Chicago City Wire

The wrongful conviction lawsuit filed last week by Marilyn Mulero doesn’t make her innocent of the 1992 execution style murder of a rival gang member, a crime she confessed to and spent 27 years in prison for.

Neither does Gov. JB Pritzker’s commutation of her sentence in April 2020, nor does Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx ‘s vacating her conviction two years later. It doesn’t read that way in the mainstream media -- news reports of the filing of the wrongful conviction suit that for the most part that quoted only Mulero and her lawyer.

The exoneration and the lawsuit, as many others, are based on claims of police abuse extreme enough to get someone to confess to a murder they did not commit. In this case, the detectives were Reynaldo Guevara and Ernest Halvorsen (now deceased); they have been named in at least a dozen other wrongful conviction cases.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL) | Facebook/Governor JB Pritzker

Another Guevara wrongful conviction case involves Gabriel Solache and Arturo De-Leon Ryes, convicted for the 1998 murders of a husband and wife and the kidnapping of their children. Besides having their convictions vacated, a judge granted them Certificates of Innocence (COIs) last November.

But even Kim Foxx’s office, which initially opposed the COIs, then reversed itself, was prepared to sign off on a declaration in the wrongful death suit brought by the men that their non-opposition to the COIs “did not reflect a final determination that either Petitioner Solache or Petitioner Reyes was innocent.”

And one former assistant State’s Attorney Eric Sussman told CBS Chicago when the charges were dropped against the two: “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 for an earlier story that he "certainly didn't believe that he [Guevara] coerced confessions in that case."

In another, older case, former Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, acknowledged that the media had a significant influence on him when in 2015 he commuted the sentence of Tyrone Hood, convicted in the 1993 murder of college basketball star Marshall Morgan Jr.

Quinn admitted in a 2015 panel discussion at the University of Chicago Law School that a 2014 published story in the New Yorker strongly influenced his decision. In the story by Nicholas Schmidle, Hood claimed that detectives “slapped him in the head and thrust a gun in his face” in an attempt to get him to confess. Schmidle also pointed to Morgan’s father as the real killer. But the story, the city attorneys say, omitted key facts, and misquoted Morgan’s mother implicating her son’s father in the murder. The detectives, moreover, deny abusing Hood.

The media campaign, city attorneys said in the case, was orchestrated by the Exoneration Project (EP), an arm of Loevy & Loevy, the law firm representing Hood. EP attorneys were part of the same University of Chicago panel discussion with Quinn.

“At the Panel Discussion, members of the EP and Gov. Quinn openly acknowledged just how important the strategy was in getting Hood’s case on Quinn’s radar,” the court filing by city attorneys said. “Two EP attorneys credited the media with ‘playing a huge role in multiple stages with Hood,’ including the ability to either pressure Quinn or get his attention over 4,000 other petitions.”

“EP attorney Karl Leonard,” the filing continued, “said that ‘one of the big advantages’ the EP had to offer was its media contacts and ‘friendly reporters who will report on these stories when we ask them to.’”