Chicago City Wire

The commission that oversees attorney conduct in Illinois has rejected a complaint by a Chicago police officer asking that it investigate Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s professional conduct in the nationally publicized Jussie Smollett case, and in her vacating nearly 200 criminal convictions, some involving homicides.

The Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) told Officer Martin Preib, a former Chicago FOP spokesman and a frequent  author of commentaries on criminal exonerations in Cook County over the past five years, that “as a matter of policy, the ARDC does not review or direct the discretionary decisions of elected officials who may also be lawyers absent some clear indication of fraud, criminal activity or other serious misconduct by the lawyer-official.”

The ARDC letter from Althea Welsh, Deputy Administrator, Intake and Administration, was dated April 6. Preib’s letter of complaint was dated March 31.

“Judging by this letter, it appears that elected officials who are also attorneys are immune from investigation into their professional conduct unless it’s what the ARDC considers serious,” Preib told Chicago City Wire (CCW). “It gives them a license to violate codes of conduct that other attorneys must abide by.”

In his letter to the Commission, Preib cited the December report by Dan Webb, special prosecutor in the Jussie Smollett case.

Webb, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, was appointed as special prosecutor in August 2019 by a Cook County judge, after Foxx’s office shockingly dropped felony charges against the actor for staging a hate crime. 

In December, Smollett was convicted on five counts. In March, he was sentenced to 150 days in jail.

In his report, Webb said that Foxx committed “substantial abuses of discretion” for her handling of the Smollett criminal case. And the report stated that Foxx and her staff provided “conflicting accounts” of who and why Foxx’s administration negotiated their agreement with Smollett.

Webb also said that Foxx was receiving regular reports on the Smollett case, even after she had publicly recused herself from the case. He said that Foxx was warned by her chief ethics officer that such conversations were “improper.” 

In addition, the report states that Foxx remained in contact with members of Smollett’s family, even after Foxx was made aware Smollett had become a suspect.

Webb has not said whether he has submitted his findings of Foxx's misconduct to the ARDC.

In December, Webb declined to respond to a Sun-Times reporter’s question about whether he had forwarded his report to the Commission, and he did not respond to a CCW inquiry into whether he has filed a formal complaint.

Preib also asked the ARDC to investigate Foxx’s vacating nearly 200 criminal convictions – a boast she made in a published commentary on the Smollett conviction. Many of the cases are now being challenged by city attorneys in federal court.

“Top attorneys in Ms. Foxx’s office have stated under oath that they did not believe the individuals released by Foxx were innocent,” Preib wrote.

He specifically cited the cases of Nevest Coleman and Darrel Fulton, convicted in 1997 of the 1994 rape and murder of Antwinica Bridgeman in Englewood. Their convictions were vacated by Foxx in 2017. Both have filed civil rights lawsuits against the city.

Preib writes that city attorneys made the following “accusations”  in federal court concerning the exonerations of Coleman and Fulton:

"In fact, the CCSAO (Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office) has made it abundantly clear it did not conclude Plaintiffs [Coleman and Fulton] were innocent. During discovery, the parties were given access to the decision-making process that occurred among the highest-ranking members of the CCSAO," he wrote. "The consensus among them was that Plaintiffs are in fact guilty of the crime…Not only did [prosecutors] conclude that Plaintiffs [Coleman and Fulton] are likely guilty, but they and the same group with whom they discussed the case also concluded the confessions were not the result of coercion or misconduct."

Preib has also investigated, and written extensively about, exonerations of other convicted murders -- some going back 40 years. The exonerations, he says, are based not on exculpatory evidence, but are rather being driven by what he calls the “exoneration industry.”

“We have a state’s attorney who’s vacating sentences based on no evidence, and a city until recently unwilling to defend the convictions in court,” Preib said. “So convicted murderers not only have their sentences overturned but they become millionaires from settled lawsuits.”

Preib, who has authored three books on crime and corruption in Chicago, said he will continue to investigate the exonerations.

Foxx’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the complaint.