Chicago City Wire

Michelle Mbekeani, the controversial head of Kim Foxx’s Conviction Review Unit (CRU) in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office (CCSAO), is leaving the position after just six months, multiple sources have told Chicago City Wire.

Her purported last day on the job is July 1. The CCSAO did not return a request for comment on the reason for her departure.

Foxx appointed Mbekeani, a 2014 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, to the head of the CRU in December 2023, and she quickly came under fire for running a side business that one former Assistant prosecutor told Chicago City Wire was a “sickening conflict of interest.”

She tried to pass the business, Periodsentence.com, off in the media as a "class project." 

But in January Cook County Judge Michael McHale called her out during a post-conviction case for her role as Founder/CEO of Period, a business that connect inmates, claiming innocence, with defense attorneys. Mbekeani was effectively working both sides of the legal system, Judge McHale said.

“A Prosecutor takes an oath to be an advocate of the victims of crimes, and families of the victims of crime,” the judge said during a January 8 hearing. “Our criminal courts work as an adversarial system. We have defense attorneys representing the accused on one side, and we're supposed to have a prosecutor representing the People on the other. When those roles become entangled and blurred, as they most certainly were in this case, the public loses trust and confidence in our criminal justice system. It creates an appearance that something unethical is occurring.”

Judge McHale barred Mbekeani from his courtroom on the case, and all future cases.

After Chicago City Wire first reported on Mbekeani’s business on December 7, Periodsentence.com was closed to public access.

City Wire also ran a story of a photo surfacing on X in which Mbekeani is seen accepting a check for $75,000 made out to the business.

“Super excited that one of our @chicagobooth Neubauer Civic Scholars Michelle Mbekeani is the winner of this Year’s @RustandyCenter Social New Venture Challenge!,” the May 23 X post by the Chicago Booth School of Business reads. “Her org Period helps the incarcerated find a lawyer to help prove their innocence. http://Periodsentence.com.”

Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), City Wire has tried to find out more about Mbekeani’s duties as head of the CRU, but multiple requests for communications with other staff, and separately with freed convicted murder Eric Blackmon, has so far gone unfulfilled.

Under Foxx, over 250 have been exonerated. At least some of the exonerations, as reported here, have lacked evidence strong enough to overturn the convictions.

Foxx has six months remaining in her second term, and she announced in April 2023 that she will not be running for re-election. In November, Eileen O’Neill Burke, the winner of the Democratic Primary, faces off against Republic Bob Fioretti and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski.

In the April Democratic primary, Burke defeated Foxx’s hand-picked successor Clayton Harris III.