A federal judge has rejected a motion by plaintiffs Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes to set a trial date in their controversial wrongful conviction lawsuits.
Instead, Judge Steven Seeger of the U.S. District for the Northern District of Illinois ordered attorneys for the plaintiffs and police officer defendants to continue with filings for summary judgment (pre-trial ruling), filings that have already reached thousands of pages.
“The parties have filed five motions for summary judgment, supported by thousands of pages of exhibits,” Judge Seeger wrote in his ruling last month. “And that's before the parties have filed responses, let alone replies.”
Arturo Reyes and Gabriel Solache
| Chicago Police Department
The judge also ordered both sides to limit the length of their motions and replies and extended a deadline for motions and replies. The deadline for replies is Dec. 20.
From the outset, the Solache and DeLeon-Reyes cases have sparked outrage among some Cook County prosecutors and law enforcement, and heightened revulsion for a spate of exonerations under the now former State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.
In their 2018 wrongful conviction complaints, lawyers for Solache and DeLeon-Reyes claimed that police, including retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara, fabricated evidence and coerced them into confessing to the 1998 stabbing deaths of 43-year-old Mariano Soto and his 35-year-old wife, Jacinta, and the abduction of their two children in Bucktown.
In 2000, Solache was sentenced to death and Reyes to life for the murders. Also convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the murders was 23-year-old Adriana Mejia who presented the kidnapped two-month-old child as her own. Mejia, who remains imprisoned, maintained for many years that all three were involved in the murders.
But in 2017, Foxx vacated the Solache and DeLeon-Reyes convictions, and in 2021 her office reversed its opposition to Certificates of Innocence (COIs) for the two men.
For an earlier story on the cases, Foxx’s office did not respond to a request to explain the reversal on the opposition.Yet at one point in the case, the state’s attorney’s office offered to release a statement in exchange for protecting a top official from being deposed in the case; the statement said that their reversal in their opposition “did not reflect a final determination that either Petitioner Solache or Petitioner Reyes was innocent.”
One former assistant State’s Attorney Eric Sussman told CBS Chicago when the charges were dropped: “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 in an email for an earlier story that he "certainly didn't believe that he [Guevara] coerced confessions in that case."
The law firm representing DeLeon-Reyes is Loevy & Loevy; the People’s Law Office is representing Solache.
Under Foxx, more than 250 convicted felons were exonerated. Many detectives, police officers and prosecutors have been named. Nearly all cases lacked evidence indicating innocence, but instead relied on unsubstantiated claims of police or prosecutorial misconduct, or both.
Foxx’s tenure heading the State’s Attorney’s ended earlier this month when newly elected Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke was sworn in. Under Burke, the office is expected to adhere to the rule of law – applying evidence over allegations.
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