The Cook County Board’s finance committee approved roughly $22 million in settlements Wednesday — including one to a man injured in a scooter crash involving the sheriff’s office and Chicago police, and another to a victim of a coerced confession and abuse by detectives who worked under disgraced Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge.
The committee approved a $3 million settlement to Reginald Henderson, who spent 26 years in state prison for the 1994 murder of 10-year-old Rodney Collins. In 2021, he and his brother, Sean Tyler, were both exonerated for the crime after his attorneys successfully argued they were victimized by detectives in Area 1’s homicide bureau working under Burge. County attorneys who prosecuted the case were also named in the lawsuit.
In his suit, Henderson said though he steadfastly denied being present for the shooting of Collins, his requests for a lawyer were ignored, he was “struck” multiple times, “slammed into a desk,” and denied food, water and access to the bathroom before signing a confession “crafted based on the false story” drafted by detectives.
The settlement was approved without discussion and will be voted on by the full board on Thursday.
The day’s largest approved settlement was to Dustin Johnson, who said he was riding a scooter near North Franklin Avenue and Madison Street on the afternoon of Dec. 22, 2023. In pursuit of another car, a Cook County sheriff’s office vehicle and Chicago Police Department car caused a crash between Johnson and another vehicle, the suit said, claiming officers were going faster than “reasonable and proper with regard to traffic conditions,” driving in the wrong lane, and entered an intersection when it was unsafe to do so.
In a statement, sheriff’s office spokesman Matthew Walberg said its officer “was not involved in a high-speed pursuit. This was just a terrible and unfortunate accident.”
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Johnson’s attorney, Colin Dunn, said in an email his client “suffered serious soft tissue and orthopedic injuries to multiple parts of his body” and “was hospitalized for nearly a month, some of which he was in a medically-included coma. His jaw was wired shut for over a month due to the multiple facial fractures.”
The driver of that suspected stolen car, Brice Mixon, was arrested and charged after the December crash with various offenses including aggravated reckless driving resulting in bodily harm. He was separately arrested and tried in Kankakee County after another chase. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office said Mixon was sentenced to 38 years in state prison for the Kankakee case and that the Cook County charges were cited in the Kankakee prosecution.
The committee also approved a $5.7 million payment to settle a class-action employment discrimination suit involving Black applicants seeking positions as correctional officers at Cook County Jail. A group of those applicants sued in 2018, alleging the pre-hiring tests administered by the Sheriff’s Merit Board — an independent disciplinary and job screening body — “had a statistically significant disparate impact on Black applicants,” leading to higher disqualification rates.
As part of the settlement, the merit board will review applications “without racial identifiers, with narrower gang-affiliation questions, written reasons for rejection, and a right to appeal a denial and have that appeal decided within 60 days,” according to court records.
On Tuesday, commissioners on the board’s health and hospitals committee briefly discussed — then deferred — a vote on a resolution supporting unspecified independent oversight of Cook County Jail.
The jail was subject to a consent decree monitor overseeing its conditions between 2010 and 2017, but the sheriff had been under federal oversight for decades leading up to the decree. Jail officials made a number of improvements during that monitoring period: they boosted staffing and officer training, installed some 2,400 cameras, and built a 979-bed, $86 million processing center that included facilities for medical and mental health treatment.
But citing the 61 people who died at the jail between 2020 and 2025, the resolution, sponsored by progressive Commissioners Tara Stamps, Jessica Vasquez and Alma Anaya, voiced support for monitoring “by an independent and external organization” to return, “focusing on the health, safety and wellness of the detainees and conditions of confinement.”
“No large jail has done more to prevent in custody deaths than the Cook County Jail,” Walberg said in an emailed statement, noting the Illinois State Police Public Integrity Task Force and the Cook County medical examiner are contacted following any detainee death.
When overdoses spiked in 2023 because of an influx of drug-soaked paper, the office expanded video monitoring, added mail scanners and screening staff, implemented drug testing and equipped staff with naloxone to reverse opioid-related overdoses, Walberg said. “There has been a dramatic reduction in fatal overdoses, and deaths by all causes other than natural causes have been trending downward.”
“The Cook County Jail leads the nation in the proper jail management and sets the standard for other correctional agencies to follow,” the statement continued, and is a destination for other correctional leaders to learn how to handle “the introduction of drug-soaked paper, compliance with jail standards, investigations of misconduct, video monitoring and incident review, management of a jail without segregation or solitary confinement, etc.”
As soon as lawsuits were mentioned in committee, however, Commissioner Scott Britton, an attorney, moved to further discuss the resolution in a closed door session. After more than an hour, commissioners returned and Stamps deferred a vote on the resolution.
In a written statement Wednesday, the three sponsors said the resolution was not meant as an attack on Sheriff Tom Dart’s work, but was an “effort to avoid future tragedies.”
Vasquez told the Tribune she had heard from a number of constituents about a “wide range” of concerns at the jail besides the recent deaths, from the quality of food to the availability of bedding and sufficient staff to look after detainees. While she said the sheriff’s office assured her there was oversight internally and from the state Department of Corrections, she told the Tribune “the public deserves to know and should know that there is comprehensive and holistic takes on what we need to have in our county jail so that we avoid tragedies like jail deaths.”