Thank you, Charles Green!

In 1985, as a 16-year-old, Charles Green was convicted of a crime on the basis of a coerced confession. After serving 24 years in prison, he was released in 2009. Since then, he has sought to clear his name, and awaits a clemency decision from Gov. Pritzker.

Read the story in a recent Chicago Tribune op-ed by Jamie Kalven.

Read an interview with Charles Green about why he wants to clear his name in a Chicago Reporter interview from 2020.

Mr. Green faces pressing financial needs and is in failing health. All money raised here will go directly to Mr. Green (via his attorney, Jared Kosoglad) to help with housing stability and health care costs.

Justice for Charles Green requires not only monetary reparations but also clearing his name and making public all police misconduct files so that others can better challenge their wrongful convictions. We stand with Mr. Green, because he took a stand for us:

In 2015, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015 for all police misconduct investigation files going back to 1967.

"Mr. Green is making this request,” his lawyer Jared Kosoglad wrote at the time, “in order to help him discover evidence of his innocence and to preserve and disseminate evidence of innocence to others wrongfully convicted."

Mr. Green’s FOIA request was an act of public service. The records at issue are public under Illinois law. Nothing prevents the City of Chicago from making them readily accessible to the public. The Chicago Police Department, however, ignored Mr. Green’s request. He sued, and in January 2020, a judge ruled that the City must release the records -- leading to a release of all underlying investigative files for Chicago Police misconduct records from over a four year period, from 2011-2015. The journalism non-profit Invisible Institute is working to make these records accessible on CPDP.co by early 2023.

The City of Chicago appealed the judge’s ruling and offered Mr. Green a $500k settlement to waive his claim to the documents. (“I look it at it like that, like its hush money, because it’s certain things in those files that would shock the public,” said Mr. Green to the Chicago Reporter at the time.) The City then reneged on the settlement agreement, and eventually prevailed on their appeal.

Mr. Green made great personal sacrifices in his fight to make these records accessible to the public, in hopes that they would prove useful to others fighting for their innocence. The documents released through Green v. CPD have already proven useful in analytic efforts to understand patterns of police behavior found in the narrative testimonies of these documents.

Thank you for your efforts, Mr. Green, to open the doors to a library of police misconduct documents for the sake of public transparency.

This fundraiser is personally organized by Maira Khwaja, the director of public strategy at the Invisible Institute. Funds will not be directed through the Invisible Institute; all funds collected will be sent directly and immediately to Charles Green.

Photo by Olivia Obineme for the Chicago Reporter.