The city of Boston will pay a total of $150,000 to two Black men who were wrongly accused in the 1989 killing of a pregnant white woman, officials said on Tuesday.
The settlement was announced nearly two years after the mayor, Michelle Wu, apologized for the actions of police and the city, which upended the lives of the two men and exacerbated racial turmoil in the city.
The men, Willie Bennett and Alan Swanson, were never charged in the death of Carol Stuart, a 30-year-old pregnant woman who, as it turned out, had been shot by her husband, Charles Stuart, as part of a staged robbery.
City officials on Tuesday confirmed partial details of the settlement to The Associated Press, which The Boston Herald reported earlier. Mr. Bennett, who is in his 70s, will receive $100,000, and Mr. Swanson, who is in his mid-60s, will get $50,000, according to the city, which did not tell the news organizations how the amounts had been calculated.
The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to several requests by The New York Times for comment on Tuesday.
Leslie Harris, a former public defender for Mr. Swanson, said in an interview on Tuesday that the settlement was a pittance compared with the toll that case had taken on the two men.
“I think it’s a token, not a settlement,” said Mr. Harris, a retired judge. “It’s not much money. It won’t change any of their lives. After taxes, it won’t be anything.”
Efforts to reach Mr. Swanson and Mr. Bennett directly were not immediately successful on Tuesday. A nephew of Mr. Bennett, who has at times acted as a family spokesman, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The actions of the police in the murder case received widespread attention after an investigation by The Boston Globe and a related HBO documentary series that examined institutional racism in the city.
On the night of Oct. 23, 1989, Mr. Stuart told the police that he and his wife had been carjacked after a birthing class by a Black man wearing a black track suit, who had forced them to drive through Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood “to an abandoned area.”
Both of them had been shot, his wife fatally. Their son, who was born prematurely, died 17 days later.
Relying on accounts from Mr. Stuart, the police in Boston arrested Mr. Swanson — who was 29 and homeless — after an intense manhunt. But lacking any physical evidence tying Mr. Swanson to the crime, the police ultimately released him.
Investigators turned their attention to Mr. Bennett, who had a lengthy criminal record and had been charged with robbing a video store. The case against him in the carjacking hinged on affidavits from teenagers who later admitted that the police had coerced them into implicating him.
At the time, Mr. Stuart, who was white, had picked Mr. Bennett out of a police lineup.
But the carjacking story soon began to unravel, with Mr. Stuart’s youngest brother, Matthew Stuart, telling the police that Charles Stuart had planned his wife’s murder and that he had helped his brother dispose of the gun used in the shooting.
Mr. Bennett was exonerated in the murder but was imprisoned for 12 years for the video store robbery, which he has denied committing.
Charles Stuart later died by suicide, while his brother pleaded guilty to criminal charges, including conspiracy and insurance fraud, and went to prison for three years.
At a news conference in December 2023, Ms. Wu, the city’s mayor, apologized for the misconduct.
“We are here today to acknowledge the tremendous pain that the city of Boston inflicted on Black residents throughout our neighborhoods 34 years ago,” Ms. Wu said. “The mayor’s office, city officials and the Boston Police Department took actions that directly harmed these families and continue to impact the larger community, reopening a wound that has gone untended for decades.”
Neil Vigdor covers breaking news for The Times, with a focus on politics.
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