Chicago City Wire

The newly installed head of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s (CCSAO) post-conviction section, which reviews claims of innocence by prison inmates, runs a side business that connects attorneys with the inmates making the claims.

On Wednesday, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx named Michelle Mbekeani, senior legal and policy advisor for justice reform in Foxx’s office, as head of the Conviction Review Unit, formerly the Conviction Integrity Unit.

Mbekeani, a lawyer who never prosecuted a case, is the Founder/CEO of Periodsentence.com, a subscription service for attorneys looking to connect with inmates claiming innocence.

One former assistant prosecutor who asked not to be identified called Mbekeani’s appointment a “sickening conflict of interest.”

“Talk about the wolf watching the hen house,” the former prosecutor said. “Imagine the business she’s going to get when attorneys know that she’s the one reviewing the cases.”

The CCSAO media relations office did not respond to a request for comment on Mbekeani’s business arrangement.

The Periodsentence.com website advertises that it “gives people in prison a free digital platform to search and access legal assistance and advocacy for their innocence claims and post-conviction relief.”

To take advantage of the services, “attorneys purchase a yearly subscription to Period which allows them to create a profile about their services and eligibility requirements.” The yearly subscription rate is not advertised on the website.

According to the CCSAO website, the post-conviction unit in the CCSAO is “responsible for reviewing claims of actual innocence or wrongful conviction resulting from prosecutions by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.”

“The Unit reviews any claim from a living person who was convicted in Cook County,” the website says. “Cases come through many sources, including letters from the convicted person, their loved ones, and attorneys; post-conviction filings that raise actual innocence claims, the work of Innocence and Exoneration projects, media investigations, and internal sources.”

In a profile section on her site, Mbekeani notes that she worked “alongside the National Innocence Project and crafted legislation that prohibits an interrogation tactic that has led to false confessions – including the Exonerated Five in the Central Park Jogger case.”

Those five exonerations, and dozens of other – many initiated by Kim Foxx -- have mushroomed into a multi-million dollar industry for plaintiffs’ lawyers and their clients (the once convicted murderers), and they continue to be challenged by critics of soft-on-crime policies.

“Chicago's radical movement is clearly moving to preserve Foxx's war on cops by appointing an anti-police zealot as head of CIU (conviction unit),” former FOP official Martin Preib, who has spent years researching exoneration cases, told Chicago City Wire in an email. “It will be her job to preserve the false narratives that comprise the exoneration movement, which is in truth an attack on the justice system. The Central Park Five were clearly culpable in the crimes for which they were convicted.”

As example, Foxx has vacated the convictions of many convicted through the investigative work of former Detective Reynaldo Guevara. In one Guevara case, the CCSAO without explanation withdrew its opposition to Certificates of Innocence for two, Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes, convicted in the 1998 murders of a husband and wife and the kidnapping of their children. This, while some prosecutors insisted that the two were guilty.

A recent WTTW analysis showed that Chicago taxpayers have now shelled out $178 million since January 2019 to resolve lawsuits brought by more than three dozen people who claimed they were wrongfully convicted.