Chicago City Wire

City attorneys are rejecting a motion by lawyers for Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes, convicted of a 1998 double murder, for a summary judgment in their wrongful conviction case on charges that the city’s policies and practices violated their constitutional rights (Monell claims)  in their alleged wrongful prosecution.

Solache and DeLeon-Reyes spent nearly 20 years in prison for the 1998 stabbing deaths of a husband and wife and the kidnapping of their children in Bucktown. In 2017, former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx exonerated them on claims that the lead detective in the case Reynaldo Guevara, now retired, fabricated evidence and beat them into confessing. Foxx exonerated the two even though some in the State's Attorney's office remained convinced of their guilt.

They filed wrongful conviction lawsuits in federal court in 2018, and in 2021, Foxx’s office did not oppose Certificate of Innocence for them, giving them a stronger case in their civil lawsuits in federal court.

In their opposition to their motion for summary judgment on the Monel claims, city attorney Eileen Rosen wrote that Solache and DeLeon-Reyes “admit that no matter what this Court decides, causation for this [Monell] claim has not been established.”

“In conceding that they have not proven causation, Plaintiffs fail to recognize that they also have not proven another element—that they suffered constitutional violations that are the basis for the Monell claims based on Brady violations [withholding of evidence],” she wrote. “As a fundamental principle, if no constitutional violation occurred, the alleged City policies are ‘quite beside the point.’”

“Moreover,” she continued, “their apparent request is for issue preclusion for a sweeping general conclusion that the City had ‘an official policy of suppressing exculpatory and impeachment evidence on only one of three elements that they are required to prove would fragment their Monell claims and will not result in ‘judgment’ on the claim, but merely an ‘adjudication of an element, which as explained below, the caselaw prohibits.”

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.

For an earlier story on the cases, Foxx’s office did not respond to a request to explain the office's position on the COIs -- they earlier opposed them. 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.”