Chicago City Wire

Repeated requests of Kim Foxx’s office and a follow-up request from an attorney to provide public documents to Chicago City Wire related to dozens of exoneration cases have been ignored. 

The cases center around retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara who has been named in nearly 30 wrongful conviction lawsuits, and separate request for any files related to Certificates of Innocence (COIs) awarded in late May to brothers Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, convicted of a 1997 murder.

A City Wire reporter made the initial requests of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO) for the Guevara documents in mid-May, and the request for the Hernandez files in early June. An attorney representing the paper followed up on the requests earlier this month.

Under the Freedom of Information Act law (FOIA), the CCSAO has five days to reply. The only response arrived six days beyond the legal deadline; it was a note that claimed to include an attachment with files on some of the cases (it contained nothing), and a promise to send more. There was no response to the Hernandez request.

Chicago City Wire is seeking all internal emails, texts and memos related to all Guevara cases that CCSAO has dropped or overturned, and any correspondence the office may have had with outside parties, including the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the wrongful conviction cases, some now in federal court. In addition, City Wire is looking into why the CCSAO did not fight the COI petitions by the Hernandez brothers and in at least one other case, that of Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes, convicted in the 1998 stabbing deaths of a husband and wife and the kidnapping of their children. A judge awarded Solache and Reyes COIs last November.

The office initially opposed the COIs for Solache and Reyes but then suddenly reversed itself. It’s unclear why in light of the fact that a former assistant state’s attorney believed the two to be guilty of the crimes. For an earlier story, a media spokesperson for the CCSAO had no comment on the reversal.

In the civil case, CCSAO attempted to get the defense attorneys to buy into their releasing a statement in lieu of First Assistant State’s Attorney Risa Lanier being deposed in the case – the statement, according to court documents, would have included that not challenging the COIs “did not reflect a final determination that either Petitioner Solache or Petitioner Reyes was innocent.”

In a response to a 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.”