The Board of Estimates today agreed to pay $11 million to a man who spent 25 years in prison on a murder charge cooked up by three former Baltimore Police officers.

In so doing, the city avoided a potentially higher jury payout to Anthony Hall, now 61, whose $15 million lawsuit was scheduled for trial on August 31 in U.S. Maryland District Court.

After his 1992 conviction was thrown out by a judge, Hall sued retired detectives Donald Licato and Frank Barlow and the Estate of John Barrick, who died in 2023, accusing them of extracting false testimony from two alleged eyewitnesses that directly led to his conviction of second-degree murder of Gerard Dorsey.

A Writ of Actual Innocence was granted to Hall in 2023 after the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project turned up handwritten interview notes that contradicted the state’s case, and activists eventually tracked down two alleged eyewitnesses to the murder, Nancy Hill and Gerald Patterson.

“The Officer Defendants threatened to take Ms. Hill’s children from her and threatened Mr. Patterson with a prison sentence on an unrelated criminal charge, if they did not falsely implicate Mr. Hall in Mr. Dorsey’s murder. The Officer Defendants engaged in this misconduct, despite Ms. Hill repeatedly telling them she could not identify the murderer and Mr. Patterson repeatedly saying he was not at the scene when the shooting occurred,” the lawsuit alleged.

There was no physical or forensic evidence tying Hall to the crime scene.

After failing to get the lawsuit dismissed in federal court, the city Law Department recommended the $11 million cash settlement, with $6 million going to Hall immediately and $5 million to be paid next year.

Scott: “We will not go back”

According to his lawyers, Hall suffers from mental health issues stemming from his quarter century behind bars and now cares full-time for his widowed mother with dementia.

Hall was employed as a cement mixer when arrested by police in 1991 and was the father of two young children.

Mayor Brandon Scott reflected on the settlement this way at today’s BOE meeting:

“I just want to say in a more plain way, as someone who was seven years old when this happened, when folks out there push and say that we need to go back to the old days of policing, this is why [not]. Because lives were ruined, not just like this gentleman’s case where he spent 25 years [in prison], but people’s lives were ruined who were just simply breathing and looking like me.

“This is why we will not go back to that way. Also because the city wasn’t that safe when they were doing it that way. They were arresting more people, they had more violence, they were ruining more lives, more communities, more families. And we are going to continue to operate in the way we are operating today because it is not only producing the results, it is the right way to do it. So anyone who thinks we ought to go back locking up anyone who is poor and black, mainly black, in Baltimore City, [we] won’t do that.”

In recent years, Baltimore has been writing some very large checks over wrongful convictions and police misconduct, including a $48 million settlement for the “Harlem Park Three,” which was approved in 2023, and most recently $400,000 to a man who was intentionally run over by a police car.

According to the National Police Funding Database, Baltimore taxpayers spent $12 million on police misconduct cases between 2010 and 2014, and $24.5 million between 2015 and 2019.

Between 2020 and 2025, at least $75 million was used to settle misconduct and wrongful conviction cases, including for members of the Gun Trace Task Force who engaged in racketeering, robbery, overtime fraud and planting evidence.