After decades in prison and 8 years in court, Mark Maxson settles wrongful conviction suit for $8.75 million

Eight years after he was freed from prison for a South Side murder that another man has confessed to, alleged police torture victim Mark Maxson has settled his federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against the city for $8.75 million.

DNA linked the other man, Osborne Wade, to the sexual assault and fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old boy in 1992 in a garage in West Roseland. In 2021, Wade, now 50, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of attempted murder in the killing of first-grader Lindsey Murdock Jr. and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Maxson's settlement must be approved by the City Council. He and the city's Law Department have signed off on the agreement in federal court, records show. It's among almost $40 million in legal settlements the Finance Committee will consider Monday, including $17.5 million for Thomas Sierra in his wrongful conviction case against retired Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara.

Maxson, 63, spent almost a quarter of a century behind bars for Lindsey’s murder. He sued the city in 2016, saying detectives working for Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge extracted his confession through torture, including kicking him in the ribs. Burge was fired over torture allegations brought by defendants in numerous criminal cases. He later was sentenced to prison for lying about the claims in a civil case and died in 2018.

"Stories of exoneration of such torture victims have appeared in the media so frequently that many of us have become desensitized to their impact upon us as a civilized society as well as to their historical significance," Maxson's lawyers said in their lawsuit against the city. "Even amidst all of these highly publicized exoneration cases, Mark Maxson’s case is both unique and quite simply, astonishing."

Detectives had zeroed in on Maxson after he told reporters who were doing stories on Lindsey’s killing that on the night the boy vanished, Maxson bought him a bag of potato chips at a liquor store near 111th and State streets and told him to go home.

After his confession, Maxson asserted his innocence and told the judge at his sentencing that he was framed. But the judge sent him to prison for life, calling Maxson "malignant."

Wade, meantime, went to prison for fatally stabbing his uncle in 1994, two years after Lindsey was killed. In 2016, after Wade served his sentence for that killing, he was arrested for failing to register as a convicted murderer. He gave a confession to the FBI admitting he took Lindsey to a garage to molest him and ended up stabbing him.

Wade’s DNA was found on Lindsey’s clothes and he later wrote letters to the boy’s family and Maxson apologizing, prosecutors said.

In October 2016, after Maxson was exonerated and freed from prison, a Cook County judge granted him a “certificate of innocence” that entitled him to about $220,000 from the state for his wrongful conviction.

In his lawsuit, Maxson said he was beaten by other inmates during his 24 years in prison because they thought he was a child killer and a rapist.

Wallace "Gator" Bradley, a supporter of Maxson, says he thinks Mayor Brandon Johnson should now apologize to Maxson for his wrongful conviction, and says the detectives involved in the case should be prosecuted for misconduct.