He spent 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He hopes a $5 million payout could mean a better life for his kids

Marquis Jackson’s father, an Air Force veteran, died in 2005 believing that his son was a criminal.

When three men wearing ski masks stormed into a New Haven, Connecticut, deli on January 24, 1999, killing a customer and wounding a cashier, police pointed to then 19-year-old Jackson as one of the suspects, and he was eventually convicted of murder, according to court records.

“He believed that I did commit the crime, even though I always told him for my whole time that I didn’t do it,” Jackson said. “He went to the Air Force, so no way he believed that America had set his son up for something he did not do…he figured that the government wouldn’t do that to somebody.”

His father was wrong. Jackson, who was convicted in 2000, spent more than 18 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

Charges against Jackson were vacated in 2018 after new evidence came to light and he was released from custody, court documents show. Now, the state of Connecticut is on track to pay him more than $5 million for wrongfully incarcerating him based on what his attorneys described as faulty testimony and “investigative misconduct” while the case was being investigated.

“I don’t think anything could ever replace the agony that I had to go through,” Jackson said. “I went in as a young man at 19. I came out 39. A couple of days before my 39th birthday, in fact.”

“Now we have to really get to know (my family) again,” Jackson said.

Jackson, who now owns a used car dealership and has two young daughters, hopes to use the money from the settlement to secure his daughters’ financial future and purchase more property.

He is one of three Black men for whom the Connecticut General Assembly’s judiciary committee approved settlements last week, putting them a step closer to multi-million dollar payouts.

The committee greenlit a $5.3 million settlement for Jackson and a $4.8 million settlement for Vernon Horn, Jackson’s friend who was also wrongfully convicted for the same 1999 murder at the New Haven deli.

Each of the men will receive the payments within the coming months, according to State Sen. Gary Winfield, the chair of the legislature’s judiciary committee.

The Connecticut state legislature’s judiciary committee on February 14 also approved a $5.8-million wrongful incarceration claims payment to Stefon Morant, another Black New Havener who was wrongfully incarcerated for murder.

When all three settlements are finalized, Connecticut will be on the hook to pay a total of $15.9 million to the three wrongfully convicted men.

‘They made the evidence follow their assumptions’

Horn and Jackson were both tied to the 1999 killing at the deli through phone records from a cellphone stolen during the incident, witness testimony and the fingerprints of an alleged accomplice at the scene who then named Horn and Jackson as his partners in the crime, former New Haven State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin told a New Haven County Superior Court judge in a 2018 hearing.

But during the appeals process, investigators discovered that a New Haven detective who investigated the case had 137 pages of telephone records that were never entered into the record during the trial – records which proved neither Horn nor Jackson could have committed the crime, attorneys told the judge.

According to court documents, prosecutors said they could not retry the case.

This led to Horn and Jackson’s sentences being dismissed in 2018, according to Jackson’s attorney, Ken Rosenthal.

Jackson said that when the case was being investigated, it felt like police quickly zeroed in on him and his friend despite evidence pointing in different directions.

“Instead of trying to follow the evidence, they made the evidence follow their assumptions,” Jackson told CNN.

Separately, Stefon Morant was convicted for the 1990 murders of two people in New Haven and spent 21 years in prison before being released in 2015 and pardoned in 2021, according to a civil rights lawsuit he filed last year against the police and the city.

The Connecticut Innocence Project had represented Morant and testing failed to link his DNA to the crime scene. And, a detective had allegedly manipulated the recording of Morant’s audio statement, and also threatened witnesses, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

“Mr. Morant’s 21+ years of wrongful incarceration was the result of extraordinary misconduct on the part of law enforcement officials and false testimony brought about at their behest, as documented by an extensive FBI investigation following the conviction of Mr. Morant and his co-defendant,” his attorney, Ken Rosenthal, wrote in a statement to CNN.

A backlog of wrongful incarceration cases

The three payments advanced this month are part of a backlog of wrongful conviction cases currently being settled by the state of Connecticut. The full state legislature may decide to take up the settlements and approve them. However, once the claims commissioner files the report with the state’s judiciary committee, it is ratified after 45 days, whether or not the legislature chooses to act on the settlement, Winfield told CNN.

The backlog is due to claims not being processed in the past, said State Rep. Craig Fishbein, the Republican ranking member of the legislature’s judiciary committee.

“I do not expect in coming years that’s we’re going to have anything like what we saw [this month],” he told CNN.

The state legislature on February 14 also considered the wrongful incarceration payments of five other Connecticut residents but decided to remand the cases back to the state’s Claims Commissioner, Robert Shea, Jr., to determine their eligibility under state law.

The eight cases represented the largest dollar amount and number of people to come before the state legislature for wrongful conviction claims since the state created the statute in 2008, according to Winfield.

Connecticut first passed wrongful conviction settlement laws in 2008. Then it updated them in 2016 to make the bar for receiving a payment higher by requiring a recorded act of malfeasance by a government official or proof of innocence.

In 2024, the legislature voted to change the wording of the statute to include those released due to “grounds consistent with innocence.”

Wrongful convictions do not affect all Americans equally.

There have been persistent racial disparities among wrongful convictions across the nation, with innocent Black people about 7.5 times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent White people, according to a 2022 report from the National Registry of Exonerations, which archives all known exonerations in the US since 1989.

Nearly 60% of people the Innocence Project has helped to free or exonerate since 1992 are Black, according to the nonprofit legal organization.

While his father didn’t live to see him exonerated, Jackson hopes he can keep his father’s legacy alive with his newfound freedom.

“Unfortunately, [my dad] never was able to see me released, but, you know, he’s up there and seeing what I’m doing now,” Jackson said. “I have two daughters that he never met and I’m gonna keep the legacy going for them — they’re Jacksons, like my father.”