Chicago's citizens — and the families of murder victims — deserve answers about how scores of convictions were abandoned without transparency
Recent revelations surrounding former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx sent shock waves through Chicago’s legal and political circles. In a recent deposition, Foxx acknowledged that Gabriel Solache and Arturo Deleon-Reyes, who obtained Certificates of Innocence with her blessing, were both guilty of perhaps the most horrific double murders and kidnappings in recent Chicago history. That extraordinary admission reinforced longstanding concerns Foxx’s approach to conviction integrity had ignited Chicago’s now multi-billion-dollar wrongful-conviction liability crisis.
Yet lost amid the public reaction was another remarkable aspect of Foxx’s testimony — one that had never been publicly disclosed. Foxx was deposed about the case of Marilyn Mulero, one of eight defendants whose murder convictions were vacated at Foxx’s behest in August 2022, in cases connected to former Chicago Police detective Reynaldo Guevara. At the time, Foxx announced that a “comprehensive case-by-case review” had uncovered police misconduct by Guevara that called all of the convictions into question.
What the public was not told, however, was that deposition testimony and emails now indicate that no meaningful independent factual review ever occurred. Instead, the vacaturs were precipitated by lawyers affiliated with civil rights firms that now represent many of those same defendants in lawsuits seeking massive damages from the City of Chicago. Nor was the public told the original group of eight defendants represented only part of a broader list of 20 who were seeking relief — all of whom have since had their murder convictions vacated and are now pursuing civil rights lawsuits.
Overall, Foxx agreed to vacate over 40 Guevara-related murder convictions, exposing Chicago taxpayers to potential liability that could exceed $1 billion. Let’s understand, Guevara was the latest golden goose for the trial lawyers. Another defrocked detective whose convictions on cases on which he worked could be overturned despite no evidence of innocence, and lawsuits filed demanding large settlements for wrongful conviction often greeted with the issuance of Certificates of Innocence.
None of this is to suggest that innocent people should remain imprisoned. No civilized society can tolerate the incarceration of truly innocent persons for crimes they did not commit. Nonetheless, the opposite concern is equally serious: When courts vacate murder convictions and release defendants convicted of brutal killings, victims’ families and the public deserve confidence these decisions were reached only after rigorous, individualized investigations grounded in evidence — not through blanket assumptions, political expedience, or informal understandings reached behind closed doors.
That is precisely why Foxx’s deposition testimony in the Mulero matter raises such troubling questions. Foxx testified that after adopting a review protocol for Guevara-related cases in 2020, she expected Assistant State’s Attorneys to thoroughly investigate each case individually before her office agreed to vacate any conviction. Foxx vehemently denied that a blanket agreement existed to stop contesting post-conviction petitions merely because Guevara was involved in the underlying criminal investigation.
However, that testimony appears irreconcilable with first, a July 13, 2022, email from an attorney with the Exoneration Project (EP), thanking Foxx for her “decision to no longer contest post-conviction matters where Reynaldo Guevara is at the heart of them”; second, testimony from a senior Foxx subordinate that after receiving the EP attorney’s email she was instructed during a Zoom meeting attended by Foxx to stop further investigation and agree to relief in all 20 of the cases the attorney identified; and third, testimony from that same senior subordinate little investigation had been conducted by that point in several of the cases, including Mulero’s.
Foxx’s deposition testimony became even more unsettling when she was questioned about remarks she made during a 2023 appearance at the City Club of Chicago. There, Foxx publicly declared Mulero, who was in attendance, “went to prison for a crime which she didn’t commit” and had been “wrongfully convicted.” Mulero had been convicted, along with two other women, of the 1992 execution-style murder of two rival gang members by luring the men into a Humboldt Park bathroom before shooting them both in the head. Mulero’s criminal defense attorney, now a Catholic priest, recently testified in Mulero’s civil case that Mulero told him she participated in the murders, before pleading guilty to the same crime.
Yet when asked at her deposition about her public proclamation that Mulero was innocent, Foxx conceded she lacked any factual basis for the statements, that her office never determined Mulero was innocent, and that she regretted having made the remarks. That concession carries potentially enormous consequences. Lawyers representing Mulero are now attempting to use Foxx’s public statements about her innocence as evidence in support of a civil rights lawsuit seeking tens of millions of taxpayer dollars.
If accurate, these allegations raise issues far beyond ordinary disagreements over post-conviction review. Chicago is now facing an unprecedented wave of litigation tied to these vacated convictions. Taxpayers may ultimately shoulder hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of dollars in exposure. More importantly, the integrity of the criminal justice system itself is at stake. No prosecutor in American history appears to have overseen the mass vacatur of so many murder convictions under circumstances carrying consequences of this magnitude. That alone should compel serious scrutiny.
Chicago’s reversed-conviction litigation landscape is not normal, and it cannot be explained by the simplistic claim that Chicago merely has more police misconduct than elsewhere.
Chicago has led the nation in exonerations for years; in 2022 alone, Cook County recorded 124 overturned convictions, more than half of the national total of 233. Michigan, by comparison, recorded 16 exonerations, while Texas had 11. Those numbers are not evidence of an ordinary civil litigation market. They are evidence of an extraordinary local pipeline.
Federal investigators should determine whether these decisions were the product of legitimate individualized prosecutorial review or predetermined outcomes negotiated outside public view. The question isn’t whether wrongful convictions should be corrected. Of course, they should be. The question is whether the public was misled about how so many of these convictions were undone. Whether political actors, government lawyers, and private civil rights attorneys collaborated in ways that denied taxpayers, courts, victims’ families, and the public the transparency they were entitled to.
For those who often couch Foxx “Conviction Integrity Unit” mass exonerations and the costly litigation as criminal justice reform in a system that discriminated against Blacks and Latinos, its important to remember that in over 75 percent of the crimes in question the victims were, in fact, Black, and in 15 percent of the time, Latino.
Chicago taxpayers deserve answers. Courts deserve those answers. And the families of murder victims — whose voices have been entirely absent from this process — deserve them most of all.
