Chicago City Wire

Kim Foxx is fighting desperately to stop one of her top officials from being deposed to answer why the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) dropped its opposition to the awarding of Certificates of Innocence (COIs) to two convicted of the savage 1998 murders of a husband and wife, and the kidnapping of their children.

Lawyers representing the city and defending retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara in the wrongful conviction case brought in federal court by convicted murderers Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes responded to a motion by CCSAO to quash the deposition of First Assistant State’s Attorney Risa Lanier. It was Lanier who made the final call to drop opposition of the awarding last November of the COIs to Solache and Reyes. For four years prior, the office opposed the COIs, insisting the two were guilty of the crime.

In their case, Solache and Reyes are alleging that Guevara coerced them into confessing to the murders.

In their response to the motion to quash the deposition, defense attorneys wrote that a CCSAO claim of deliberative process privilege to protect internet office communications doesn’t hold in part because the CCSAO communicated about the case with those outside the office, including lawyers with the plaintiffs’ firm of Loevy & Loevy representing Reyes, according to documents obtained through a subpoena. 

“On June 14, 2023 after numerous Rule 37.2 conferences, Defendants received the CCSAO’s response to their subpoena, which included heavily redacted communications between an assistant to State’s Attorney Foxx, ASA Lanier, Joshua Tepfer (an attorney at Loevy & Loevy and the Exoneration Project), and counsel for Reyes from Loevy & Loevy, Steve Art and Anand Swaminathan,” the attorneys wrote in their response. “This communication revealed that State’s Attorney Foxx, ASA Lanier, Tepfer, Art and Swaminathan met at least once on June 14, 2022, regarding the CCSAO cases involving Detective Ray Guevara, including Solache’s and Reyes’s cases. At that time, the only pending CCSAO matters involving Solache and Reyes were their COI petitions.”

A COI is an especially powerful argument for a cash settlement in a wrongful conviction case – a settlement shared by plaintiffs and their lawyers.

“At the trial of multi-million-dollar reversed-conviction cases,” attorneys wrote in their response, “plaintiffs with COIs argue to juries their COIs are ‘powerful evidence’ of their actual innocence. In such cases, plaintiffs counter evidence of guilt with pronouncements such as ‘the justice system has spoken’ through the COI. As a result, the magnitude of a COI’s potential influence on the question of guilt or innocence cannot be overstated. No differently here, Solache and Reyes have confirmed that they intend to make their own suspiciously timed and unopposed COIs center stage at trial as evidence that they did not savagely murder Mariano and Jacinta Soto and kidnap their children.”

Earlier, the CCSAO tried to get the defense attorneys to buy into their releasing a statement in lieu of Lanier being deposed, a statement “did not reflect a final determination that either Petitioner Solache or Petitioner Reyes was innocent.”

Defense attorney didn’t bite citing in their response that that the CCSAO refused to include in the statement: “(i) the facts that were known to ASA Lanier prior to and at the time she decided to withdraw the CCSAO as intervenors in the COI proceedings; (ii) who ASA Lanier spoke to about the COIs; and (iii) the reason(s) for her final decision to withdraw the CCSAO as intervenors in the COI proceedings.”