convincing a jury that the shooting was justified. “It is a very unfortunate set of facts and situation,” he said.

The committee voted 13 to 8 to recommend a $1.2 million settlement, and on July 21 the City Council approved it, 35 to 14. The MacArthur Justice Center, Stroth’s firm, and the Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic had brought Hudson v. City of Chicago to the verge of trial.

Athletes’ Contracts, Then Mothers on Capitol Hill

Stroth graduated from Northwestern’s law school and worked at the Leo Burnett Company before spending twenty years as a Chicago sports and entertainment agent, representing clients in professional sports and the media, among them Dwyane Wade, Donovan McNabb, Michael Vick, Brandon Marshall, and Lovie Smith. As managing partner of Action Injury Law Group he now represents people hurt by police. He is married and the father of three.

“By the time I get the phone call from the family, someone has already been killed, or severely injured by the police,” Stroth said. He had watched news reports of Black children shot by police. “I thought, ‘How can we stop this from happening?’ And that’s when I formed Truth, Hope and Justice.”

Through the Truth, Hope and Justice Initiative, which he founded, Stroth brought together mothers from across the country who had lost loved ones to police violence and connected them with one another and with the mothers of NBA players. Cynthia Lane’s 19-year-old son, Roshad McIntosh, was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in August 2014. Tambrasha Hudson, Pierre Loury’s mother, joined them. Alice Howell’s 17-year-old grandson, Justus Howell, was killed in a police shooting in Zion, Illinois, in 2015. In 2018 Howell, Stroth, and others took a group of mothers to Washington, where more than 100 of them marched on Capitol Hill for legislation on police shootings, and the group met with the Congressional Black Caucus.

“I knew from my upbringing and from working in sports that mothers are the influencers, the first responders, the core of our African American community, of our faith community,” Stroth said in 2020. “I thought I needed to work to mobilize these mothers, amplify, lift up their voices, bring them together and create a platform.” He also said, “I think if America sees what these mothers know their human truth to be, we can change the world.” For October 23 of that year the initiative and Macy Gray’s My Good foundation produced “Rise Up and Stand—A Tribute to Our Mothers,” an hourlong online broadcast with Gray and Andra Day, to honor mothers of people killed by police during arrest or in custody and to renew the push for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; more than 500 mothers were expected to take part. “He’s no longer here, so I have to be the voice for him,” Hudson said of her son. “I have to fight for him.”

Two Officers, a Stairwell, and New Police Orders for Chicago Schools

Stroth also took the federal civil-rights case of Dnigma Howard, a special-needs student at Marshall Metropolitan High School on the West Side. At 16 she was told to leave school after she refused to put away her cellphone during a test and threw it down.

School security cameras recorded what followed on the morning of January 29, 2019, without sound. At about 9:47 a.m. a second-floor camera showed two Chicago police officers stationed at the school, Sherry Tripp and Johnnie Pierre, standing on either side of Howard while she hugged and talked with another student. Less than a minute later, as she began moving away from the stairwell, one officer, with no physical provocation, grabbed her and pushed her down the stairs while she struggled. A first-floor camera showed an officer pulling her down the last flight by her leg as the other fell down the stairs holding her from behind. Near a metal detector at the bottom, one officer stepped on her chest while the other punched her, and she was shocked with a stun gun and arrested. Her father, Laurentio Howard, who had come for her, stood nearby; police told him to step back, and he said he told the officers to stop.

The officers’ arrest report said she “became irate and initiated a physical altercation with the officers.” She was charged with misdemeanor and felony offenses, and the state’s attorney’s office dismissed the charges a week later. She had not been allowed to speak with the assistant principal or a counselor, in violation of her Individualized Education Program.

In February 2019 Stroth sued the officers, the Board of Education, and the City in federal court. “If you watch the video and study the tape, the truth is far different from what was reported,” he said. “Dnigma was kicked, she was punched with a closed fist, she was tackled and brought down a stairwell.” His amended complaint alleged that at no point had the officers sought help from the school’s administrators, staff, or security, and that her father had not been allowed to walk her out or help calm her. When the footage from both cameras became public that April, Stroth said, “Those officers filed a false statement,” and, “The saving grace for Dnigma is that this was caught on camera.” He said Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot “needs to address the issue of police in schools immediately.”

Deputy Corporation Counsel Jeff Levine gave aldermen the City’s version: when the officers told Howard she was suspended and her father had come for her, “Plaintiff objected and stated that she was ‘not going anywhere.’ At that point, an altercation occurred.” In December 2020 the City Council’s Finance Committee unanimously approved a $300,000 settlement. Levine told the committee that since the case the Police Department had changed its orders on school resource officers so that they “are only to physically engage with students in the event of criminal conduct.” Both officers had been removed from the school after public outrage over the incident, and in the summer of 2020 the Chicago Board of Education renewed its contract with the department at half the cost of the previous one, after a handful of schools voted to remove police officers.

The board’s revised agreement also barred from school posts any officer with a sustained excessive-force allegation, or a complaint of inappropriate interaction with young people, in the previous five years, and it gave each local school council the final say on whether officers would be stationed in its building.

A Dispatcher’s Order to Slow Down, a Red Light, and the City’s Admission of Liability

Two years before the Gibson settlement Stroth had taken another family’s case against Chicago to a jury. Verona Gunn was a former Chicago Public Schools teacher and a great-great-grandmother. On May 25, 2019, the Saturday before Memorial Day, she was being driven home from a family cookout held for a relative’s college graduation. Around 10 p.m., at Laramie Avenue and Division Street in North Austin on the West Side, her daughter, who was driving the family’s blue Toyota, heard police sirens and stopped at the crosswalk lines. A speeding Chicago police van ran the red light, collided with an unmarked police car, and sent both vehicles into the car in which Gunn, 84, was sitting with her family.

She died hours later during surgery. Her daughter, Vicki Steverson, Maris Oliver, and a child, all in the car with her, were injured, and so were ten police officers. The chain of events had begun three minutes earlier and two blocks away, when an officer confronted a man in an alley and other officers raced to his aid. A dispatcher told the responding units to slow down because the man had been disarmed, and she repeated the order at least five more times over two minutes. It did not stop the van or the car. After the crash an officer at the scene radioed, “We have officers hurt,” and then, “We have civilians hurt. We have children hurt.”

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the officers had been responding to a call about a man with a gun. Stroth’s account of the crash turned on the call the officers had been answering. “This was a response to the standard call for service and it was not a police pursuit,” he said. “It did not necessitate officers to drive in a reckless manner. As a result, the matriarch of the family was killed.” A call about a man with a gun, he said, was not unusual in Chicago and did not require officers to drive that way. Chicago Police Department protocol requires officers to proceed through an intersection or a traffic signal only after determining that it is reasonable and safe to do so, and neither police driver followed it.

Three days after the crash the family spent about half an hour with Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson reviewing new security footage. Afterward Stroth said the officer should have yielded and that Verona Gunn “should be alive today.” Her son Dwight Gunn, a pastor, called the crash “absolutely 100% avoidable.” In June the family sued the City and the two drivers for wrongful death in Cook County. “This case is clear. And the video speaks for itself,” Stroth said of the surveillance footage from a nearby liquor store. “At every level, on Memorial Day weekend, the City of Chicago and CPD failed.”

Through the lawsuit Stroth obtained the dispatcher’s recordings from the City’s Office of Emergency Management, and in June 2020 he gave them to the Associated Press. “It can’t be that her life was taken in vain,” he said, and he hoped her death would lead to new protocols on police speeding. Dwight Gunn said police were more likely to speed through minority neighborhoods. “Biases show up in every aspect of policing, including this one,” he said. Of the graduation cookout, her last family gathering, he said, “It was almost like she knew she was leaving and she was saying goodbye.”

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability sent its findings to the superintendent in 2021. Its report, made public in September 2022, found that Officer Patrick Brown, driving the van with five officers aboard, had gone through the red light, and it recommended that he be fired. Brown “should not remain a member of the Chicago Police Department,” the office wrote; he had driven in a way that “endangered numerous lives.” By then the family had publicly asked the department to finish its response to the investigation, adopt a motor-safety program, and examine the policies the officers followed that day, and her son Derrick Gunn had called his mother the “epitome of a strong woman.” Brown was fired; Officer Noel Reina, who was driving the other vehicle, is no longer on the force.

Because the City admitted liability, the trial at the Daley Center before Cook County Circuit Judge Janet Adams Brosnahan went to the jury on damages. Stroth represented the Gunn family with Antonio M. Romanucci and Bhavani K. Raveendran of Romanucci & Blandin and with Julian Johnson. In March 2023, after about four hours of deliberation, the jury returned $4.93 million. It allocated $4.75 million to Verona Gunn’s estate and divided the rest among the three other people who had been in the car, for their physical injuries and emotional suffering. Romanucci said the lawyers had fought to convey to the jury “that every life matters, regardless of age.”

“Today, this jury honored their oath and made the City of Chicago accountable for the tragic and untimely death of Mrs. Verona Gunn,” Stroth said after the verdict, and he asked how many more innocent lives would be taken “before the City’s leadership and our next Mayor mandate constitutional policing in Black communities.” Pastor Dwight Gunn said nearly four years had passed since her death “at the hands of failed policy and execution by members of the Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago.” He added, “While the City has taken some responsibility, we hope for the next step of policy change and reform that improves policing in our community.”

Chicago conceded fault in the Gunn case and left the amount to a jury. Gibson’s claim passed through a state torture commission, two appellate reversals, and a federal ruling on whether it had come too late before the City agreed to pay.

The Interrogation at Area 3, December 1989

Lloyd Benjamin, 61, and Hunter Wash, 56, were killed on December 22, 1989, in a garage at 1118 West 58th Street in Englewood. James Gibson, who was 23 and whose nickname was Peter Gunn, heard a rumor tying him to the killings and called the local police station on December 24 to disclaim any involvement. No physical evidence or eyewitness ever connected him to the murders. On December 27 police arrested his brother, Harold, and then Gibson, and took Gibson to the Area 3 Violent Crimes unit.

In his lawsuit Gibson alleged that he spent the night at Area 3 handcuffed to a chair, unable to use the washroom and without food or drink, and a second night the same way; that officers placed him in three lineups in which no one identified him, a fact the police reports left out; that John Paladino slapped him several times; and that Anthony Maslanka kicked and punched him in the ribs, left the room, came back with a silver-colored iron, pointed to the tattoo on Gibson’s right arm, and burned it off, leaving a triangular-shaped scar. “Once I start telling them that I didn’t commit a crime, they begin to smack on me, punch on me and kick on me and eventually fracture my ribs and burn a tattoo off my arm,” Gibson said in 2021. He said he was held for 98 hours.

On December 30 Gibson gave a statement to an assistant state’s attorney, out of fear, he said, of more abuse. That day his family complained to the police Office of Professional Standards that detectives had slapped, punched, and kicked him. At his bench trial, which began on October 7, 1991, the judge found him guilty of both murders, emphasizing the “extreme importance” of that statement, and sentenced him to life in prison. He lost his appeals and his post-conviction petitions, and he worked on his own case as a jailhouse lawyer.

“For 29 years, four months, and seven days, I was treated like just a name and number,” Gibson wrote in 2021. “I was then told by a correctional officer one day that I no longer had a first name.” He spent most of his time studying law, drafting motions and pleadings, and helping other prisoners and their families, and in 2005 he began to pray. “I had to plug my ears up and nose up with toilet paper ’cause roaches was so deep in there,” he said of prison. His mother had told him he would come home but would have to fight for a long time.

The Torture Commission, the Appellate Court, and a Certificate of Innocence

In 2011 the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission began investigating claims of torture by Burge and the officers who worked under him. Gibson filed a claim in May 2012. On July 22, 2015, the commission concluded that sufficient credible evidence of torture existed to warrant judicial review of his conviction. The Cook County circuit court denied him relief in 2016. The Illinois Appellate Court reversed twice; it noted evidence that “Burge’s subordinates beat [Gibson] during his interrogation” and ordered the circuit court to vacate the conviction and hold a new trial at which his statement would not be introduced, because police torture had produced it.

At the 2016 hearing Detective John Paladino and Sergeant John Byrne invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about their roles in the 1989 investigation. In March 2018, in an opinion by Justice David W. Ellis, the appellate court held that “it was error for the trial court not to draw the adverse inference” from that silence and found that “none of the testifying detectives rebutted defendant’s claims in any meaningful way.” When the circuit court denied relief again, the same panel reversed in March 2019, calling the rejection of the torture evidence “arbitrary, and manifestly wrong.” Photographs a bond-court judge had ordered in January 1990 showed swelling and bruising on Gibson’s chest, which a pathologist found consistent with a beating, and the panel found “not a shred of evidence” that he had been hurt in a holding cell. The court wrote that “there was defendant’s account, and then there was silence,” and it ordered the case sent to a new judge.

On April 4, 2019, the circuit court vacated the conviction. Gibson was released on bond on April 18, and on April 26 the court dismissed all charges. He had spent twenty-nine years and four months in prison. In August 2020 a Cook County judge granted him a certificate of innocence, and the State of Illinois awarded him $177,071.

Judge Ellis on When a Claim Against a Torture Conviction Accrues

Gibson sued on May 10, 2019, two weeks after the charges were dismissed, naming the City of Chicago and more than a dozen former officers and officers’ estates, Burge’s estate among them; the defendants removed the case from the Circuit Court of Cook County to the federal court in Chicago. He alleged that the officers coerced his confession, fabricated evidence, suppressed evidence of the torture at Areas 2 and 3, maliciously prosecuted him, conspired against him, and tortured him because of his race, and he sued the City itself, under Monell, for its own policies and practices.

The officers and Burge’s estate argued that much of the case had come decades too late. Physical abuse, they contended, was excessive force actionable only under the Fourth Amendment, and the claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress had accrued in December 1989, when Gibson was interrogated and arrested. Both arguments measured Gibson’s time to sue from the interrogation room rather than from his exoneration.

Judge Sara L. Ellis rejected both on July 29, 2020. Graham v. Connor, she wrote, “does not prohibit Gibson from using such acts to support his Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment coerced confession claims,” and the Seventh Circuit had continued to recognize after Graham that “coercive interrogation techniques that ‘shock the conscience’ may support a substantive due process claim.” On timing she applied the rule of Heck v. Humphrey: a claim that impugns a criminal conviction does not accrue until the conviction is overturned. Gibson could not have sued for emotional distress while the conviction stood, and because he filed within two months of the dismissal of the charges, that claim was timely.

She allowed Gibson to proceed on claims that officers fabricated witnesses’ statements and withheld evidence of the coercion used to obtain them and of the pattern of abuse at Areas 2 and 3, on his malicious-prosecution, conspiracy, and equal-protection claims, and on his claim against the City. On equal protection she wrote that, drawing all inferences in his favor, his allegations “support the conclusion that the Defendant Officers and Burge subjected him and other African Americans to torture because of their race.” Gibson had pleaded that a 1990 OPS report found evidence of systemic physical and psychological abuse under Burge at Area 2, and that in 2015 the City issued a resolution and ordinance acknowledging and condemning the torture at Areas 2 and 3.

The City’s Own Findings on Burge, in a Motion Stroth Signed

After he received the certificate of innocence, Gibson retained Stroth’s firm to press the lawsuit. “It was important for me to find an attorney and law firm committed to serving God and advancing justice for all torture victims, especially victims of Jon Burge and The Midnight Crew,” he said. In its answer to his complaint the City denied that it was “well documented” that officers under Burge “regularly engaged” in torture, although the Police Accountability Task Force that Lori Lightfoot chaired before she became mayor had reported in 2016 that Burge and others “tortured and abused at least 100 African-Americans on the South and West sides in attempts to coerce confessions.”

By June 2021 Stroth was speaking publicly for him. If Mayor Lightfoot and City officials took ownership, acknowledged what had happened, paid the victims, and put systems in place to prevent it, Stroth said, it would be historic in Chicago. “Instead the city of Chicago is paying millions of dollars to outside lawyers to defend cases that are indefensible. James Gibson has a certificate of innocence. He’s factually innocent. And he spent 30 years in four different maximum-security prisons.” He said Chicago had never gone to trial on a Burge case in which the victim held a certificate of innocence, and that the City knew its exposure ran to millions of dollars. The City’s Department of Law said it disagreed with Gibson’s description of the positions it had taken in court filings and would not comment further.

“It’s much bigger than just getting millions of dollars, James Gibson wants to change the game,” Stroth added. “I can’t get back what they did to me,” Gibson said, and he said he was now in a position to push for reform.

On May 3, 2022, Stroth signed and filed a motion asking Judge Ellis for partial summary judgment against the City on one element of Gibson’s Monell claim: that in the 1980s the City had a widespread custom or practice of Burge and the officers under his command physically and mentally torturing suspects. The motion did not ask her to decide whether a policymaker had known of the practice before Gibson’s interrogation. The motion was built from the City’s own words: the 1990 Goldston report of the police Office of Professional Standards, which found the abuse at Area 2 “systematic”; Mayor Daley’s 2006 acknowledgment of a “pattern of misconduct on the part of Burge and his unit”; the City Council’s 2015 resolution, which said that “words alone cannot adequately convey the deep regret and remorse that we and our fellow citizens feel”; and Lightfoot’s statement that Burge “caused immeasurable harm to so many people.”

The same day the two sides filed a joint statement of undisputed material facts, signed for Gibson by Stroth and for the City by Special Assistant Corporation Counsel Daniel M. Noland. It set out the task force’s finding of at least 100 victims between 1972 and 1991, the Goldston report’s identification of at least 50 potential victims at Area 2, the $5.5 million fund for people with credible claims of torture by Burge’s men that Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced in April 2015, and the assignment in December 1989 of eleven officers, Anthony Maslanka among them, to Area 3 Violent Crimes, where they worked under Burge. Stroth’s co-counsel on the filings were Carlton Odim of his firm, Peter Romer-Friedman and his colleagues at Gupta Wessler, and lawyers from Lathrop GPM.

Later that month 47 Chicago business, civic, and religious leaders filed a friend-of-the-court brief, through Pillsbury lawyers working pro bono, asking the court to recognize the pattern of torture under Burge as undisputed and arguing that the City’s defense was spending taxpayer money on private lawyers while delaying justice for Gibson and other Burge victims. One of them, Russ Rosenzweig, addressed the mayor and the City’s legal department: “Apologize for the evil acts that were done, settle this case with honor.”

$14.75 Million, Approved by the City Council

By January 7, 2025, Chicago had paid four private law firms $2.6 million to defend the officers, and by May 20 the total was $2.7 million. None of the officers remained on the force, and five had died. In early 2025 the case was set for a four-week jury trial before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Cummings. A City spokesperson said the City understood “the serious and complex nature of reverse conviction cases.” Stroth declined to comment on the coming trial.

On June 12, 2025, the City’s lawyers recommended a $14.75 million settlement; the City Council’s Finance Committee was to take it up the following Monday, and the full council could vote as soon as that Wednesday. The agreement spared the City a jury trial after juries in two other reversed-conviction cases had returned verdicts against it totaling $170 million, which the City was appealing. By then Chicago taxpayers had paid approximately $140 million in settlements and judgments related to Burge’s conduct, including $5.5 million in reparations for torture survivors that the City Council approved in 2015. Stroth again declined to comment, and on June 18 the council approved the settlement. The City had already spent the $82 million it set aside for police-misconduct settlements and judgments in 2025, and it was unclear how it would pay.

“This is bigger than just me,” Gibson said. “This is a pattern of practice. Somebody got to be on notice about this atrocity.” Stroth said Gibson “was going to fight all the way” because he knew he was innocent. Among the first to comfort Gibson outside the council chambers was a man from his block who had been convicted in the same killings and released in 2012, after twenty-two years, on an Alford plea that let him maintain his innocence while admitting guilt. The plea left that man ineligible for a certificate of innocence, and so for a civil suit. “Once you do that, you have no remedy,” Stroth said. “It ain’t no congratulations,” Gibson said. “I had my whole life ahead of me.”

In November 2025 Gibson was 59. He was starting an investment firm, writing an autobiography, and producing music, and he still had night sweats. “I lost everything. I never had a chance to serve my country,” he said. Of his years in prison he said, “[The] only thing I had was God.” He asked, “How do you get justice when they took everything? There is no justice.” He had not yet begun to receive settlement payments.