Chicago City Wire

A powerful plaintiffs’ firm this week announced it has filed 11 additional wrongful conviction cases, and asked the city to settle them, not fight these and other cases alleging police brutality now percolating in the courts.

“Instead of fighting, compensate the people and move on,” Loevy & Loevy attorney Russell Ainsworth was quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying.  “Use those funds you’re spending on lawyers and do something else. The lawyers who are standing here (at a press conference outside City Hall), put us out of business. We would rather be doing anything else than having to clean up the mess that the CPD (Chicago Police Department) created.”

Loevy & Loevy listed the new cases on its website.

In at least one civil case filed in federal court in 2018, many questions remain as to the guilt or innocence of two convicted murderers. In the case, Loevy is representing Arturo-DeLeon Reyes, who along, with Gabriel Solache, were convicted in the 1998 stabbing murders of a husband and wife, and the kidnapping of their children in the Bucktown neighborhood.

In 2000, Solache was sentenced to death and Reyes to life. 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.

In 2017, charges against Solache and Reyes were dismissed citing alleged abuse by investigating detective Reynaldo Guevara. It’s Guevara who’s named in the 11 new cases just announced by Loevy.

Recently, city attorneys filed a motion asking for the reopening of discovery into the granting of Certificates of Innocence (COIs) in November to Solache and Reyes. Being granted a COI is a near guarantee of a cash award for wrongful conviction.

Earlier, Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, headed by Kim Foxx, had vigorously fought the COIs. But in November it offered no opposition.

In their motion, the city attorneys are asking 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.”

The lawyers noted: “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.”

Moreover, one former assistant State’s Attorney Eric Sussman told CBS Chicago in 2017 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 for an earlier story that he "certainly didn't believe that he [Guevara] coerced confessions in that case."

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

Last year, the city Inspector General issued a report that the city spent $250 million on judgments and settlements in police misconduct cases between 2017 and 2019, according to the Sun-Times. The figure, the paper said, did not include the cost of outside lawyers or paying fees for plaintiffs’ lawyers.