Chicago is poised to pay nearly $14 million in wrongful-conviction settlements in the Bucktown double-murder case involving disgraced former Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara. To date, Chicago has resolved 14 lawsuits naming Guevara by paying $141.9 million to people whose murder convictions were later vacated. The cost of defending and settling those cases has topped $191.8 million. With 38 lawsuits naming Guevara pending, the ultimate cost could be far higher.
The underlying Bucktown crime was horrific: Mariano Soto was stabbed 39 times. Jacinta Soto was stabbed 20 times. Their two young children, an autistic three year old and a two month old, were kidnapped. Adriana Mejia, who lived with Arturo DeLeon-Reyes and Gabriel Solache, pleaded guilty in 2001 for her role in the slayings and the kidnapping of their children. She implicated both DeLeon-Reyes and Solache and, according to court records, remains imprisoned for her role in the crimes.
DeLeon-Reyes and Solache confessed after lengthy interrogations. They later claimed their confessions were coerced by Guevara. No physical evidence tied either man to the murders or kidnappings, and a judge later found Guevara’s denials of abuse to be “bald-faced lies,” suppressing the confessions. At the time of their release in December 2017, Eric Sussman, who served as then-State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s First Assistant declared:
“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.”
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office then declined to retry the cases. In the years following their release from prison, both DeLeon-Reyes and Solache received Certificates of Innocence (COI).
However, in a stunning admission in a deposition earlier this year, Foxx admitted she believed DeLeon-Reyes and Solache had in fact committed what she characterized as a “heinous act of murder.” Foxx’s office eventually withdrew its opposition to their petitions for COIs, which both men received in 2022 and 2023.
This pattern of vacated convictions, followed by civil litigation against the City, has already cost Chicago taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
The pattern used by trial lawyers has been to take a defrocked detective — in this case, Reynaldo Guevara — and recruit criminals convicted in cases in which the detective was even peripherally involved, claim police misconduct, and demand their release. The pattern has precedents: Former Commander Jon Burge and his “Midnight Crew” of Area 2 and Area 3 detectives became infamous for coercing confessions from suspects during the 1970s and 1980s.
The recent settlements involving former CPD Sergeant Ronald Watts are another example. Plaintiffs alleged Watts and his Tactical Team ran an extortion and protection racket and framed residents on fabricated drug charges at the Chicago Housing Authority’s Ida B. Wells complex. Chicago approved a $90 million global settlement to resolve 176 civil-rights lawsuits involving 180 individuals. The City said all of the plaintiffs’ convictions had been vacated and that nearly all had received certificates of innocence.
An era that continues to plague Chicago, Kim Foxx’s tenure, 2016-2024, the pace of vacating convictions multiplied, spawning a tsunami of civil lawsuits against the City. Foxx’s own final report says the Conviction Review Unit helped overturn 248 wrongful-conviction cases by the end of her administration. The resulting exposure for Chicago taxpayers has been enormous.
Since her arrival in office in December 2024, State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke has signaled a decisive break from prosecutor-driven mass exonerations, appropriately insisting that claims of innocence be litigated and proven on a case-by-case basis in court rather than sweeping administrative deals. Burke’s core message is clear: Justice must be grounded in evidence and due process, not in blanket assumptions that every conviction connected to a criticized officer is automatically invalid. A prosecutor’s inability, or decision not to retry a case, is not the same as proof that a defendant did not commit the crime.
O’Neill Burke’s insistence on soberly reviewing each case individually has sent the “Criminal Industrial Complex” into a panic. The CIC is an ecosystem led by trial lawyers who masquerade as civil-rights lawyers, along with activists, academics, consultants, and federal consent-decree monitors who have profited handsomely from the taxpayer-funded legal system and anti-police narratives.
The effort to mobilize outrage against Burke by claiming that she has ignored possible ICE abuses is simply the latest tactic in a broader campaign to discredit her. Burke’s critics seek a return to the “glory days” of the Foxx administration, when even murder convictions were cavalierly tossed aside and certificates of innocence, according to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, were handed out “like candy”— transforming convicted killers and their civil lawyers into multimillionaires at taxpayer expense.
Consider that, in February, Burke implemented a charging protocol that explicitly permits her office to pursue felony charges against federal immigration agents in use-of-force incidents when the facts and law support charges. The protocol directs law-enforcement agencies to preserve evidence and present completed investigations to the State’s Attorney’s Office, which will conduct an independent review. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office and the Illinois State’s Attorneys Association reviewed the policy before it took effect. That has not stopped her critics from playing the ICE card.
Look for the mainstream media to continue portraying the settlements as a product of corrupt policing, without sufficiently questioning whether those being compensated committed the crimes. Mainstream outlets, along with first-news organizations such as Block Club Chicago and nonprofit journalism organizations such as Injustice Watch, have reinforced an anti-police narrative while giving too little attention to crime victims and the costs borne by taxpayers. Every settlement is celebrated as justice served and further evidence of a Chicago Police Department resisting reform.
Police misconduct is real. It is an undeniable truth that some police officers deliberately engage in criminal behavior and Chicago has a responsibility to compensate people genuinely wronged by police misconduct. However, it must include careful scrutiny of every claim, honest recognition of disputed evidence, and a refusal to confuse a prosecutor’s inability to retry a case with proof a defendant did not commit the crime. Justice must include the victims of violent crime and their families.
Chicago cannot afford a system in which legal process, political convenience, and contingency-fee litigation combine to produce massive payouts without sufficient attention to the facts of each case. Chicago is about to award millions in compensation to two men who were originally convicted in the brutal murder of two people and the kidnapping of their two children — while further enriching their lawyers in the process.
Is there no shame?
