Chicago City Wire

City attorneys representing former Chicago police officers are trying to pull back the curtain on why in November the Cook County State’s Attorney’s reversed its opposition to the granting of Certificates of Innocence (COI) to two convicted of the 1998 brutal murders of a husband and wife, and the kidnapping of their children.

The motion filed in federal court is asking for reopening discovery in the COI cases of Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes to see all “communications between the CCSAO (State’s Attorney) and third parties including Plaintiffs, their counsel and other advocates on topics relating to Solache’s and Reyes’s COIs.”

In 2000, Solache was sentenced to death and Reyes to life in prison for the stabbing deaths of 43-year-old Mariano Soto and his 35-year-old wife, Jacinta, and the kidnapping of their two children. Also convicted and sentenced to life in prison was 23-year-old Adriana Mejia who presented the kidnapped two-month-old child as her own. Mejia, who remains imprisoned, maintained for many years that all three were involved in the murders.

Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx | Cook County

Per the motion: “Until November 2022, the CCSAO’s position was consistent and unequivocal: Solache and Reyes were guilty. What is not clear, is how, when and on what record, that position changed. In addition, based on Mejia’s continued insistence for 25 years that Solache and Reyes helped her savagely murder the Soto parents and kidnap their children, Defendants had every reason to believe that the CCSAO would continue to oppose the COIs and that they would be denied.”

In 2017, the charges against Solache and Reyes were vacated over allegations of abuse by the lead detective in the case, Reynaldo Guevara -- allegations that Guevara has denied.

As the motion stated, the State’s Attorney’s office, headed by Kim Foxx, had earlier vigorously opposed the COIs, with one former assistant State’s Attorney Eric Sussman telling CBS Chicago when the charges were dropped: “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.”

In addition, Sussman, now in private practice, told Chicago City Wire in an email that he "certainly didn't believe that he [Guevara] coerced confessions in that case."

The motion by city attorneys for the reopening of discovery was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, where Solache and Reyes in 2018 filed a civil action seeking damages for wrongful conviction. Solache is being represented by plaintiffs’ attorneys Loevy & Loevy; Reyes by the Peoples Law Office.

COIs present a compelling argument in civil court for a wrongful conviction claim. Past wrongful conviction cases have led to millions awarded to both the once convicted murderers and their lawyers.

Other wrongful conviction cases naming Guevara alone could cost city taxpayers up to a billion dollars, given earlier estimates.

Additional pending cases, naming other former detectives and police officers, could cost taxpayers millions more.

One upcoming trial in a case naming former Detectives Kenneth Boudreau and Jack Halloran, Tyrone Hood v. City of Chicago, has its origins in the 1993 murder of college student and basketball star Marshall Morgan Jr.

Hood’s exoneration in 2015 was not based on a finding of new evidence, but rather on “an intense media” campaign, according to a motion filed in 2019 in the case by city attorneys. The campaign, the motion says, was orchestrated by Loevy & Loevy and the Exoneration Project (EP), an activist organization associated with Loevy & Loevy. Attorneys from Loevy & Levy comprise most of the staff at EP, out of the University of Chicago. An allegedly sympathetic media played along with the narrative, the motion says.