Chicago City Wire

One of the hundreds of convicted murderers exonerated by former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx over her eight years in office was recently sentenced to 12 years for a 2019 home invasion in the Belmont Cragin section of town. 

Just a year before the home invasion, Foxx exonerated Ricardo Rodriguez, a member of the Spanish Cobras street gang, who quickly filed a wrongful conviction suit. 

This past May, Rodriquez received a $5.5 million settlement from the city while his home invasion case was pending.

“After a prosecutor laid out detailed allegations of the home invasion and kidnapping against Rodriguez, they noted that Rodriguez was a convicted murderer who received a 60-year sentence in 1997,” wrote CWB Chicago reporting on the home invasion sentence.

‘“It was vacated,” Rodriguez interjected firmly. “I was wrongly convicted. It was vacated.’”

“The prosecutor knew nothing about the wrongful conviction finding, but Rodriguez’s claim was absolutely true.”

Rodriguez was convicted of the 1995 murder of Rodney Kemppainen, a 38-year-old homeless man, on the Northwest Side. Rodriguez, a member of the Spanish Cobras street gang, claimed that now retired detective Reynaldo Guevara coerced him into confessing and framed him for the murder. A key eyewitness in the case recanted. Then, after serving 21 years of his 60-year sentence, a judge vacated Rodriguez’s conviction in March 2018 at Foxx’s request.

Rodriguez is one of over a dozen who have claimed retired Detective Reynaldo Guevara abused and framed them in allegations, often recounted in news reports, that characterize Guevara as a “disgraced” detective. Yet, no evidence has ever been presented that Guevara, who has repeatedly taken the fifth in these cases on the advice of his attorneys, ever abused any suspects.

One key difference in the Rodriguez exoneration is that a Cook County judge denied his petition for a certificate of innocence (COI), a rejection that was upheld by an appeals court in 2021. A COI would have entitled Rodriquez to $200,000 from a state fund, in addition to this wrongful conviction settlement.

Foxx came to Rodriguez’s rescue again when in February 2019 her office dropped drug charges against him. This helped avert his deportation, according to former Chicago union spokesman and author, Martin Preib, who has researched dozens of Foxx exoneration cases.

“In addition to his gang membership, some of the evidence used to deport Rodriguez was a list of criminal offenses, which included two felony drug convictions,” Preib wrote in October 2022 in the Contrarian. “In one of the most suspicious acts in the long list of controversies that have plagued the Foxx administration, prosecutors walked into court and vacated the two ancient felony convictions against Rodriguez.”

“Why is a prosecutor going so far out of her way to vacate convictions from more than a decade earlier that will allow a member of a gang that has been terrorizing Chicago for decades to remain in the country?" Preib wrote. 

Over the past 13 years, Chicago taxpayers have dished out nearly $300 million in wrongful conviction settlements, according to a December 2023 NBC Chicago report. The payouts increased dramatically in 2021 and 2022, the report said. The Guevara cases alone could cost taxpayers $1 billion.

In another exoneration case involving Spanish Cobras, Foxx just last month effectively vacated the 2019 conviction of Alexander Villa when her office informed a judge they would not retry the case. 

Villa, and two other Spanish Cobras, were charged with the 2011 murder off-duty police officer Clifton Lewis. When he was shot, Lewis was working part time as a security guard at a Westside convenience store to earn extra money for his upcoming wedding. The other two gang members, Edgardo Colon and Tyrone Clay, had their charges dropped before their trials. Both have already filed civil rights suits. 

In justifying the exoneration, Foxx left some of her own prosecutors hanging by falsely accusing them of misconduct.