Chicago City Wire

A champion of equality and diversity, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was recently hit with a race and age discrimination lawsuit by a highly respected former assistant prosecutor.

The former head of the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), Nancy Adduci, a 54-year old white woman, filed her lawsuit in federal court eight months after being fired in December 2023, and being replaced by Michelle Mbekeani, a 33-year old black woman. Adduci had 27 years of prosecutorial experience with the office, while Mbekeani had none—she was initially hired as a policy advisor to Foxx. Under Mbekeani, the CIU was renamed the Conviction Review Unit. 

According to the lawsuit, Adduci was told that her firing had nothing to do with her performance, but the office wanted someone “more representative of the community.”

Adduci, who in 2021 received a fellowship with the American College of Trial Lawyers, an honor earned by only 1% of attorneys, was seen as a check on Foxx’s fondness for exonerations—250 since taking office in late 2016, with few being the result of new evidence indicating innocence but based on claims of police abuse and prosecutorial misconduct instead. 

Mbekeani quickly came under fire in her new position for running a side business that one former Assistant prosecutor told Chicago City Wire was a “sickening confliction 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.

Mbekeani resigned in July.

In March, Judicial Watch (JW), a Washington, D.C.-based conservative watchdog group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office seeking email records and all documents pertaining to the exoneration of convicted offenders.

The FOIA came in the wake of a series of articles published in Chicago City Wire that reported on Mbekeani’s side business.

The FOIA request was first reported by former Chicago police union spokesman Martin Preib in his Substack blog “Crooked City.”

“The dozens of false exonerations and civil lawsuit payouts are the heart of the corruption in Foxx’s office,” Preib told Chicago City Wire for an earlier story. “The office is supposed to prosecute and jail bad guys, not free them and make them and their lawyers millionaires.”

Last October, Chicago City Wire filed two complaints against Foxx’s office for not responding to FOIA requests that sought details into why the office supported the exonerations of once convicted murderers, and why it reversed itself in opposing Certificates of Innocence (COIs) for two men convicted of the brutal 1998 murder of a husband and wife and the kidnapping of their children in Bucktown.

A separate FOIA requested documents related to the exonerations of brothers Juan and Rosendo Hernandez, convicted of a 1997 murder.