Only the Department of Justice Can Stop Chicago’s Outrageous Wrongful Conviction Payouts

The wrongful conviction racket could be the biggest scandal in modern Chicago history. It's time to bring it to an end

Last week, the Chicago City Council approved a multi-million dollar out-of-court settlement for two convicted murderers and their lawyers -- yet another in a now seemingly endless train of contradictable exonerations initiated under former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. 

In the deal, Mexican nationals Arturo DeLeon-Reyes and Gabriel Solache, convicted with overwhelming evidence of a 1998 double murder and kidnapping, and their lawyers will divvy up the agreed-to $13.75 million payout stemming from their wrongful conviction suits filed in 2018. 

Chicago takes a big fiscal hit with these settlements. WTTW reports the city shelled out $204.6 million in exoneration and police misconduct payouts over 2025 alone. The justification by a majority of City Council members, at least the one for public consumption, is that they are simply righting the wrongs of a systemically racist criminal justice system (nearly all of the exonerees are people of color.)

The price tag to these settlements is one cost, but there are other societal costs, rarely mentioned. 

In the press, police and prosecutors are repeatedly stained by charges of bigotry, abuse, and incompetence -- the allegations that fuel the endless exonerations. And for their trouble, the surviving family members, already enduring endless grief, are overlooked by the same social-justice warriors dishing out millions of dollars to those convicted of killing their loved ones. 

Yet there might finally be a chink in the armor of the woke narrative that shields the lawyers for the exonerees and their friends in the press who lap out whatever is shoveled out to them. Recently, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, Paul Diamond, asked the U.S. Attorney to investigate a Kim Foxx clone in Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner, over what local writer and long-time reporter Ralph Cipriano characterized “as a criminal conspiracy to deceive the courts” regarding exonerations there. 

On his Substack page, Cipriano further writes: 

"Because it showcased in the courtroom of Judge Diamond how Krasner’s alleged greatest achievement as a reformer — his so-called ‘exonerations’ that have been relentlessly championed by Krasner’s publicists at The Philadelphia Inquirer— are in fact a thoroughly corrupt enterprise based on collusion and willful prosecutorial misconduct.”

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For years, one lone wolf in Chicago, former FOP spokesman Martin Preib, has been urging federal investigators through his books and columns to do the same in Cook County. In a September 23rd letter to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, Preib has done so again: 

“It has been my hope for several years that the DOJ would begin to review the conduct of prosecutors and law firms involved in exoneration cases, just as this courageous Philadelphia judge has requested,” Preib wrote. “I believe the results of such an investigation would be monumental in restoring the criminal justice system throughout the country.

I do not believe that it is necessary for the DOJ to initiate a widespread, expensive and time-consuming global investigation of the exoneration movement,” he continued. “Rather, I think taking on a few of the most egregious examples of corruption in the movement would begin the process of restoring justice.”

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The Solache/Reyes case ranks right up there in the “egregious” column.

Solache and Reyes were convicted in June 2000 for the Bucktown stabbing deaths of husband and wife Mariano and Jacinta Soto, and the kidnapping of their children. A third accomplice, Adriana Mejia, pleaded guilty in 2001. Court records show Mejia was engaged in a plot to deceive her husband that she was pregnant; she was searching for a newborn to claim as her own.

Kim Foxx and the lawyers zeroed in on Solache and Reyes because the lead investigator in the case, retired detective Reynaldo Guevara, has been repeatedly called out in the press over allegations of abusing suspects. What reporters failed to note is the top prosecutor before Foxx, Anita Alvarez, found claims against Guevara to be unsubstantiated and refused to overturn convictions resulting from his investigations. 

But exonerations alone don’t always go far enough to ensure wrongful conviction payouts. So, Foxx instructed her office to reverse course on opposing Certificates of Innocence (COIs) petitions for the two. A Cook County judge had no choice but to award the COIs, and under the law, Solache in 2022 and DeLeon-Reyes in 2023, became as innocent as the day they were born.

However, there are some big buts in this case:

Andriana Mejia, who remains in jail for the crime, told investigators early on that Solache and Reyes were her accomplices, testimony that helped convict them.

Former assistant prosecutors insist the two were guilty, with an exasperated former assistant Eric Sussman stating in December 2017, just after he learned of the exonerations, that there was "no doubt" in his mind the two men were guilty of murder. 

And then we have an astonishing admission by Foxx herself saying in a recent deposition in an unrelated exoneration case that she believed Solache and Reyes were guilty of those “heinous” crimes.

Again, the Solache/Reyes case is one in a long line of controversial payouts that makes you wonder who’s running the show. It will take someone from the outside, someone not blindly following the social-justice narrative supplied by the lawyers.

It’s time for federal prosecutors to come in and clean up this God-awful mess.

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W.J. Kennedy is a writer living in Chicago.