Kim Foxx: “We believed that the evidence suggested that the defendants had committed a heinous act of murder”
The Chicago City Council is nearing a decision on restitution — expected to be millions of dollars, though no figure has yet been made public — for two illegal aliens, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, who were convicted in the heinous 1998 Bucktown stabbing murders of Mariano and Jacinta Soto and the kidnapping of the couple's two young children, a plot carried out on behalf of Adriana Mejia. The two men were released from prison in December 2017, after then-State's Attorney Kim Foxx's office dropped the charges, and were later awarded certificates of innocence despite no new evidence of innocence being presented. This would be the latest in a string of settlements tied to the nearly 250 convictions vacated during Foxx's tenure.
Mejia — who recruited Solache and Reyes and remains in prison — has never wavered in her testimony that they committed the crimes with her. When Foxx's office dropped the charges, then-First Assistant State's Attorney Eric Sussman publicly stated: "There is no doubt in my mind, or the mind of anyone who has worked on this case, that Mr. Solache and Mr. Reyes are guilty of these crimes. It is a tragic day for justice in Cook County." And in a deposition this past April, Foxx herself acknowledged under oath that she believed Solache and Reyes — whose release her office approved, and whose certificate-of-innocence petitions it ultimately stopped contesting — had committed the brutal murders.
The Solache-Reyes case is not an aberration, but one example among many wrongful-conviction lawsuits brought by individuals who committed the crimes for which they were convicted. Foxx's office routinely overlooked clear evidence of guilt when dismissing charges in hundreds of cases over alleged police misconduct, while rarely opposing defense lawyers' requests for certificates of innocence — powerful tools in civil rights lawsuits that help drive taxpayer-funded settlements and verdicts.
Foxx's so-called Conviction Review Unit helped vacate nearly 250 convictions — by her office's own count, 248 — not because of exculpatory evidence, but because of allegations of police misconduct. Foxx's office then declined to oppose certificates of innocence for many of those released, despite no new evidence of innocence being presented. Those certificates were later used to pursue large settlements.
The $50 million verdict awarded to Marcel Brown in September 2024 — convicted along with a teenage cousin in a 2008 murder, then released and granted a certificate of innocence despite no evidence establishing either man's innocence — is another product of this process. The city has since asked the court to throw out or reduce that award, the largest ever to a single wrongful-conviction plaintiff.
Michelle Mbekeani, then head of the state's attorney's Conviction Review Unit, created and operated a state-licensed business linking inmates with wrongful-conviction claims to private attorneys. That obvious conflict of interest, compounded by courtroom answers Cook County Judge Michael McHale called "duplicitous," led to the judge barring her from cases in his courtroom.
The mainstream media has largely ignored the alignment between Foxx, justice reform advocates, and trial lawyers that not only freed convicted criminals but greased the skids for large, taxpayer-funded settlements. Some members of the City Council, including Alderman Raymond Lopez, have publicly criticized the mounting cost of these settlements, echoing criticism from former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who once accused Foxx of "handing out certificates of innocence like they're candy."
For years, Chicago's wrongful-conviction debate has operated on the misleading assumption that a vacated conviction equals actual innocence, with press coverage casting nearly every settlement exclusively as a story about police misconduct — a narrative advanced by self-described criminal justice reformers and police reform advocates. The media's near-total silence on the Solache-Reyes case, a poster child for this pattern, is itself an abdication of its watchdog role.
The financial toll has been staggering. Foxx-era exonerees have sued the city in droves, regardless of guilt. Foxx was among the most aggressive prosecutors in the nation in pursuing prosecutor-directed mass exonerations in cases involving officers accused of misconduct — without court findings or genuine innocence determinations. The pattern began with cases tied to disgraced former police commander Jon Burge, in which virtually anyone convicted in a case he was even peripherally involved in was released; most filed lawsuits, and the Burge scandal has cost taxpayers more than $210 million to date in settlements, judgments, and related legal costs — a tab that is still rising.
A $90 million global settlement — resolving 176 lawsuits brought by roughly 180 plaintiffs alleging drug shakedowns and frame-ups by former Sgt. Ronald Watts and his tactical team — was approved by the Chicago City Council in September 2025. More than 40 murder convictions tied to former Detective Reynaldo Guevara's alleged investigative misconduct have been overturned or vacated, pushing cumulative city and county payouts to nearly $150 million so far, with roughly 35 related suits still pending.
The election of Eileen O'Neill Burke, a former appellate judge, over Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle's endorsed candidate, Clayton Harris III, sent shockwaves through the ecosystem of lawyers, professors, and activists who make their fortunes off Preckwinkle's criminal-friendly government. The coalition of lawyers, lawmakers, and activists behind the petition demanding a special prosecutor to investigate federal agents involved in Operation Midway Blitz — a petition a Cook County judge denied in May — was not truly seeking justice for migrants; it was aimed at discrediting Burke for applying the brakes to mass exonerations.
Critics claim Burke has "abandoned" wrongful-conviction investigations. As a responsible prosecutor, she has simply returned to case-by-case review instead of rubber-stamping demands for the mass release — without proof of innocence — of anyone ever arrested by an officer accused of misconduct. Injustice Watch and Bolts Magazine have criticized Burke's refusal to grant widespread exonerations in cases involving former Chicago Police Sgt. Brian Forberg, who has been accused of misconduct in numerous cases.
Forberg was positioned to become the latest disgraced officer whose caseload produced a flood of exonerations and certificates of innocence — paving the way for high-dollar legal settlements. Critics have also accused Burke of blocking exonerated people from clearing their names by opposing the vast majority of certificate-of-innocence requests — roughly 80 percent, versus about 25 percent under Foxx.
This criticism is pure hogwash. Such certificates grease the skids for large settlements. Burke has simply ended the Foxx-era practice of waving through certificates of innocence without proof of innocence. Her approach is rooted in principle: innocence must be adjudicated in court, not decreed administratively. Foxx's blanket approach didn't just free innocent people; it released the guilty as well — including murderers — who then collected substantial taxpayer-funded settlements.
It's no accident that Cook County has been the nation's leader in reversed convictions — accounting for more than half of the nationwide total in at least one recent year— contributing to nearly $700 million in taxpayer-funded settlements since 2000. Burke ended Foxx's practice of overturning convictions en masse and issuing certificates of innocence without proof. However, hundreds of millions of could still be coming from lawsuits still pending from those Foxx released.
Foxx's mass exonerations predictably opened a gold mine for trial lawyers, contributing to the hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements cited above — money that has enriched convicted criminals along with their lawyers and advocates. For the cottage industry of advocates and trial lawyers who call this justice reform: Explain this warped system — one that has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to vicious criminals and their trial lawyers — to the families of the victims, who were overwhelmingly Black or Hispanic.
Expect the mainstream media to keep reinforcing the narrative that these multimillion-dollar settlements are entirely a story of police misconduct. Rarely, if ever, has the press questioned the legitimacy of making violent criminals multimillionaires. It will continue to portray these criminals as victims — and sometimes heroes — and their so-called criminal justice advocates and trial lawyers as civil rights warriors.
