Jon Loevy

Eric Morro was nineteen when a teenager shot him in the chest on the evening of February 3, 1993, in front of a Honey Baked Ham store on West Belmont Avenue in Chicago. His friend Larry Tueffel was with him, and Phil Torres watched from the store’s third floor. Neither of them named Thaddeus Jimenez that night. At one o’clock the next morning Torres called Detective Jerome Bogucki and said that he “now remembers” that Jimenez was the shooter. At 3:30 Bogucki woke Tueffel and took him to the station. Police arrested Jimenez, who was thirteen, at about five that morning, and never tested his hands or clothing for gunshot residue. Tueffel was questioned for several hours without his parents, and by the end of it he too had named Jimenez. The next day the father of a twelve-year-old boy who had been with the shooter secretly tape-recorded another teenager admitting that he had fired the shot.

Jimenez spent more than sixteen years in custody for Morro’s murder. In 1995 Naperville police obtained a confession from William Amor that he had started the fire that killed his mother-in-law; he spent twenty-two years in prison. John Fulton was eighteen and Anthony Mitchell seventeen when Chicago detectives arrested them in March 2003 for the murder of Christopher Collazo, whose bound and partially burned body was found in a Back of the Yards alley, and each of them spent sixteen years in prison.

Jon Loevy tried the civil cases that followed to federal juries in the Northern District of Illinois. In January 2012 a jury awarded Jimenez $25 million against the City of Chicago and the detective who had built the case against him. In August 2024 a jury awarded Amor’s estate $22.5 million against the City of Naperville and one of its officers; Amor had died the year before. In March 2025 a jury awarded Fulton and Mitchell $60 million each. The prosecutions had rested on eyewitnesses who picked Jimenez out, on Amor’s description of how he set the fire, and on statements detectives took from Fulton, Mitchell, and a seventeen-year-old witness. In each civil case Loevy had to prove what the police had done, years earlier, to produce that evidence.

Bogucki’s Witnesses and the Excluded Tape

Bogucki built the case against Jimenez. Jimenez’s civil jury later heard evidence that Bogucki used coercive tactics, including middle-of-the-night interviews of Tueffel, to get Tueffel and Phil Torres to identify Jimenez falsely as the shooter; that he arranged for a third witness, Tina Elder, to see a picture of Morro’s corpse next to a picture of Jimenez before she viewed a lineup and picked him out; and that, knowing Jimenez owned a blue and white Duke University jacket, he planted with the witnesses the idea that the shooter had worn one.

Jimenez was tried as an adult at fifteen. Five relatives and friends testified that he had been at his grandmother’s house when Morro was shot, doing homework and playing video games with his cousins. The jury convicted him in October 1994, and he was sentenced to fifty years. The Illinois Appellate Court reversed the conviction in 1996 and ordered a new trial. He was retried in 1997 on the same witness testimony, convicted again, and sentenced to forty-five years. A fourth witness, Victor Romo, who was present at the shooting, consistently identified a different teenager as the shooter and said so at both trials. Two days after the shooting, at a restaurant, Romo’s father had secretly tape-recorded that teenager saying he had fired the shot, and the recording reached prosecutors and the police in March 1993. Police briefly re-interviewed the teenager at his home; he denied making the admission, and the investigation of him stopped. The trial court excluded the tape as hearsay at the 1994 trial and again in 1997.

In 2005, Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and the law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman began reinvestigating the case. In a videotaped statement in July 2006, Tueffel recanted and said Jimenez was innocent; he also said that at the lineup, police had asked him whether “T.J.” was in it. Elder, confronted in May 2007, admitted that the photograph had tainted her identification: just before the lineup, police had sat her at a desk with two photographs, one of Morro and one of Jimenez. The Cook County State’s Attorney reopened the case, and on May 1, 2009, on a joint motion by prosecutors and Jimenez’s lawyers, Judge Joseph Claps vacated the conviction and ordered Jimenez released. His lawyers drove to the Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg to bring him home, and shortly after midnight he was with his mother and family at a cousin’s home in Elmwood Park. Judge Paul Biebel later granted him a certificate of innocence. Seventeen days after Jimenez’s release, the man heard on the tape was indicted for Morro’s murder; he was later acquitted at trial.

Two Weeks in the Dirksen Building

Jimenez sued the City of Chicago and Bogucki in federal court in 2009. His due-process claim was a Brady claim: that Bogucki had concealed material evidence favorable to the defense. He also alleged a conspiracy, and he sued for malicious prosecution under Illinois law. Loevy tried the case before Judge Matthew F. Kennelly in January 2012, with Locke Bowman of the MacArthur Justice Center and Stuart Chanen of Valorem Law Group; Bowman gave the closing argument on damages.

One of the issues the defendants later raised on appeal arose in jury selection. The defense used two of its three peremptory strikes on the only two African American members of the venire. Jimenez objected under Batson v. Kentucky that the strikes were based on race, and Kennelly sustained the objection as to one of the two, a juror identified as S.M., finding the defense’s stated reasons not credible because the defense had not struck a similarly situated white juror.

Over two weeks in the Dirksen Federal Building, the jury heard the evidence about the identifications, the photograph, and the jacket, and testimony from Gregg McCrary, a police-practices expert, about the steps a reasonable investigator would have taken to solve Morro’s murder and how Bogucki’s investigation departed from them. In closing, Jimenez’s lawyer went through the matters he said had been concealed from the defense. “We only have to show one thing was concealed that might have changed the outcome in this very close case and we win,” he told the jurors. “Well, I’m going to show you ten things, ladies and gentlemen, ten things that were concealed.”

The jurors deliberated for about a day. They found for Jimenez on every claim and awarded him $25 million in compensatory damages against Bogucki and the City. Afterward Loevy said the police had “strong-armed witnesses into falsely implicating” Jimenez. “Sometimes the criminal justice system makes a mistake,” he said. “In this case, we proved that’s exactly what happened.” He credited the Cook County prosecutors who had reopened the case: “They recognized there had been an injustice and they corrected it.”

The City and Bogucki moved for a new trial and for judgment as a matter of law, and Kennelly denied both motions in July 2012. On the concealment claim, he wrote that all items of evidence that were concealed or suppressed “are considered as part of a single, unitary claim.”

Batson, Brady, and a Police-Practices Expert

Both defendants appealed, and Loevy and Bowman represented Jimenez in the Seventh Circuit. The court heard argument on June 5, 2013, and on October 7 a panel of Judges Bauer, Easterbrook, and Hamilton affirmed. Judge Hamilton’s opinion begins: “When he was fifteen years old, plaintiff Thaddeus Jimenez was convicted of a murder he did not commit. He spent sixteen years in prison before he was exonerated.”

The defendants argued that Kennelly had erred in sustaining the Batson objection. The panel agreed with the Eighth and Ninth Circuits that an error in sustaining a Batson challenge in a federal civil trial is subject to harmless-error analysis, and held: “Unless the defendants can show that a biased or otherwise unqualified juror sat on the jury that rendered the verdict against them, any error in granting Jimenez’s Batson challenge would have been harmless.” The defendants had made no such showing, and the panel refused to order a new trial on that ground.

The defendants also contended that the jury’s consideration of the Brady claim should have been limited to five pieces of evidence. The panel found no error: “Nothing prevented the jury from deciding the case on evidence that had not been used to support or oppose an earlier summary judgment motion.” Nor, the panel held, did Jimenez have to put the complete transcripts of his criminal trials into evidence; the transcripts “were relevant but not necessary evidence” of the Brady claim “so long as he met his burden by other means.”

The panel also upheld the admission of McCrary’s testimony. He had described sound investigative standards and identified where the Morro investigation departed from them; he offered no opinion on probable cause and did not try to resolve conflicts in the testimony of different witnesses. “We find no reversible error,” the panel concluded, “so the judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.”

A Contingency Firm Started in a Garden Apartment

Loevy was a state champion debater at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook. He graduated with honors from the University of Michigan and, in 1993, from Columbia Law School, where he won the prizes for the top examinations in torts and in civil procedure. He clerked for Judge Milton I. Shadur of the Northern District of Illinois and then spent a year traveling, mostly in Central America, Asia, and the Middle East, a trip he has said opened his eyes to how justice works, and fails to work, outside the United States. “If you live in other parts of the world and people experience deprivations of their civil rights, too bad, so sad,” he said in 2018. “Here you can go to court and have 12 citizens decide if you were mistreated by these public officials. That’s really a wonderful thing that nobody should take for granted.”

He spent about a year and a half at Sidley & Austin, working for large corporate clients. “I knew very quickly that it wasn’t for me,” he has said. In 1998 he started Loevy & Loevy, a civil-rights firm, with his wife, Danielle, whom he had met when she applied for an internship with Judge Shadur, and his father, Arthur, working at first out of his garden apartment in Lake View. The early cases involved employment discrimination and complaints about police treatment, and without a large firm’s name behind him, Loevy found that opposing lawyers and judges gave him little deference. “People treat you like you don’t have a clue and why should they even be talking to you,” Loevy said. “So you’ve got to figure out how to win.”

Arthur Loevy had come out of retirement to practice law with his son. He had spent decades as a leader of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, bargaining for workers, and had also worked for the Cook County Police Association, which helped suburban police departments unionize and negotiate contracts. “He started at the bottom, with 30-year-olds bossing him around, but we quickly realized” what a negotiator he was, Jon Loevy said after his father died in April 2026, at eighty-seven, and Arthur became, in his son’s words, “the heart and soul of the place.” When Jon walked into a courtroom for trial, Arthur would take off his watch and put it on his son’s wrist, a pretrial ritual between them.

In 1999 Loevy represented Joseph Regalado, who was paralyzed and who said Chicago police officers had beaten him in an alley. Arthur Loevy later recalled that other firms had turned the case down because “the young man had a bit of a past, and police officers told what to them sounded like a credible story.” His son, Arthur said, “proved to a jury’s satisfaction that it was not.” The jury returned a $28 million verdict, at the time the largest civil-rights award against the City for an individual, and with the verdict and the attention it brought, Loevy was able to hire more lawyers. By 2004 the firm had nine, and Loevy said he hoped lawsuits would force police departments to re-examine their policies on the use of force. “Maybe I’m naive,” he said. “But maybe the City of Chicago will have to change because it will just get too expensive.”

The firm now has more than fifty lawyers with offices across the United States, and Loevy manages it with his partner, Mike Kanovitz. He and lawyers at the firm also founded the Exoneration Project, which works to free people wrongly convicted and operates as a clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, where Loevy is a lecturer in law.

The firm’s practice also includes government-fraud and whistleblower cases. Loevy + Loevy has said Loevy was lead trial attorney in a False Claims Act case the firm had litigated for thirteen years, on behalf of four former military officers, Scott Dillard, Rickey Mackey, Charles Shepherd, and Danny Rude, who had worked for Fluor Corporation on its contract to support American troops at forward operating bases in Afghanistan. The False Claims Act allows private whistleblowers to sue on the government’s behalf and share in what is recovered; the suit alleged fraud that included covering up the loss of Army property and falsifying government reports. In March 2026 a federal jury in South Carolina found that Fluor had defrauded the United States and assessed $15 million in damages, an amount the Act requires the court to triple to $45 million.

The firm takes its cases on contingency and is paid only when a defendant pays. “You lose, you lose it all,” Loevy has said. “It’s not for the faint of heart.” He prefers trial to settlement, and he traces his appetite for risk to a line of professional gamblers in Kentucky: “Every bet, if the odds favor you, you should take it.” At trial, Loevy has said, his job resembles a director’s: from the testimony of friendly and hostile witnesses and the contents of hundreds of files and depositions, he has to build one coherent, persuasive account.

Amor’s Confession and the Fire Science

On September 10, 1995, William Amor and his wife, Tina, left the Naperville condominium they shared with her mother, Marianne Miceli, to see a movie at a drive-in. Less than twenty minutes after they left, Miceli, who was partially disabled, called 911 to say she was trapped by a fire, with a chair blocking her way out. She died of smoke inhalation before firefighters reached her. Investigators suspected arson for life-insurance money.

Three weeks after the fire, Naperville detectives questioned Amor for fifteen hours, and during the questioning the police allowed divorce papers from his wife to be served on him. At the end of it he confessed that he had spilled vodka on newspapers and knocked a lit cigarette onto them before he left. “It’s my fault. I did it. I started the fire,” he said on tape. He recanted almost immediately. At his 1997 trial, fire investigators called by the prosecution testified that a V-shaped burn pattern on the wall near the chair showed that the fire had started there and had been set. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and arson, and he was sentenced to forty-five years.

The Illinois Innocence Project took up the case in 2012. At a hearing in DuPage County in December 2016, the fire experts Doug Carpenter and John DeHaan testified that the methods used in 1995 were outdated and that the cause of the fire should have been classified as undetermined. The State’s own witness, ATF Special Agent John Golder, testified that a smoldering fire in a polyurethane chair can take as long as eighty-eight minutes to break into flame, and he conceded that the fire could not have started the way the confession described. Newer fire science showed that a lit cigarette dropped on vodka-soaked newspaper would not ignite a fire. On April 6, 2017, Judge Liam Brennan vacated the conviction. The key evidence at the 1997 trial, he said, had been the confession, which “the State and the defense experts today agree is scientifically impossible.”

Amor was released on bond on May 30, 2017. He chose to be retried by Brennan without a jury, and lawyers from the Illinois Innocence Project, the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, and the firm Cozen O’Connor defended him. Three independent fire experts testified that the evidence did not support a finding of arson, and on February 21, 2018, Brennan acquitted him: “The court cannot determine William Amor is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” Amor, then sixty-one, said in a statement: “This is the end of a nightmare for me.” He had spent twenty-two years in prison. He sued Naperville and its officers in federal court that April, and he died in January 2023, before the case came to trial.

The Estate’s Trial and Naperville’s Settlement

Loevy tried the case for Amor’s estate with Locke Bowman, Tara Thompson, and Alyssa Martinez. In August 2024 the jury unanimously found that Michael Cross, the lead investigator, who had died in October 2022, had obtained an involuntary confession from Amor and had intentionally inflicted emotional distress, and it awarded the estate $22.5 million. “Prior to trial, the City of Naperville offered a maximum of $500,000 to settle this case, believing they were going to win,” Loevy said. “They miscalculated.” He called the verdict “bittersweet.” The biggest regret, he said, was that Amor “didn’t get to live to see justice.” He went on: “So, I do regret that he didn’t get to watch the final chapter.”

Naperville’s city attorney said the City was disappointed and would discuss whether to appeal; an appeal would have added pre- and post-judgment interest and more legal fees. In September 2024 the City Council unanimously approved a $25.5 million settlement covering the verdict, attorney’s fees, and interest, and Naperville agreed not to appeal. Under the agreement, payable to the trustee of the William Amor Trust, the City would pay $7.5 million from its budget and its insurer the remaining $18 million.

Area One, March 2003

At about 3 a.m. on March 10, 2003, Sid Taylor looked out his window into the alley behind his apartment building and saw something burning. Responding officers found Christopher Collazo’s body under partially burned black plastic, his hands, feet, waist, and mouth bound with duct tape; he had been gagged with a sock. A medical examiner found that he had died of blunt force trauma and asphyxiation before his body was set on fire.

On March 11 detectives interviewed Johnitta Griffin, who was seventeen. She denied any part in the murder but acknowledged that she had set up a gun deal between Collazo and her former boyfriend, John Fulton. At 11 p.m. on March 13, three detectives intercepted Griffin as she was returning home and took her to the Area One police headquarters, where two of them questioned her until 9:45 the next morning; the parties to the later civil case disputed what happened during that interview. She eventually told an assistant state’s attorney that she had spoken with Fulton on March 9 and told him where he could find Collazo that night. After she got home, she made a telephone call in which she said she had been coerced into making false statements against Fulton. She later said that the officers had told her she would be charged with the murder, had yelled at her, and had shown her photographs of the body.

Detectives arrested Fulton at about 5:30 on the morning of March 18 at the apartment building where he lived with his fiancée, Yolanda Henderson, and their son. He told them he had nothing to do with the murder and that he had been at the University of Chicago Hospital with Henderson until very late on the night of March 9, had returned home, and had not gone out again. Late that evening detectives took him to the polygraph unit, where Officer Robert Bartik gave him a polygraph test and afterward wrote a report claiming that Fulton had confessed during a pre-test interview. Fulton later testified that John Zalatoris and James Breen, two of the detectives assigned to the case, drove him around “to refresh [his] memory,” and that Zalatoris “went over the story a couple of times, to get prepared.” Shortly before 5 a.m. on March 19, Assistant State’s Attorney McRay Judge joined two detectives in questioning Fulton, and Fulton eventually made an inculpatory statement in their presence. When the detectives left McRay Judge and Fulton alone, Fulton gave the prosecutor his alibi in a conversation of five to ten minutes and repeatedly said that the statement he had just given was not to be credited.

Detectives arrested Mitchell on March 19. Zalatoris and Breen told him that Fulton’s statement implicated him and drove him along the route that he, Fulton, and a third person had supposedly taken the night of the murder, as they had done with Fulton. Mitchell denied any involvement. After further interrogation, he gave an inculpatory statement, which was videotaped. In 2006 both men were convicted of first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, and concealment of a homicidal death, and each was sentenced to thirty-one years in prison.

No physical evidence tied either man to the killing. Hospital sign-in logs and security video placed Fulton and Henderson in the emergency room before 9 p.m. on March 9 and back at their building at 11:54 p.m., and video showed Fulton leaving for school at about eight the next morning. The prosecution’s theory was that he had slipped out a back door in between, and an investigator testified in rebuttal that no camera covered that door. At a three-day hearing in 2018, former employees of the building testified that a camera had watched the rear door and that a key fob was needed to open it, and the defense introduced the investigator’s own undisclosed photographs, some showing the camera or its housing aimed at the door. DNA testing of a sock from the crime produced a male profile that excluded Fulton and Mitchell. Cook County Circuit Judge Lawrence Flood granted them a new trial in February 2019, ruling that their juries should have heard evidence that a surveillance camera trained on the back door of Fulton’s home did not show him leaving before the murder and returning before he went to school the next day. The door was also opened with an electronic key, whose records would have shown that Fulton’s key was not used to enter around the time of the murder. The two men were released on bond a week later, and in June 2019, a little more than three months after Flood’s ruling, the State dismissed all charges.

Probable Cause and the Polygraph Examiner

Fulton and Mitchell sued in federal court in May 2020, naming the City, Cook County, and seventeen Chicago police and Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office employees; Jon and Arthur Loevy each filed an appearance for Fulton the day his complaint was filed. The two cases, Fulton v. Bartik and Mitchell v. Bartik, went before Judge Joan H. Lefkow, who handled them together. The men alleged that detectives had coerced both confessions with false promises of leniency, threats, and physical violence over a long detention in harsh conditions; had coerced Griffin by feeding her a false narrative the detectives had concocted; had fabricated reports; and had withheld evidence of innocence.

On summary judgment the officers claimed qualified immunity on the claims for unlawful pretrial detention and malicious prosecution, arguing that they had probable cause, or at least arguable probable cause, to detain and prosecute the two men. They pointed to a motive: they said they had known that Collazo robbed Fulton at gunpoint, taking about $14 or $15, and that Fulton had testified that Collazo repeatedly called him, taunted him, and threatened to kill him. In March 2024 Lefkow rejected the immunity defense at that stage: “Even viewed together with Fulton’s possible motive, the remaining undisputed facts do not add up to probable cause, or even arguable probable cause.” Those facts, she wrote, might amount to reasonable suspicion but did not establish probable cause as a matter of law, and the officers could not have immunity while so many material facts about their claimed basis for probable cause remained in dispute. She also denied McRay Judge absolute prosecutorial immunity at that stage, because the parties disputed when and to whom Fulton first made an inculpatory statement, and a jury that found he had not confessed before the prosecutor arrived could conclude that McRay Judge had been acting as an investigator. “Such a dispute, supported by competing depositions,” she wrote, “cannot be resolved at summary judgment.” She denied the City’s motion for summary judgment.

The officers also pointed to Mitchell’s videotaped statement and what they called the “calm and cool nature” it captured. Lefkow found a genuine dispute over whether the detectives had fed him its details, and that question went to the jury.

Loevy was lead counsel for the two men at trial; Russell Ainsworth, Julia Rickert, Isaac Green, and Fatima Ladha of his firm and Andrea Lyon of Lyon & Kerr also represented them. Bartik had reported that Fulton confessed spontaneously just before the polygraph test; Fulton alleged in his lawsuit that Bartik had made the same claim in other cases more than 100 times in five years, a pattern the complaint said “defies all statistical probability.” On the stand Bartik said: “I wrote down what Mr. Fulton told me on the paper, sir.”

Both men testified that they had confessed after detectives promised them leniency, threatened them with physical violence, and physically abused them. The defense argued that the confessions were voluntary, pointing to the Miranda warnings the two had been given and the consent forms they had signed. In the defense’s own summary of the plaintiffs’ case, Zalatoris and Breen “drove them around, threatened them, fed them the details of the crime.”

Twenty-Two Years to the Day

On March 10, 2025, twenty-two years to the day after Collazo’s body was found and after four weeks of testimony, the jury found that detectives had fabricated evidence against the two men and coerced their false confessions. It awarded each man $60 million in compensatory damages, a total of $120 million and the largest verdict ever returned in a lawsuit alleging misconduct by Chicago police officers, along with $50,000 in punitive damages against three of the detectives. That month Mitchell also received a certificate of innocence.

The City said the same day that it would appeal. Fulton and Mitchell resolved their separate claims against Cook County, whose Board of Commissioners approved $7.45 million for each man. In May 2026 the Seventh Circuit consolidated the appeals of the City, Bartik, Zalatoris, and Breen, and Loevy entered his appearance there for Fulton and Mitchell; briefing was set to run into September. While the appeal was pending, Lefkow ruled on the plaintiffs’ petition under the civil-rights fee statute, citing Loevy’s record as a trial attorney and “his unique role as a market leader within the context of civil rights litigation,” and she wrote: “In the end, plaintiffs won handily, the city lost badly, and the city spent 3,000 more attorney hours than plaintiffs in the process.”

On the day of the verdict, Loevy said the jury had found that the two men “were innocent and they were framed by the Chicago Police Department.” Fulton had been interrogated for more than 100 hours at eighteen, he said, and Mitchell for more than 40 at seventeen. “The city of Chicago continued to insist they were guilty,” Loevy said. “Whoever really killed that kid is still out there and got away with it because they focused all their energy on these two kids who didn’t do it.” In a statement he added: “The State never wants to admit when it screwed up, and they never want to acknowledge that their cops did anything wrong.”

Fulton, then forty, stood outside the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse with his wife and children and described parts of the 100 hours of interrogation he had endured, during which, he said, he was denied a phone call. He had been held, he said, in an old Board of Education building then in use as a homicide station. “Nobody knew where I was,” he said. “This is what the face of justice looks like. Justice is finally here.” Of the years in prison, he said, “you can’t make up for that lost time.” He said he and Mitchell were not the only victims of injustice. “We got a lot of work to do,” he said. “There are a lot of people that are just like me that are wrongfully incarcerated in the justice system, and they need to be brought home, too.”

Mitchell called the verdict “unbelievable,” but he said he still blamed himself for his false confession. Loevy told him: “It’s not your fault. You’ve got to forgive yourself. You were 17.”