Baltimore set to pay $11M to man wrongfully convicted of murder

For 25 years, Anthony Hall sat in prison for a crime he did not commit. Next month, Baltimore will pay up for the mistake.

The city’s spending board is poised to approve an $11 million settlement for Hall to close out a lawsuit alleging that Baltimore Police engaged in “intentional and unconscionable misconduct” that resulted in Hall’s wrongful conviction.

The mayor-controlled board will consider the case in early August.

If approved, the settlement will be the second Hall will receive since being cleared in the 1991 murder of Gerard Dorsey. In 2024, the Maryland Board of Public Works paid out $2.36 million in compensation — plus attorney fees and housing benefits — for Hall.

That settlement was accompanied by an apology from Gov. Wes Moore.

“There is no amount of money, nor apologies, nor acknowledgment to truly be adequate to right the wrongs that happened to this gentleman’s life,” Moore said at the time.

An attorney for Hall did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

Hall, then 29, was the father of two small children and working as a cement mixer when he was charged with shooting Dorsey in July 1991. Though he maintained his innocence, Hall was convicted of second-degree murder and a handgun charge in 1992, based largely on the testimony of two eyewitnesses.

In his lawsuit, Hall alleged that police, specifically detectives Donald Licato and Frank Barlow and Sgt. John Barrick, coerced the two witnesses, Nancy Hill and Gerald Patterson, into falsely testifying at trial. No physical evidence tied Hall to the killing.

Law enforcement withheld or otherwise failed to disclose numerous statements, the lawsuit asserted, that excluded Hall as the shooter or were evidence of his innocence.

The lawsuit claimed that Baltimore Police had a “long maintained a policy, practice, or custom of using coercive techniques in interviews and interrogations to obtain confessions and false statements.”

In 2004, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project took up Hall’s case and interviewed the two eyewitnesses to the murder. Both recanted their original statements and instead alleged that the police coerced them into testifying against Hall, according to the city spending board’s agenda.

In 2023, Baltimore Circuit Judge Charles Peters granted a petition for writ of actual innocence and awarded Hall a new trial. The Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office later dropped the case.

Hall sued the Police Department in 2024 as well as Licato and Barlow, both of whom are no longer with the department. He also sued the estate of Barrick, who is deceased.

The city “vigorously contested” the lawsuit, according to the spending board’s agenda, but a city motion for summary judgment was denied. The case was headed to trial before it was settled.

The settlement will be among the largest Baltimore has paid out in recent years amid a campaign to more aggressively fight exoneration cases.

Earlier this month, a federal lawsuit by 2018 exoneree Clarence Shipley went to trial, and a jury returned a verdict for the city. Nathan & Kamionski, a law firm that represents the city in such cases, said Shipley, who claimed officers in his case had fabricated evidence and suppressed other information, had been seeking $1 to $3 million for each year of incarceration — a total demand of $27 to $81 million.

In 2023, Baltimore paid out $48 million to the “Harlem Park Three” after they were exonerated in the 1983 killing of 14-year-old DeWitt Duckett in the hallway of Harlem Park Junior High School.

Baltimore Banner reporters Justin Fenton and Dylan Segelbaum contributed to this article.