The grand jury subpoenas come after federal Judge Paul Diamond claimed Krasner was not protected by a prosecutor’s right of absolute immunity because, Diamond ruled, Krasner was acting outside the scope of his duties as prosecutor in connection with a wrongful conviction bid for a man trying to overturn his murder conviction.

The subpoenas may mark the first time a top prosecutor has faced a criminal inquiry surrounding a wrongful conviction case. Such an inquiry represents a potentially seismic shift in the Department of Justice strategy of dealing with big-city, George Soros–supported prosecutors like Krasner, for whom exonerations became a powerful means to attack the police and garner hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements against cities.

That wasn’t the only instance in which the feds have stepped in on a controversial case tied to Krasner. Feds announced additional charges against Eric Lewis, 35, for the October 10, 2026, ambush shooting that killed Philadelphia Police Officer Shane Seiber and seriously wounded Officer Hector Rodriguez.

Adding to the outrage over the shootings is that fact that Lewis had been acquitted for the fatal shooting of a man in 2019. If Lewis had been convicted, he would not have been on the street to gun down two officers, one fatally, a few weeks ago. Krasner and police officials have been pointing fingers at each other over the failed conviction of Lewis that let him back on the streets to kill again.

But the sentiment seems to be strong that police and the feds are suspicious about Krasner’s claims concerning how and why Krasner’s prosecutors failed to convict Lewis. A sign of this suspicion was revealed in the decision by the feds to step in and add federal charges against Lewis for the police shooting.

Ralph Cipriano from Big Trial substack:

In hitting Lewis with an initial five charges, the feds are just getting started with taking over the homicide case from Krasner’s incompetent DAO.

The additional federal charges were announced by US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania David Metcalf, who had some striking comments about the case.

From Fox News:

In announcing the additional charges, Metcalf emphasized that the federal charges are necessary because state-level proceedings may not have addressed all aspects of the case. “No one attacks law enforcement without facing the consequences,” Metcalf said.

Whoa. Wait a minute there, Mr. Metcalf.

That’s not true, not at all.

The truth is that three men in Chicago who are members of the Spanish Cobras, a street gang that has been terrorizing Chicago for decades, are not only walking free from the 2011 execution murder of Chicago Police Officer Clifton Lewis, but they are also currently in the federal courts attempting to get rich, alleging highly dubious claims of police and prosecutorial misconduct over their arrest.

Officer Clifton Lewis was working security at a convenience store to earn money for his upcoming wedding when two of the gang members entered the store intent on robbing it. They shot Lewis, who had announced he was a police officer. A third gang member waited outside in a getaway car.

The decision-making under former Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx in the Officer Clifton murder case is every bit as suspicious as anything alleged against Krasner. Foxx, like Krasner, was a Soros-supported prosecutor who also embraced dubious exoneration cases.

And despite pleas to the supposed reformer who replaced Foxx, Eileen O’Neill Burke, to recharge the Cobras after Foxx left office, thereby restoring some degree of sanity after two terms of Foxx, Burke, a Democrat, refused to take up the case again. Similarly, pleas to former Attorney General Pam Bondi and the current federal prosecutor Andrew Boutros to recharge the gang members have also generated a particularly ominous Chicago silence.

So Metcalf’s claim in Philly that “no one attacks law enforcement without facing the consequences” is not binding in Chicago.

Why?

There are compelling reasons for the feds to take up the case apart from the simple fact that Officer Lewis’s murder cries out for justice. A main one is this: recharging the gang members could reveal the playbook of the exoneration movement in Chicago, a movement that has scored hundreds of millions of dollars in dubious settlements paid by taxpayers based upon police and prosecutor misconduct claims.

Kimberly Foxx would certainly be center stage in revealing the highly suspicious conduct of public officials in not only this case but the vast majority of her exonerations. It might cast a dark shadow on the prosecutors working underneath Foxx as well, demanding explanations on whether Foxx subordinates were following the law or merely following orders they may have known were outside the bounds of reasonable decision-making for a prosecutor. The Chicago media would also be exposed.

How deep could the exoneration playbook be revealed? The long history of suspicious conduct by private investigators in exoneration cases, conduct going back all the way to 1998, could also get another look.

Chicago City Wire journalist W. J. Kennedy revealed a police report that Destiny Rodriguez, a central witness in the case against one of the Spanish Cobras, went to the Elgin Police Department and filed a police report claiming that a private investigator threatened her to change her statements.

From the City Wire article:

An Elgin Police Department report obtained by Chicago City Wire shows that Rodriguez filed a complaint about contact she had with Jordan Scherer, a private detective who asked her to claim that the Chicago police bribed her to testify against Alexander Villa—one of the three convicted of Lewis’s murder while he was working off-duty as a security guard at a West Side convenience store.

“I am one of the nice guys,” Scherer said to Rodriguez according to the November 8, 2022, police report, “and there are going to be some not-so-nice guys who will come looking for you.”

And Chicago’s mainstream media coverage of the police report?

Nothing.

While it is reassuring to see that the feds in Philly seem to be pushing aside Krasner in a police murder case by adding extra federal charges, the refusal of the feds to recharge three gang members for a police killing in Chicago is a blight on the DOJ, a blight Attorney General Todd Blanche should immediately address.

After all, it is a central promise of the Trump administration that murderers of police officers should feel the full weight of justice.

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

It takes the form of a massive scandal unfolding against Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner in a collection of rulings, verdicts, and statements that paint a portrait of a radicalized prosecutor possibly breaking the law in his zeal to the sacrifice his office to the exoneration industry.

Sound familiar?

The storm is now gaining strength after media outlets announced the feds have sent subpoenas to Krasner. From Fox News:

The Justice Department sent grand jury subpoenas to Democratic Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office in recent days, Fox News has learned.

Two sources briefed on the subpoenas say they are related to potential obstruction of justice relating to the handling of cases before federal judges. The sources said the subpoenas came as a result of a federal judge referring Krasner and his top deputy to the DOJ for possible criminal investigation.

The allegations against Krasner and his staff arise from federal judge Paul Diamond’s rulings condemning the tactics employed by Krasner’s office, in particular Krasner’s willingness to push a dubious exoneration claim for a man named Dennis Johnson, whose exoneration cause was embraced by the Philadelphia Innocence Project.

In his memorandum, the judge talked about the credibility problems that plague Krasner’s DAO in his crusade to empty the prisons of convicted killers, typically by lying and cheating.

“In the last two years, the Third Circuit, this Court, and the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court have condemned as dishonest repeated post-trial concessions of relief made by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office,” the judge wrote.

The judge cited the “false facts” of Johnson’s claims for a new trial and condemned Krasner and some of top lieutenants conduct in the case.

From Ralph Cipriano in Big Trial:

During the hearings, the judge was investigating why a faulty DAO concession granted to convicted killer Johnson, to aid his bid for a new trial, was contaminated with false facts.

“Here, four DAO supervisors credibly testified that the District Attorney himself and his lieutenant, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Stiegler, urged them to make false representations to this Court to ‘protect the office,’” the judge wrote.

“According to ‘the Four,’ the District Attorney threatened them with ‘consequences’ if they did not,” the judge wrote.

Judge Diamond referred Krasner to federal prosecutors. The unfolding Krasner scandal no doubt initiated a gnawing anxiety in Chicago, for it marks the first time a prosecutor has been referred to a federal criminal investigation in connection with the prosecutor’s actions in a wrongful conviction case.

What the federal prosecutors who take up the investigation of Krasner might not realize is that exoneration cases are a narrative black hole. Once corruption or misconduct is discovered in one case, a vast, terrifying tapestry unfolds spanning time, distance, and players. Who knows where the federal investigation of Krasner will go? One also wonders if key players in Chicago’s own wrongful conviction movement are facing a growing unease as the federal investigation against Krasner unfolds.

A sign that this unease is already settling in Chicago might be revealed in the absolute silence with which the Krasner bombshells are met by the Chicago media, a city completely adhered to its exoneration claims. Wouldn’t open-minded, curious journalists in Chicago who have covered exoneration cases for decades in Chicago be interested in what was taking shape in Philly? Can’t Chicago journalists see the shocking connections between what is happening in Philly and their own city?

But then, given the depraved condition of Chicago’s criminal justice system, that silence might be the best reaction for the media, for the risk of probing into Philly cases may pose too many dangers for a Chicago journalist.

Former top prosecutor Kimberly Foxx, after all, is an ideological soulmate of Krasner. Both Foxx and Krasner were part of a movement to elect radical, big-city prosecutors supported by philanthropist George Soros. Both prosecutors initiated anti-police policies and decisions while at the same time embracing highly dubious exoneration claims.

The Chicago City Council, for example, recently approved a $280 million settlement to a host of former prison inmates claiming they were abused by a retired detective, Ray Guevara. The Guevara cases generated their own allegations against Foxx, who admitted under oath that two of the men that her office let of prison were guilty of double stabbing murders and kidnapping. Foxx also stated under oath that her underlings made crucial decisions on exonerations. It will certainly be interesting to see if those underlings would agree with Foxx’s claims, or will an inquiry into the decision-making in Foxx’s office lead to the kind of finger-pointing now taking place among prosecutors in Philly?

Foxx also appointed attorney Michelle Mbekeani to head the Conviction Unit despite the fact that Mbekeani had ties to an organization that assisted offenders in making innocence claims.

Cook County Judge Michael McHale had some harsh words for Mbekeani when he confronted her about the apparent conflict of interest.

“The Illinois Supreme court firmly established that once an attorney (in this case a prosecutor) has retained and received the confidence of a client (in this case the People of the State of Illinois) she cannot serve adverse interests regardless of how innocent her motives or good intentions,” McHale said [on] January 11.

Then Judge McHale didn’t like the answers he was getting:

“While the above legal principles certainly apply to ASA Mbekeani’s conduct, this court also placed great emphasis on her complete lack of candor and her brazen attempts to evade telling the truth. In this court’s 17 years on the bench and 32 years working in the criminal justice system, it has never seen such manipulative efforts used before a judge in open court and to such a degree,” McHale wrote.

Lack of candor? Brazen attempts to evade telling the truth?

Sound familiar?

But what might be causing the greatest unease among Chicago’s media and public servants who embraced the exoneration narratives that have cost taxpayers so many hundreds of millions of dollars might be Foxx’s decision to drop charges against three Spanish Cobras for the 2011 murder of police officer Clifton Lewis.

There were compelling signs Foxx’s actions in this murder case were wholly unjustified and worth further legal scrutiny. Media-driven claims against prosecutors and cops in the case that were used to justify tossing convictions or charges against the Cobras crashed in the courtroom of Judge James Linn, who presided over the trial of Spanish Cobra Alexander Villa.

Judge Linn wasn’t having the exoneration claims:

“I conclude that Mr. Villa did get a fair trial. He was more than competently represented. I find these things to be matters that, looking at them either individually or collectively, would not have changed or not have been likely to change the outcome at trial. The petition for posttrial relief is respectfully denied,” Linn ruled.

Not only did Foxx drop charges against three gang members for the murder of a police officer, but she also fired a long-serving top prosecutor in her administration who oversaw trying the Spanish Cobras. A co-prosecutor quit before it was rumored he was about to be fired.

That’s quite a chilling picture of the Foxx administration: Dropping charges against three gang thugs for executing a cop, then firing the prosecutors who oversaw the trials of the men.

While the Chicago media refuses to address the blatant parallels between top prosecutors in Philly and Chicago, federal investigators should not refuse to do so. Restoring the criminal justice system, in particular holding police killers accountable, is a central theme of the Trump administration.

The feds must do their job not just in Philly, but Chicago as well.

And the media? Well, let them squirm.

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

From CBS:

The city of Chicago appears ready to pay out an eye-popping $260.8 million to 17 men framed for murder by notorious former Detective Reynaldo Guevara, after a unanimous vote by the City Council Finance Committee on Monday.

The massive payout is only part of the growing costs related to Guevara, who has been linked to dozens of wrongful convictions. The full City Council is expected to give the settlement final approval next week.

The payment will resolve 16 lawsuits filed by 17 men who spent a combined 384 years in prison before they were exonerated. The settlement means they will get an average of $680,000 for every year wrongfully served behind bars.

Party loyalty is the only explanation for a settlement by the city of Chicago to a collection of largely gangbanging, murdering thugs all claiming they were coerced into confessing to their atrocities by a retired detective, Ray Guevara.

The Guevara strategy is nothing new. For several decades, operators and allies within the Democratic Party in Chicago have banded together to target various detectives and prosecutors on the claim that these investigators were coercing confessions. Once a few cases tied to the detectives are overturned, voilà, a boatload of other inmates whose crimes were investigated by the same detectives suddenly claim that they were also victims of abuse.

The exoneration movement requires a level of media corruption never before seen in the American republic. Many of the claims against the detectives, including those against Guevara, are blatantly false, the exoneration mythmakers certain that the media lapdogs will certainly ignore this evidence, then attack the critics who point it out.

Among the media typists who genuflect to the exoneration cases on the claim that they are acting as journalists, rarely will any ever admit that the Guevara mythology was rejected by former Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who refused to overturn convictions tied to the former detective and his officers. An old-school Democrat who still believed that elected officials should fulfill their oath of office, Alvarez reviewed the claims of these offenders and refused to accept them.

The exoneration and settlement of Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes is perhaps the greatest obscenity of all the Guevara exoneration tales, for the two men were found guilty for their role in stabbing a couple to death some 59 times and kidnapping their children. Stacks of evidence point to the culpability of Solache and Reyes, including several depositions by a third offender in the case repeatedly fingering the two men as accomplices.

The case gets darker. Foxx even admitted in a deposition that Solache and Reyes were guilty of the double murder. Foxx’s bombshell deposition was only covered by one media outlet in the city, CWB Chicago. Without CWB covering the story, Foxx’s admission may never have been revealed by Chicago’s self-proclaimed “investigative reporters,” who are, in fact, nothing more than PR stooges for the exoneration industry.

But the Guevara settlements are a far greater scandal than a collection of potentially dirty criminal cases in a city known for its corruption. They are in fact a terrifying glimpse into the heart of the modern Democratic Party and the possible future of the American republic, particularly as the country heads into the midterms.

They reveal a city in which the prosecutor’s office may have been hijacked by a radical movement aimed at undermining the system, including a media colluding with those radicals; city attorneys unwilling to take on the task of righting the corruption the movement has imposed upon the city; police officers, detectives, and prosecutors criminalized; a gaggle of cowardly “representatives” in the city council bowing to the one-party overseers to approve the settlement without even picking up the phone to inquire of the myriad current and former prosecutors who, like Anita Alvarez, know the cases and don’t believe Guevara coerced the confessions.

They reveal not a vibrant city within a republic, but an outpost in a war against that larger republic, less than thirty days to the midterms.

U.S. Federal Judge Paul Diamond has referred criminal investigation against Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner and possibly some attorneys serving under him. In the wake of this referral, tensions are high among prosecutors, according to Big Trial journalist Ralph Cipriano.

“Over at the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, people are on edge because any day now, they expect to either get a call from the FBI, or get served with a summons to appear before a federal grand jury,” Cipriano wrote.

Is it time for Chicago prosecutors serving under former top prosecutor Kim Foxx to start getting nervous, as well?

Let’s review.

Krasner’s potential downfall is tied to perhaps the most influential strategy of the modern Democratic Party and certainly all Goerge Soros–supported prosecutors throughout the country: the exoneration of convicted killers. Imposing prosecutors like Krasner and Foxx paints a picture of radicalized prosecutors all too willing to criminalize the police and lionize killers, gang members, and rapists.

The Krasner scandal is tied to a wrongful conviction claim involving a convicted killer, Dennis Johnson. It is this case that has landed Krasner, and perhaps others, in hot water.

“U.S. District Court Judge Paul Diamond has concluded that DA Larry Krasner and ADA Matthew Stiegler, a top aide, may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to deceive the court,” writes Cipriano.

Normally, prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity in the course of their prosecutorial duties. But Krasner, according to Cipriano, is accused of threatening underlings.

“Judge Diamond heard testimony from four of Krasner’s top supervisors, who told the judge under oath that Krasner had threatened them with ‘consequences’ for disclosing conflicts inside the DAO,” reports Ciprinao.

Such threats, if true, would be outside the scope of a prosecutor’s absolute immunity protection, and so Judge Diamond initiated a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, perhaps the first time an exoneration scandal is landing on the desk of the feds for a criminal investigation.

Troubles may be emerging for prosecutors under Kim Foxx who were also tied to controversial exoneration cases.

The Chicago City Council recently approved a $13.5 million settlement to two illegal immigrants, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, once convicted of stabbing a couple to death and kidnapping their two children. The city council approval comes despite the fact that Foxx was deposed about the case and admitted under oath she believed the men were guilty of the crime.

The admission that Foxx believed the men were guilty was a bombshell in and of itself, posing this question: If even Foxx thinks the men are guilty, why is the city council voting to settle with the men, making them millionaires, and not trying them in federal court?

One reason may be that prosecutors, again under Foxx, initially contested a Certificate of Innocence (COI) petition by the offenders. Certificate of Innocence petitions are a bizarre Illinois statute allowing offenders to request a judge declare them innocent. Prosecutors have to contest them. If they don’t, the judge has no option but to grant them.

In the Solache/Reyes case, Foxx suddenly and inexplicably ceased to contest the COI. The sudden reversal by Foxx prosecutors placed a great burden on the attorneys defending the cops in the federal lawsuit brought by the men, as the certificate provides a legal ruling essentially declaring the men innocent, a difficult hurdle to overcome in a federal lawsuit.

Did Foxx’s sudden refusal to contest the COIs indicate a willingness by Foxx to aid the innocence case of the two men at the expense of prosecutorial integrity, much as the Krasner scandal is generating claims his office went out of its way to bolster a dubious innocence narrative on behalf of Dennis Johnson?

Well, it isn’t just Foxx admitting the men were guilty under oath yet still releasing them from prison and standing by while they obtained a COI that might have feds scratching their heads about Foxx’s conduct.

In the same deposition in which Foxx admitted Solache and Reyes are guilty, she also stated that “she did not know the details of exoneration cases or how her office investigated and determined whether to challenge certificates of innocence. . . . Those matters, Foxx said, were under the purview of the office’s number-two executive, then-First Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Risa Lanier,” according to CWB Chicago.

Did not know?

Well, now city attorneys defending accused cops want to depose Risa Lanier, no doubt to ask Lanier if Foxx’s statements are accurate.

CWB Chicago:

“The woman who served as Kim Foxx’s top assistant in the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office must sit for an under-oath deposition to explain why her office decided not to object to people convicted of murder receiving certificates of innocence even though Foxx personally believed some of the recipients were guilty.”

Is Lanier going to take responsibility or will she turn the responsibility back onto her boss, or to other prosecutors, or both?

Was it indeed your decision not to contest these COIs, Ms. Lanier? Was your decision made independently without the input of the top prosecutor?

Just as Philly prosecutors are on edge, Chicago prosecutors may be reaching for the Xanax as well, for if Foxx is passing the buck on who made such controversial decisions, who is going to take the responsibility for such ominous decisions in murder cases?

As more and more evidence of prosecutorial shenanigans emerges in exonerations by Soros-backed prosecutors, one can’t help but wonder if the feds will take a wider look at exonerations beyond just Krasner’s Philadelphia to other prosecutors throughout the country, like Foxx.

Where, prosecutors under Foxx may be asking, is that goddamn Pepto-Bismol?

From CWB Chicago:

“Frank Burrell spent about 20 years in prison for a 1999 murder conviction that was later overturned. On Thursday, a Cook County judge rejected his bid to be declared innocent of the crime, ruling that the evidence presented during a Certificate of Innocence proceeding did not undermine her confidence in the original conviction or the 32-year sentence he received.

Judge Tyria Walton ruled that Burrell failed to prove his innocence of any of the offenses for which he was convicted, saying the evidence presented during the proceeding did not cause her to question the original verdict or the findings that led to it. Still, he will remain a free man and the murder conviction will be off his record…”

Read More…

Krasner is one of the nation’s most high-profile “progressive prosecutors”—the far-left lawyers who won election to address “injustice” in the “criminal legal system.” Remarkably, Krasner is not the first or only such progressive prosecutor to get the unwanted attention of the feds. At least four others have found themselves in the spotlight. Perhaps it’s worth asking: Why do these purported reformers seem to have so little respect for the system they’re trying to run?”

Read More…

For at approximately the same time attorneys for the city’s corporation counsel were telling city council members that it would be best for the city to pay out yet another multimillion-dollar settlement to two murderous thugs, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, Judge Diamond was sending a request for federal prosecutors to investigate Philadelphia’s top prosecutor Larry Krasner and his underlings for their role in exoneration cases.

“U.S. District Court Judge Paul Diamond has concluded that DA Larry Krasner and ADA Matthew Stiegler, a top aide, may have engaged in a criminal conspiracy to deceive the court,” wrote Ralph Cipriano, whose Substack publication, Big Trial, has been covering the Krasner saga.

One source of allegations against Krasner and Stiegler arose from a prosecutor in Krasner’s office, DA Jaclyn Mason, a whistleblower in revealing Krasner’s suspicious conduct in exoneration cases, whose accusations have been called a “disaster” for Krasner.

“Because it showcased in the courtroom of Judge Diamond how Krasner’s alleged greatest achievement as a reformer—his so-called ‘exonerations’ that have been relentlessly championed by Krasner’s publicists at The Philadelphia Inquirer—are in fact a thoroughly corrupt enterprise based on collusion and willful prosecutorial misconduct.

Highly problematic concessions that were achieved by Krasner’s ‘prosecutors’ subverting the adversarial form of justice that’s been the standard in American courtrooms for 250 years . . .

And how were those concessions achieved?

According to that majority opinion of the state Supreme Court, Krasner’s ‘prosecutors’ achieved those concessions by routinely lying to and deceiving judges. While they were conducting intentionally corrupt investigations where they submitted false evidence to the courts, while hiding real evidence.”

An undue influence of exoneration advocates over the administration of former top prosecutor Kimberly Foxx has been a recurring theme in Chicago, including her actions in vacating the convictions of Solache and Reyes.

Solache, Reyes, and a third offender, Adriana Mejia, were convicted for their role in the 1998 double murders of Mariano and Jacinta Soto. They were accused of going to the Sotos’ apartment and stabbing the couple, then kidnapping the Sotos’ newborn and another child. Mariano was stabbed 39 times, Jacinta 20 times. Mejia reportedly was the one who hatched the plot against the couple. Court records claim Mejia was engaged in a bizarre plot to deceive her husband that she was pregnant, so she was searching for a newborn to claim as her own. The Sotos had a newborn. That’s why the three went there.

In a deposition, Foxx recently admitted she believed the men were guilty of the crime.

The Solache/Reyes “exonerations” are part of a larger body of cases in which Latino gangbangers claimed they were abused by now-retired Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara.

A peculiar and potentially chilling sign that Foxx sacrificed her administration to the aid of exoneration advocates, much as Krasner is now accused of doing, permeates the entire collection of “Guevara” exonerations. The reason is that Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, rejected overturning Guevara convictions.

This fact alone might be enough to justify a federal inquiry into what was taking place in the Foxx administration. But allegations of unjustified exonerations reverberate through Foxx’s entire administration, not just “Guevara” cases.

The truth is that the exoneration mania now under a microscope in Philadelphia is bush league compared to the frequency and suspicious nature of exonerations under Foxx in Chicago. The cases are rife with suspicious witness retractions, allegations of witness intimidation, and dubious investigations by prosecutors before approving exonerations. Perhaps most suspicious in the Foxx administration was the fact that her office initially challenged certificate of innocence petitions by Solache and Reyes, then arbitrarily ceased challenging them, a decision that paved the way for the men to garner a lucrative settlement from the city in federal court.

One reason Chicago is not seeing the headline-making reform challenging Krasner in Philadelphia is the fact that Chicago’s and Illinois’s tyrannical one-party rule—guarded by a corrupt, militant, and amoral media machine—seems to undermine the checks and balances of the political and judicial system Philadelphia still maintains.

Current top prosecutor, Eileen O’Neill Burke, campaigning as a reformer after the incessant scandals of the Foxx administration, has refused to address the signs of potential prosecutorial misconduct in Foxx exoneration cases. At the same time, Burke has fought the remaining exoneration claims under her administration, a sign that her administration recognizes at least some of the exoneration claims are bogus. Nevertheless, Burke refuses to address the ones, like Solache and Reyes, that took shape under Foxx. By failing to reform these injustices, Burke, a Democrat, is rubber-stamping potential corruption when she is obligated to uncover and remedy it.

Burke’s failure to address Foxx’s dubious exonerations could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

City attorneys under the corporation counsel regularly settle lawsuits by once-convicted offenders after dragging them through the courts for as long as a decade. The Chicago City Council, perhaps the most gutless collection of “go-along, get-along” bureaucrats in the nation, chooses to bankrupt the city by approving the settlements and destroying the lives and reputations of cops and prosecutors villainized in exoneration narratives rather than trying them in federal courts.

All these entities—Eileen Burke, the corporation counsel, the Chicago City Council—could easily have requested a federal probe of the Foxx administration, just as Judge Diamond has done in Philly.

Why haven’t they? One reason? They are all Democrats.

The call for the feds to criminally investigate Krasner’s administration is a crucial step in taking back the justice system from radicals funded by George Soros and revealing the real tactics and motives of their movement.

And once a federal investigation is initiated, who knows where it will lead?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

On August 28, the state FOP voted to expel Chris Southwood and Ike Hackett from the state FOP. Catanzara is the First Vice President of the state lodge and advocated for the expulsion of the two members, both of whom were once strong Catanzara allies.

The expulsion culminates a long record of Catanzara taking action against political enemies.

After taking office in 2020, Catanzara claimed that his predecessor, Kevin Graham, failed to notify Catanzara about cameras in the lodge office, and this was sufficient to have Graham suspended from his voting position of past president on the board. Graham was then ousted for several years, his vote, likely to oppose many of the bizarre mandates and spending proposals of Catanzara, nixed from the lodge.

When First Vice President Mike Mette confronted Catanzara and the board about what Mette claimed was suspicious spending of lodge money by Catanzara, Mette’s accusations went nowhere at both the Chicago and state lodges. Catanzara then kicked Mette out of his spot as a rep at the lodge, casting Mette back to patrol. It was a long fall from Catanzara’s grace, as the alliance of the two men no doubt played a key role in Catanzara’s ability to win the election for president in the first place. Then in a what might be interpreted as a powerful sign that Catanzara holds great sway over the FOP board, the board approved charges against Mette for Mette’s reported granting legal defense resources to an FOP member charged with a DUI.

Those charges against Mette are pending.

And just last week, sources indicate that Catanzara fired a long-serving office staff member at the union hall who once served as Catanzara’s secretary. Sources say someone reportedly sent the police to the staff member’s home for a “well-being check” after she called in sick, Crooked City has learned.

Most of these actions took shape with a federal criminal probe in the background, a probe recently confirmed in media reports citing two apparent subpoenas, one for the state lodge and one for the Chicago lodge. At least one subpoena, the state one, focuses on records tied to Catanzara.

The federal probe may at least, in part, focus on many of the same financial issues Mette brought up in his charges against Catanzara. If the federal probe determines there is merit to Mette’s allegations, it might be a black eye for the Chicago FOP board, which dismissed Mette’s charges, then turned around and filed charges against Mette himself.

A chilling question now looms behind Catanzara’s attacks. Are many of the targets by Catanzara also witnesses in the federal probe against him and/or the FOP board?

And if some of these individuals who are the recipients of Catanzara’s attacks are witnesses in the federal investigation, the decision by the FOP board to hire an attorney at the request of Catanzara in connection with the federal probe may be drawing members into a legal quagmire.

If the fed investigation, now demanding a large body of records from both the Chicago and state lodges, asserts misconduct to a criminal level at any members of the lodge board, members may be footing the bill for an attorney to provide legal aid to those offenders.

But shouldn’t the members of the lodge be allied with the investigators trying to discover if there was criminal misconduct at the lodge, not compelling members to provide legal assistance to any potential offenders?

Foxx herself was called to testify. It was a doozy of a testimony, even though the mainstream media did their darndest to keep it hidden. CWB Chicago reported that Foxx admitted she released two men, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, for a 1993 double murder even though she believed they were guilty of the crime. Not only that. Her administration walked away from contesting a certificate of innocence for the men. The decision not to contest the certificate of innocence means Foxx virtually paved the way for a multimillion-dollar settlement with the monsters who stabbed a couple in their apartment and kidnapped their two children.

And, oh yeah, they were illegal immigrants, kind of like poster children for the wisdom of President Trump’s immigration crackdown after Democrats like those in Chicago opened up the borders to impose one-party control throughout the nation in the guise of Chicago and Illinois. Why not? It works so well here?

Now the two once-convicted killers are out and about, free as birds and likely to be flush for the rest of their lives because they have filed a lawsuit claiming they were “coerced” into confessing to the police.

That’s the party line anyway. The case suggests to world-weary Chicagoans who know that nearly everything published in the media is a lie that the Foxx administration was likely engaged in a Chicago form of lawfare, tossing cases on behalf of allies in the radical left as a way to wage war on the criminal justice system at the same time foisting massive amounts of money from the taxpayers into the radical coffers.

Where all that money goes is never explained from the legion of Chicago’s “investigative reporters” and never will be.

Pressed for an explanation about the decision making in the Solache/Reyes debacle, Foxx’s answers sounded like a passing of the accountability buck. From CWB:

But during her deposition, Foxx often said she did not know the details of exoneration cases or how her office investigated and determined whether to challenge certificates of innocence, legal documents that mean an exonerated person is actually innocent of a crime. Those matters, Foxx said, were under the purview of the office’s number-two executive, then-First Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Risa Lanier.

After this bombshell statement, CWB then reported that city attorneys are scheduled to depose Risa Lanier herself.

Nevertheless, the can of worms has been opened. Looming on the legal horizon are other depositions that could be equally scandalous as the release of Solache and Reyes for the double murder, including the Foxx administration’s decision to drop charges against three Spanish Cobras for the 2011 murder of Chicago police officer Clifton Lewis. The dropping of these charges for a murder that was caught on video is a measure of how far Chicago has sunk into radicalism and dysfunction, an ominous sign of the danger the entire nation is faced with should the faction of the Democratic Party ruling Chicago expand their power even deeper into the national landscape.

If these maniacs stay in power, will there come a day when the murder of cops will be celebrated with a national holiday?

Despite the overwhelming evidence that these Spanish Cobras, a gang that has been terrorizing Chicago for decades, are guilty of murdering Officer Lewis, the Foxx administration didn’t just toss the case. Foxx ultimately also fired one of the lead prosecutors on the case and was rumored to be about to fire another when that prosecutor resigned.

Hang with me, dear reader. This is crucial to understand. One of those prosecutors, Nancy Adduci, filed a lawsuit against the Foxx administration and that lawsuit is slowly proceeding through the courts. At some point, Adduci will get her own bite at the deposition apple.

One prosecutor it might be of interest for Adduci to depose is Craig Engebreston, who was the lead prosecutor when the bizarre decision to drop the charges against the Spanish Cobras was made. It would be particularly interesting deposition because Engebretson is now one of the top prosecutors in the current administration of Eileen O’Neill Burke, the nominee who said she was going to reform the prosecutor’s office after the Foxx nightmare.

One might wonder why a prosecutor who dropped charges against police killers is now one of the top dogs under Burke. That’s a unique take on “reform.” The question is more pregnant when one considers the fact that Burke, unlike Foxx, refuses to acquiesce on current exoneration claims that Foxx once embraced unquestioningly. Does the fact that Burke refuses to release these offenders signify that she believes the exoneration claims are bogus?

If so, is Burke going to just let the dark era of Foxx slide into Chicago’s oblivion? Is she saying through her actions that all the victims of this era—from the cops, prosecutors, and family members of victims—can just suck it up?

By all means, then, let the depositions fly.

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

The union’s First Vice President, Mike Mette, has filed a petition to preserve evidence to the FOP board, a sign that Mette may be considering a lawsuit against the lodge after board members initiated internal charges against him.

Mette is being accused by a board member of approving legal defense funds to an officer charged with a DUI, an expenditure of lodge money for an off-duty incident that may not be sanctioned by the lodge. The charges are opaque. Legal defense for cops is a gray area, with many examples of the lodge at least providing some assistance to cops, particularly in instances in which the officers could lose crucial credentials allowing them to remain on the job. Such assistance has been provided in the past, but garnered no disciplinary response against the lodge member who approved it.

But a petition to preserve evidence suggests that Mette may be alleging a whistleblower-type lawsuit that the charges against him are retaliatory. Mette recently leveled his own charges of financial misconduct against FOP President John Catanzara, charges that were dismissed by both the Chicago and state lodges and are now headed to the national FOP. Mette’s claims that Catanzara was spending lodge money on personal items came right around the same time federal investigators sent a subpoena to at least some lodge officials demanding lodge spending records.

In response to the federal subpoena, the board of the lodge has hired an attorney, Terence Campbell. It is still not clear exactly who and what the federal investigators are looking at in their inquiry beyond the scope of financial matters. Some members are questioning why lodge members, and not those who may be under investigation, are paying attorney fees for the federal investigation. Campbell has not responded to questions via email.

The upcoming election could also play a role in Mette’s claims. If the board finds against him, he could be suspended, making him unqualified to run against Catanzara in the upcoming election in which Mette is rumored to be a candidate. In other words, questions emerge that at least some board members are using charges against Mette not for misconduct, but to prevent him from running in the next election. Such a scenario, if true, could increase Mette’s damages in a lawsuit exponentially.

The Mette petition to preserve evidence is not the only sign of battles arising from internal FOP fighting, in which President Catanzara seems to play a key role. On August 28, Catanzara, who is also first vice president of the state lodge, traveled to Springfield for a meeting in which former state lodge president Chris Southwood and state secretary Ike Hackett were expelled. The allegations claim a host of abuses against the men, both of whom once were, like Mette, Catanzara allies who fell out with the FOP president.

Such a vote to make killers like Arturo Reyes and Gabriel Solache rich takes place regularly in Chicago, but this time enough truth about the case has emerged in Chicago’s underground media and in a few novel legal tactics that the usual one-party corruption keeping the story out of the public imagination has failed.

More and more people in Chicago and beyond are seeing that what Crooked City has been claiming for nearly two decades is true: The exoneration of killers like Solache and Reyes, then making them rich through lawsuits, is the lifeblood of the modern radical Democratic Party, having originated in Chicago but now spreading across American cities like a cancer.

That the city is even considering a settlement for Solache and Reyes, both illegal aliens, is itself a stunning glimpse into the failure of large Democratic cities to govern or conduct a legitimate justice system. But the debate over this settlement—and the mainstream media coverage of it—promises to be a compelling event to witness, much like a horror movie, except that this one is real.

Let us consider many of the threads comprising this evil tapestry before contemplating the grand event in the city council about to take shape.

Solache, Reyes, and a third offender, Adriana Mejia, were convicted for their role in the 1998 double murders of Mariano and Jacinta Soto. They were accused of going to the Sotos’ apartment and stabbing the couple, then kidnapping the Sotos’ newborn and another child. Mariano was stabbed 39 times, Jacinta 20 times. Mejia reportedly was the one who hatched the plot against the couple. Court records claim Mejia was engaged in a bizarre plot to deceive her husband that she was pregnant, so she was searching for a newborn to claim as her own. The Sotos couple had a newborn. That’s why the three went there.

The Solache/Reyes “exonerations” are also part of a larger body of cases in which Latino gangbangers claimed they were abused by now-retired Chicago detective Reynaldo Guevara. This chorus of gangbangers claiming abuses never got any traction until Kim Foxx was elected as the city’s top prosecutor. Her predecessor, Anita Alvarez, rejected all the Guevara coerced-confession claims and refused to toss their convictions. That is until Foxx, a radical’s radical, breathed life into what was a hopeless exoneration mythology, which will ultimately cost taxpayers as much as a billion dollars.

This pivotal transformation in Chicago’s criminal justice system in the “Guevara” cases is itself worthy of scrutiny by the media, federal investigators, and anyone concerned about the demise of America through the radicalization of the Democratic Party, for it was an incredible act of leftist hubris by Foxx to toss the convictions, a brazen sign suggesting that these radicals could do whatever they wanted in Chicago.

One reason it was so brazen is that throughout the years the third offender, Mejia, was in prison, she repeatedly stated that Solache and Reyes were her accomplices. And even as the men walked free from prison, Foxx’s own top prosecutors stated in the media that they were guilty.

“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,” said Foxx’s top prosecutor at the time.

Hang in their dear reader. We got a long way to go.

A crucial statute in Illinois often determines whether “exonerated” killers get a massive payday. It’s called a certificate of innocence. Offenders petition for such a certificate from a judge. If they get the certificate, it makes it much harder for city attorneys to defend cops like Guevara in the federal lawsuit the offenders file in their crusade to not only become free for murder, but rich from taxpayers.

Who says socialism doesn’t work?

Prosecutors have to contest the petition by forcing a judge to admit the exoneration was shady. If the prosecutors don’t contest it, a judge has no option but to issue the certificate. In perhaps the most scandalous, corrupt move under the Foxx nightmare, her administration suddenly and inexplicably ceased contesting the Solache/Reyes certificate of innocence, almost as if Foxx was working on behalf of the exoneration attorneys guiding the case rather than working on behalf of the public she swore to protect.

In a sign of life for justice in Chicago, Foxx was recently questioned about the Solache and Reyes case in a deposition. She admitted she believed the men were guilty. The bombshell was covered by CWB Chicago, not the mainstream media in Chicago. Even after the CWB story broke, no mainstream outlet posed this question to Foxx: If you thought they were guilty, why did you let them out and not contest the certificates of innocence?

Are you getting depressed, dear reader, by that chilling sense that you do not live in a republic anymore, but rather a fast-evolving socialist hellhole? Did you think those chronically empty storefronts all over the city and those roving bands of gangbangers shooting, robbing, and stealing was just a “trend” and not an inevitable consequence of living in a one-party political machine that is, in truth, a sign that socialism and Marxism are taking shape before your very eyes?

Consider this, then. In the era of the Foxx nightmare, two police killers walked free; two men convicted of raping and murdering a young woman in one of the offenders’ basements walked free, then got rich; and a total of four prosecutors were fired or about to be fired before they left Foxx’s administration. Two of these prosecutors were criminally charged and endured the long nightmare of the leftist “process is the punishment” tactics chronically employed by Foxx and her allies. Thankfully, those former prosecutors had their case overseen by a suburban judge who ripped the charges against the prosecutors to shreds in a bench verdict. But the lesson was nevertheless sent to naive prosecutors and other public servants in Chicago still operating from a sense of duty or principle: Cross the mandates of the ruling party, and you are toast.

Take a break, dear reader. Get some more coffee. Put a bagel in the toaster and slather some extra butter on it, maybe even fry an egg. Your doctor may understand if you just explain to him or her what you now know about the Solache/Reyes case.

One of the early champions of getting the two men out of prison was an attorney named Karen Daniel, who worked at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University. When the two killers were released from prison, Daniel waited outside the prison gates. But the men never showed up. Instead, they were taken into federal custody because they were illegal immigrants.

While Daniel was a fervent exoneration attorney championing one ludicrous case after another, Northwestern became embroiled in a vast scandal, which had rocked Northwestern in the years before Daniel vainly waited outside the Pontiac prison for Solache and Reyes to emerge. The scandal centered on the university’s Medill School of Journalism, involving a controversial professor, David Protess, and various private investigators and students working under Protess as part of the school’s Innocence Project. Intense doubt was cast upon the journalism school’s claims about cases, in particular the means by which Protess, his private investigators, and his students obtained retracted witness statements that paved the way for “exonerations.”

After the scandal broke, the university initiated an investigation and issued the following statement:

In sum, Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters to students, alumni, the media and the public. He caused the University to take on what turned out to be an unsupportable case and unwittingly misrepresent the situation both to the Court and to the State.

All the while Protess was engaged in the conduct the university assailed, Daniel, who was killed in a 2020 traffic accident, was an attorney at the university. Did she truly not know what was going on at the Innocence Project under Protess? Whatever Daniel’s state of mind was, the Innocence Project scandal was so ominous that any exoneration claim issued from the university’s attorneys or journalists should have met with intense skepticism, especially a case like that of Solache and Reyes which held so much overwhelming evidence.

As it is now, dear reader, the public is paying more and more taxes to a political machine that sees them as little more than chumps who must witness the spectacle of the Chicago City Council debating whether to make Solache and Reyes rich through a settlement, a debate that perhaps will take shape within a few weeks.

You will certainly not see the only fair response the city council will make to this case coming before the council: a formal request for the Department of Justice to look into the Foxx administration on this and all the Guevara exonerations. Such a request would never, ever actually work for the ruling one-party banana republic of Chicago to a Justice Department under Donald Trump. The city council also would never take the necessary steps to truly reveal the corruption in the exoneration movement. If the city council did, the three decades of settlements they have made to this movement would reveal what almost anyone paying attention to Chicago already knows: the Chicago City Council is perhaps the most pathetic, corrupt political body in the country.

Keep an eye out for these dark dynamics. The most radical city council members—the ones chronically bloviating about social justice, racism most certainly will be the ones to make Solache and Reyes rich. The basic human rights of men, women, and children, like the victims in the Solache/Reyes murders, will recede, as they always do, in the machinations of the more radical aldermen’s crusade to maintain the lucrative exoneration industry, an industry whose revenue almost certainly finds its way back to the campaigns of these unapologetic radicals in the city council. The rights of these victims will also recede in order for the radical city council members to maintain their war on the system that the exoneration industry provides.

The other dynamic is to watch the huffing and puffing of the supposedly middle-of-the-road and police-supporting aldermen. Certainly many of them will oppose the settlement and make righteous speeches against it. But will they band together to take the necessary steps to undermine this movement?

Like demanding that the feds take a long, long look at the exoneration movement in Chicago?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Let us flush out some of these most compelling questions to understand how a big city justice system could be commandeered by the radical left and transformed into an actual weapon against the system itself, for Foxx’s decisions to release criminals more and more encapsulates a phrase the left reserves for their media attacks on the right: systemic corruption.

According to the lone voice of still-legitimate journalism in Chicago, CWB Chicago, Foxx’s former top prosecutor Risa Lanier will be questioned about the exoneration of two women, Marilyn Mulero and Madeline Mendoza, for a 1992 double murder.

The deposition will likely include one key event. After convicted killers like Mulero and Mendoza get released from prison in Chicago, they often petition for a certificate of innocence. Obtaining such a certificate from a judge makes it all that much harder for city attorneys to contest the inevitable lawsuit filed against police and prosecutors. In one of the most glaring signs of prosecutorial abuse under Foxx, the social-justice-bloviating public servant Foxx refused to contest some of these certificates despite the overwhelming evidence of the guilt in the cases.

So it wasn’t just a decision to release the convicted killers in the first place and then refuse to contest the certificate of innocence. No, not at all. The doubt surrounding Foxx’s exonerations was compounded a few months ago, when Foxx herself was deposed about her administration’s decision to release two men for the stabbing death of a couple and kidnapping their children, another case in which Foxx’s prosecutors suddenly dropped out of contesting a certificate of innocence. In the deposition, Foxx reportedly admitted the men were guilty of the horrific crime.

Hang on, dear reader. It’s a dismal, depressing saga.

Many of the cases the Foxx administration dropped were tied to a retired detective, Reynaldo Guevara, accused of coercing confessions from gang members. The allegations against Guevara, championed by the most corrupt media in the country, were rejected by Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, but within weeks of taking office, Foxx started letting out the criminals Alvarez claimed were still culpable.

So you see the vast disparity between the old school Democratic politicians and the new radicalized ones? It’s a powerful lesson for the entire country: These maniacs are dangerous.

CWB broke the story of Foxx’s deposition, in which she admitted the two men were guilty of the stabbing:

But during her deposition, Foxx often said she did not know the details of exoneration cases or how her office investigated and determined whether to challenge certificates of innocence, legal documents that mean an exonerated person is actually innocent of a crime. Those matters, Foxx said, were under the purview of the office’s number-two executive, then-First Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Risa Lanier.

Sure, Kim. Sure.

Now CWB reports Lanier is being called to a deposition:

Lanier is now expected to be questioned under oath about topics including the administration’s decisions not to contest the vacating of the Mulero and Mendoza convictions, discussions with the Exoneration Project about cases involving Chicago Police Detective Guevara, and the State’s Attorney’s Office’s decisions to stop investigating the validity of convictions Guevara played a role in.

Grab the popcorn. Put some extra butter and salt on it. This is gonna be good.

At this point, though, compelling questions emerge.

Some are obvious, like: Why did CWB Chicago break this story, but no one in the mainstream media? Why after the story broke has it not been picked up by the mainstream media to pose the myriad questions that emerge from it? Oh, the Pulitizers that could be won. The book tours. The media interviews.

Forget about it. The answer is simple. The mainstream media in Chicago is one of the most corrupt institutions in the country. Its zombies have been pushing bogus exoneration stories for so many decades, they are trapped in their own web of lies. If the reporters and editors truly believed these men were innocent, those media dogs would be scribbling line after line pointing it out in front-page stories. But their silence tells it all.

The sad story is that many in the Chicago media have less integrity than the worst street thugs in the city. They have not exercised the First Amendment; they have abused it, violated it. Their willingness to support the most vicious, violent offenders as a war on the system should be kept in one’s mind as they publish virtually daily attacks on police officers.

Here’s another question. According to CWB, plaintiff attorneys have fought the city attorneys’ question to depose Foxx and Lanier.

Why? If these attorneys believe the offenders are innocent, wouldn’t such depositions be welcome? Wouldn’t they help bolster their innocence claims, perhaps even increase their settlements or verdicts in the civil lawsuits, the lawsuits that are one of the only thriving industries in Chicago’s endlessly vacant storefronts and closed restaurants? Wouldn’t it be yet another opportunity to humiliate the big bad cops and prosecutors who set up their poor clients?

Another troubling question, very troubling, emerges.

Why are these questions holding Foxx and her subordinates accountable being posed by city attorneys and not the woman who billed herself as a reformer, the current top prosecutor Eileen O’Neill Burke? The question becomes even more compelling when one observes that the Burke administration is no longer folding on remaining and new exoneration fantasies nauseatingly turned into legal arguments, but contesting them, a vital sign that her administration recognizes fraud was endemic in the exoneration movement during the Foxx dark ages.

Why, then, wouldn’t Burke be the one grilling Foxx and Lanier, not city attorneys? Why wouldn’t she be gung ho to get to the bottom of the “Guevara” exonerations to find out which ones were substantial and which ones were bogus.

Here is why, dear reader.

While Burke is refusing to hold Foxx accountable, she is nevertheless willing to extend the energy and resources of her administration to pursue criminal charges against ICE agents. “Cook County’s Top Prosecutor Outlines Plan to Charge ICE Agents with Crimes” ran the headline of a Sun-Times article back in February.

So while Burke refuses to address the evidence of corruption against her predecessor, who seemed to think nothing of destroying the career and reputation of a Chicago detective or a prosecutor—detectives and prosecutors who faithfully served the public for decades—she dutifully bows to the radical faction of her party to undermine a policy aimed at addressing rampant illegal immigration that the majority of Americans support and voted for.

Burke is a goddamn Democrat and, at this point in America, no Democrat is willing to let it be known just how crooked their ruling radical faction truly is. It is impossible in America to find even a few Democrat politicians anywhere in the country worthy of a republic. If Burke digs into one Guevara case, just one, she could reveal a fraud so grand, so malevolent, that the corruption unfolding in Democratic strongholds like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia would be jaywalking in comparison.

Imagine, then, the trouble brewing among current and former prosecutors who worked under Foxx and obeyed her mandates despite private misgivings, despite perhaps everything they learned in the first year of law school, about that one document . . . what’s it called again? Oh yeah, the Constitution. Imagine the phone calls being made, the gossiping taking place. At some point, somebody may lie in a deposition or legal proceeding, as the exonerations appear more and more unjustifiable.

At this point, it will take a dozen “news” stories from the radical sycophants in the media to explain how it’s not really a lie, how white is actually black and up is actually down, in the same manner they argue a human predator is really a great guy and the courageous cops and prosecutors who put him in prison are, in fact, the criminals.

Well, let them, because there’s an even bigger fly in the ointment of the exoneration movement. One of the people Foxx sold down the river was Nancy Adduci, who led the prosecution of three Spanish Cobras for the 2011 murder of police officer Clifton Lewis. Foxx dropped all charges against the men, even after one had been convicted. She also fired Adduci. Not one to go gentle into that good night, Adduci filed a lawsuit over her termination. Foxx also fired other prosecutors under equally dubious circumstances, firings that thrilled the wrongful conviction crowd, none more so than their media lapdogs.

Many prosecutors shocked at Foxx’s tactics fled her administration, some writing letters expressing their disgust on the way out. Will all these outcasts from the Foxx revolution sit idly by should statements be made that these outcasts know are false?

Hardly. Each and every one of them has a story to tell.

Let the Chicago media try to spin those stories.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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Right now, the most pro–law enforcement president in the modern history of the nation is in office, proving time and again his willingness to back the police. At the same time, Chicago is ground zero for the radical Democrats seeking to expand their power throughout the country. The key strategy of this Democratic faction is a war on the criminal justice system.

One would think that an alliance of the Trump administration, particularly the Department of Justice, and the Chicago FOP would be a match made in heaven. Imagine the things they could get done. One would think that public appearances between Trump and the leader of the FOP, John Catanzara, would be frequent and friendly.

Consider. In his first administration, Trump already signaled his willingness to rescue Chicago from the grip of the radical lunatics now governing almost every institution in the city and state. For example, Trump and his DOJ quickly nixed the imposition of a consent decree on the Chicago police, one generated in the politicalization of the DOJ that took shape under Obama and Biden.

Never to be distracted from the war on law and order that now drives the depraved, radicalized Democratic Party, Chicago/Illinois political hacks former attorney general Lisa Madigan and former mayor Rahm Emanuel stepped in to resurrect the consent decree through legalistic trickery. In the wake of this dirty Chicago political move, the FOP folded like a cheap suit and the Democrats got their consent decree. But it was through no fault of the Trump administration.

When Trump came to Chicago in his first administration, he was met by former FOP president Kevin Graham at the airport, a meeting broadcast throughout the world.

But search the media and you will find no such photo-op, let alone the slightest indication of any communication or cooperation between Trump’s administration and the Chicago FOP under its current president, John Catanzara. In fact, you will find just the opposite.

In what many regard as a sign Trump wants nothing to do with Catanzara, the FOP president was reportedly turned away at the capital for a conference of big city police union leaders. Rather than work with Trump’s DOJ to root out the endemic corruption within Chicago by harnessing the power of the DOJ, it appears that either Catanzara, the FOP board, or both are being targeted in an investigation by the DOJ.

The FBI investigation seems tied to at least some allegations made against Catanzara by his first vice president, Mike Mette, allegations in which Mette claimed a host of financial abuses by Catanzara with FOP money. Mette’s allegations were dismissed by the FOP board and then by the state lodge, both entities that Catanzara holds great influence over. The allegations now head to the National FOP, where Catanzara’s influence is close to nil.

In the long list of claims and counterclaims surrounding the DOJ investigation of the FOP/Catanzara and the charges by Mette, two issues may illuminate just what is at stake.

In 2011, Officer Clifton Lewis was murdered while working a side job. Three Spanish Cobra gang members were ultimately charged with the murder. In the all-too-common corruption of Chicago’s depraved criminal justice system, the charges were ultimately dropped by Kim Foxx, the poster child for the radical Democrats’ war on cops.

Many of the scandals surrounding Foxx took place while Catanzara and the current board were in office, yet Foxx and her political allies never showed any signs they were concerned about the FOP.

Nevertheless, any police union that had the slightest moxie, the barest ability to navigate the political and legal channels of their city, would rally to right this depravity, including communication with the DOJ to assert the DOJ’s right to intervene on the Lewis murder case by bringing their own charges against the gang thugs, a move that would humiliate the Chicago radicals who have destroyed the criminal justice system in Chicago and their media lapdogs. In doing so, a sense of moral outrage would guide the actions of the FOP.

But the FOP has done little to nothing about this case, and there are no signs they are about to. Has the FOP in Chicago become so pathetic, so weak, so caught up in its internal bickering that it cannot even undertake an action to recharge the gangbanging scumbags for the execution-style murder of one of their own?

The second issue surrounds the allegation by Mette that Catanzara took money from both the Lodge and the state FOP to run for national president, totaling some $20,000. Despite taking the money, Catanzara ended up not running for national president, likely realizing he lacked the political support to do so. When asked about the money, sources say Catanzara claimed he used it to buy T-shirts with the image of slain police officer Ella French on it. Yet sources say Catanzara has not provided any receipt for this purchase, only an invoice.

Has the receipt been turned in? Is the absence of this receipt an issue that the feds are looking at in connection with Catanzara and the board, as well?

It’s a disturbing question, to say the least.

Consider all these issues in the face of the fact that an FOP election is approaching this winter. Rumors abound that Mette will run against Catanzara in that election. Just recently, FOP board members initiated their own charges against Mette, allegedly based on the fact that Mette approved paying for legal defense for an officer in a DUI case.

The approval was made more than a year ago, but charges are emerging only now. There is no accusation that Mette pocketed any money or benefited in any way from the approval. He made a judgment call, as many FOP board members have made in legal defense issues, none of whom have faced similar charges.

And so a question lingers in the dusty, putrid air of Chicago politics. Are the charges against Mette, in fact, politically motivated? Are they aimed not at misconduct but rather at the next election?

How would bringing charges against Mette affect the election? Simple. If Mette is found culpable by the FOP board—the same FOP board that rejected far more ominous charges against Catanzara, charges that seem to have interested federal investigators—Mette could be suspended and therefore become ineligible to run in the next election against Catanzara. With his main opposition sidelined, Catanzara could then glide into his third term as president of the FOP.

FOP members can now stand back and watch with one question lingering: Would the FOP board sustain charges against Mette that would prevent him from running for office and deprive many members the right to a candidate they strongly support simply to commandeer an election victory?

But no. It can’t be.

Not in Chicago.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Former prosecutor Nancy Adduci—whose assignments over two decades prosecuting the worst of the worst in the trenches of Chicago’s criminal courts included overseeing the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU)—is perhaps the poster child for the corruption wrought upon Chicago by former Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx.

Caught in a hailstorm of biased and fake news reports claiming that Adduci’s prosecution of three lowlife Spanish Cobra gang members for their role in the murder of police officer Clifton Lewis was dirty, Foxx fired Adduci from her long-serving post as prosecutor in the wake of the bogus media reports surrounding Adduci’s prosecution of the Spanish Cobras.

How ludicrous were the trumped-up media attacks on Adduci? Reporters echoed claims that one of the Spanish Cobras couldn’t have committed the murders because phone records obtained by the FBI indicate one of the offenders wasn’t in the vicinity of the crime. What the reporters didn’t bother to notice—and haven’t cleared up yet—is the fact that the FBI reports were cited in Pacific Standard Time, a two-hour difference from Chicago time. Taking into account the time difference, the FBI reports actually bolster Adduci’s conviction narrative.

Nevertheless, Foxx’s firing of Adduci served another crucial purpose: It put wind in the sails of the lawsuit by the Spanish Cobras against police and prosecutors, a lawsuit that can turn the gangbangers into millionaires. By getting the police killers out of prison, the case marked a climactic moment for the collection of prosecutors supported by radical philanthropist George Soros in big cities throughout the country, all of whom used their prosecutor’s office to wage war on the system, not strengthen it. The fact that one of these Soros-backed prosecutors, Kim Foxx, would engage in tactics that would assist police killers in escaping prison marks a radical shift in the tactics the new, radicalized Democratic Party will engage in.

Foxx’s firing of Adduci also sent a powerful message to public servants not only in her administration but throughout Chicagoland; the more committed and seriously you take your job, the more of a target you become. Go along and get along and you will be okay. Fight crime, as Adduci and so many other prosecutors did, and you are a target.

Doubt it? Look at the exodus of committed, long-serving prosecutors who were either fired or became so fed up with Foxx’s tactics they left. This trend is taking hold throughout Chicago and Illinois, not just in the prosecutor’s office. Virtually every institution in Chicago, including the police department, is ridding itself of committed, duty-minded public servants, turning departments into useless bands of bureaucrats willing to tow the party line even they don’t believe in.

This goes for people at the top positions in Chicago’s institutions. Many people, for example, were hoping for a restoration of sanity in Chicago’s criminal justice system with the election of supposed reformer Eileen O’Neill Burke, who narrowly defeated Foxx’s acolyte in the last election for prosecutor. Proving she is a Democrat first and public servant a distant second, Burke refused to recharge the three Spanish Cobras for the murder and stood silent as they marched into federal court to get rich. She also refused to send a powerful message to Foxx and her ilk by not rehiring Adduci to the position she had so faithfully served throughout her career.

Go along and get along.

Adduci did not go gentle into Foxx and Burke’s good night. She courageously filed a lawsuit against Foxx. That lawsuit has been winding its way through the courts at the same time the Spanish Cobra civil lawsuit winds its way through the federal courts, two entirely different narratives moving through local and federal courts.

In the meantime, there is other smoke emerging in the cockpit of the George Soros movement to radicalize big-city prosecutors.

Foxx, for example, was recently under fire for her deposition testimony in which she admitted she believed Arturo Reyes and Gabriel Solache were guilty of a horrific double murder and kidnapping of two children in 1993. What made Foxx’s admission so shocking was the fact that she vacated their conviction and then suddenly ceased contesting a certificate of innocence for the men, paving the way for the two men to become rich in a civil lawsuit à la the Chicago “justice” system, just as the three Spanish Cobras are attempting to do.

Another compelling development in the era of Soros-supported prosecutors is taking shape in Pennsylvania. The Supreme Court has investigated Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner, another Soros soulmate, for his opening up of prison doors.

Ralph Cipriano, a former L.A. Times and Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, covered this story on Substack:

The state Supreme Court also found that the work of Krasner’s prosecutors, in granting “highly problematic” concessions to 110 convicted killers, to be lacking in integrity. In past concessions granted by Krasner to convicted killers, the state Supreme Court found that Krasner’s “prosecutors” had routinely lied to and misled judges, submitted false evidence, withheld “relevant” evidence, conducted faulty investigations, and dodged required evidentiary hearings.

Sound familiar?

Adduci appears well-prepared in her lawsuit to refute the attacks against her by Foxx, including any allegations of misconduct in a police murder case. Her deposition of Foxx, therefore, could be revelatory. In fact, Foxx’s deposition could drag down a host of players in the Chicago criminal justice debacle, not just Foxx.

Consider: Adduci’s lawsuit against Foxx could undermine the integrity of Burke’s current administration, providing so much evidence that Foxx had no right to drop charges against gang members in a police murder case that Burke’s refusal to recharge the men approaches legal cowardice and amounts to a betrayal of Chicago police officers on a magnitude rarely seen in an American city.

The significance of Burke’s betrayal has been obfuscated by a Chicago police union president and board mired in its own scandals, including reports of a federal investigation concerning union funds.

In any case, it is not clear that the tactics employed by the current decision-makers at the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office regarding the lawsuit by the Cobras against the county comprehend the potential fallout from Adduci’s lawsuit. If the county does settle with the gang thugs, Adduci’s lawsuit, in particular her deposition of Foxx, could uncover so much egregious misconduct by Foxx that the decision to settle amounts to little more than a prosecutor’s office working on behalf of gang members.

Various voices in Chicago, including former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas, are calling for a federal investigation of the Foxx era. What if that federal investigation unfolds? How would the prosecutors who recommend settling the case rather than recharging the Cobras look then?

And what if, as has happened in other “exoneration” cases, the city follows suit by the Spanish Cobras and settles the case against the detectives? How would that settlement look in the wake of a Foxx deposition by Adduci’s attorneys ripping the decision-making by Foxx to shreds? How would the other cases the city has settled as a result of Foxx’s alliance with the exoneration movement look?

And perhaps most importantly, what shadow would be cast upon the Chicago media in the wake of Adduci’s lawsuit? The exoneration movement, particularly under Foxx, is media-driven, not judicially driven. The movement hinges on the fact that Chicago has purged itself of legitimate journalists and replaced them with drooling anti-police radicals who cut and paste the same drivel from one article to another, all clearly aimed at pressuring prosecutors, judges, and politicians to embrace exoneration fantasies, as well as drowning out any journalism posing legitimate questions.

Wouldn’t it be nice for Adduci, who has been scapegoated by the media in the media’s efforts to embrace Foxx’s bogus exonerations, to have the last laugh and expose the Chicago media for what it is, one of the most corrupt institutions in America?

Pay attention to the Adduci lawsuit, dear reader. Pay close attention.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

The state’s supreme court has assailed Philadelphia prosecutor Larry Krasner for his willingness to release offenders, often murderers, with dubious “investigations.”

Ralph Cipriano, a former L.A. Times and Philadelphia Inquirer reporter, described how on Substack:

The state Supreme Court also found that the work of Krasner’s prosecutors, in granting “highly problematic” concessions to 110 convicted killers, to be lacking in integrity. In past concessions granted by Krasner to convicted killers, the state Supreme Court found that Krasner’s “prosecutors” had routinely lied to and misled judges, submitted false evidence, withheld “relevant” evidence, conducted faulty investigations, and dodged required evidentiary hearings.

In response to the findings of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the state attorney general has been imposed as a watchdog over Krasner’s decisions to release convicted killers with the authority to nix these decisions should the AG conclude they are baseless. One compelling subplot in the handcuffing of Krasner is the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is majority Democrat, a sign that even members within Krasner’s own party have turned on him.

Let us take a moment and consider the implications of the Krasner scandal and the supreme court response to it for a city like Chicago.

In the coming weeks or days, the Chicago City Council will consider paying out a massive settlement to two illegal aliens convicted of a double murder in 1993. Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes would not have gotten out of prison were it not for Kimberly Foxx, another big-city prosecutor supported by George Soros in the mold of Krasner, except that Foxx’s exoneration mania far surpasses that of Krasner.

The Solache/Reyes debacle is part of a larger group of exonerations tied to retired detective Reynaldo Guevara. Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, rejected the claims of misconduct against Guevara and refused to overturn convictions tied to him. But soon after taking office, Foxx embraced these claims, which led to vast riches to Foxx’s far left ideological soulmates in the exoneration industry through federal civil lawsuits.

Foxx’s 2017 decision to vacate charges against Solache and Reyes was one of her most appalling actions during her two-term nightmare. Foxx took the extraordinary step of suddenly ceasing to contest a certificate of innocence for the two men, a move that made contesting their federal civil lawsuit even more difficult for attorneys representing former detective Guevara. Foxx then admitted under oath she believed they were guilty.

“So why did you let them out?” few, if any, journalists have asked Foxx.

Foxx’s conduct in the Solache/Reyes case alone cries out for an investigation like the one carried out against Krasner in Philadelphia. But Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois are run by one-party political machines devoid of principles, guided only by power politics.

It is difficult to imagine, then, that the kind of reform that is taking place in Philly will happen in Chicago, even as the vote for a payout to Solache and Reyes approaches. Nevertheless, it will be interesting, if nauseating, to observe the Chicago City Council debate making Solache and Reyes millionaires through a legal settlement. One reason is that Solache and Reyes were illegals when they committed their crimes. The far-left faction of the Democratic Party ruling Chicago would prefer not to let the two men stand as poster children for the need to protect borders as a necessary measure against letting such monsters enter the country. Instead, Chicago’s depraved uniparty has turned the men into victims worthy of a massive payout.

Here’s another reason why the city council will pay out for the men. If the aldermen reject a Guevara settlement in the Solache/Reyes case, don’t they open up the possibility that all their settlements in previous Guevara cases are suspect?

If only the Solache/Reyes case were an isolated incident that should draw scrutiny on the Foxx nightmare. Foxx’s transformation of her office into a way station for killers went much deeper than perhaps that of any other Soros prosecutor, including Krasner.

Let us consider what Foxx did to her Conviction Review Unit, tasked with reviewing convictions and possibly letting guys like Solache and Reyes out. At one point, Foxx appointed Michelle Mbekeani to run the CRU, even as Mbekeani held a top position in an organization that helped convicted offenders find defense attorneys in an effort to have their convictions tossed.

Go figure.

Where is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when you need them?

Cook County Judge Michael McHale had some questions for Mbekeani about her apparent dual role as prosecutor and someone helping offenders obtain exonerations:

“I find the answers that you have been giving to this Court duplicitous. I do find there is a per se conflict of interest with this specific Assistant State’s Attorney, and you’ve conflicted yourself off this case, so to speak, in addition to any other cases in my courtroom.”

Foxx didn’t just free a host of offenders other prosecutors wouldn’t dream of letting out. She didn’t just put an exoneration advocate in the top spot reviewing innocence claims. Heavens no. Foxx also went after tried-and-true prosecutors who took seriously the job of putting dangerous predators in jail.

Foxx, for example, fired one of the best prosecutors in her administration who had skillfully led the prosecution of three Spanish Cobra gang members for killing Chicago police officer Clifton Lewis. She replaced this prosecutor with exoneration advocate Mbekeani. Foxx also showed the door to three other prosecutors, one tied to the Lewis case and two tied to another infamous police murder case.

Again, where is the Pennsylvania Supreme Court when you need them?

Forget about it.

The kind of courageous public servant that would reveal the corruption of the Foxx administration and attempt to remedy it, in particular a case of cold-blooded police murder, is almost impossible to find in Chicago. Many citizens placed their hopes on the candidate Eileen O’Neill Burke, who professed bringing reform and legitimacy to the prosecutor’s office on the heels of the Foxx scandals.

But Burke has refused to take up real reform in the manner the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has done in the case of Krasner. Like virtually every public servant in Chicago, Burke is a go-along/get-along party hack far more loyal to her party overseers than to the people she swore to represent.

But Burke should watch Philadelphia closely. It isn’t just Pennsylvania’s supreme court that is scrutinizing Krasner’s office. US District Judge Paul Steven Diamond for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has apparently cast a suspicious eye on Krasner and his staff, according to Substack author Cipriano:

Judge Diamond is nobody to trifle with. He was one of a three-judge panel that recommended the disbarment of former ADA Paul George, and the suspension of the law license of ADA Nancy Winkelman for three years.

How interesting. For how long have attorneys in Chicago brought forth one bombshell argument and evidence that exoneration cases in Chicago are a sham and federal judges have shrugged their legal shoulders? Indeed, one wonders if Burke is paying attention to the lawsuit by the Spanish Cobras clearly hoping to cash in on a big payday the same as Solache and Reyes. Attorneys for the city and county defending the detectives and prosecutors seem to be mounting an aggressive defense. What will come out in the course of gathering evidence? Could the case for the detectives and prosecutors be so strong as to cast a dark shadow on Burke? Would it be so bad as to constitute a betrayal on her part against her own prosecutors?

And so as the reform of a Soros prosecutor takes shape in Philadelphia through a Democratic Supreme Court and a federal judge, so many questions emerge for Chicago.

Will the gaggle of gasbags called the Chicago City Council make Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes rich men? Will Burke ever take one step to rectify the depraved exonerations that took place under Foxx? Will she take any action to hold her fellow Democrat Kim Foxx accountable, let alone the prosecutors who did Foxx’s bidding? Will Burke skate through her administration leaving a police murder unsolved, even though there is overwhelming evidence against three gangbangers originally indicted for the crime?

No question is more compelling than this: Will the feds see the opportunity in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling and initiate an investigation into exonerations by Soros prosecutors throughout the nation?

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has already laid a foundation for the feds in Philly.

The feds reindicting the Spanish Cobras for the murder of Officer Clifton Lewis would be a good starting point in Chicago.

It promises to be a virtual tour of the most Crooked City.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Philadelphia Prosecutor Larry Krasner was one of several big city prosecutors heavily supported by philanthropist George Soros who embraced the tactics of destroying the system from within by transforming their administrations into an agency working on behalf of criminals, not prosecuting them. Krasner, like Kimberly Foxx in Chicago, began releasing murder offenders on the most laughable claims with, critics allege, no serious investigation to support the releases.

It was family members of murder victims who initiated the legal proceeding that ultimately compelled the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hold Krasner’s renegade office accountable. In a 5–4 vote, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court acknowledged that not only was Krasner’s ruling on the murder case of Lavar Brown “not reliable,” but also that Krasner “withheld material evidence from the court, submitted a false stipulation of fact, misstated facts in its pleadings, failed to conduct a reasonable investigation and opposed a required evidentiary hearing.”

Wow. “Withheld material evidence”? “Submitted a false stipulation of fact”? “Misstated facts”? “Opposed a required evidentiary hearing”?

Imagine what would happen if a court made such allegations against a cop.

Nevertheless, shouldn’t such allegations merit an investigation by the Department of Justice? Indeed, the failure of the DOJ to hold Soros prosecutors accountable across the country has helped big cities become base camps for the radical left.

In any case, it is a step in the right direction that now anytime Krasner wants to let out a killer at the behest of his political and media comrades, the attorney general must be notified and can intervene.

Krasner, like all Soros prosecutors across the nation, was helped out by a press that dutifully didn’t report or under-reported what was clearly a bombshell ruling. In response to the supreme court ruling, the media should generate questions about Soros prosecutors throughout the country, but they won’t. Admitting the vast corruption in the exoneration movement going back decades would simultaneously reveal a corrupt press in the back pocket of the movement.

But the larger national burden of the movement still remains, in particular the connection between Soros prosecutors, exonerations, and the faction of the Democratic Party now engaged in what many are finally recognizing as a political party filled with revolutionary zealots, for no strategy has fulfilled the mandates of American radicals more than the movement to turn cold-blooded killers into victims and the criminal justice system that convicted them into villains. More importantly, some cities, like Chicago, are much farther down the road of exoneration madness than Philly, so much so that it is a serious question whether Chicago or Illinois can ever return to the fold of a functioning republic.

Krasner’s allegiance to exoneration mania cannot compare to Kim Foxx’s in Chicago. Not only did Foxx release scores of offenders, but she also fired a host of career prosecutors, many of them doing so with public attacks on her tactics and decisions. In perhaps the most despicable chapter in the decline and fall of the American republic, Foxx also fired prosecutors who had attempted to hold accountable offenders charged with murdering police officers.

One reason Foxx got away with such outrages is that the entire institutional landscape of Chicago and Illinois is far more radicalized than that of Pennsylvania, a state not tangled in a one-party web in the fashion of the Soviet Union or Cuba.

To understand the vast disparity and the hopelessness of Chicago, let us compare what the family members of victims in Philly accomplished with a similar attempt by family members of murder victims in Chicago.

In 2009, the Democratic legislature of Illinois bowed to the emerging radical faction of their party and created one of the most blatantly unconstitutional bodies ever conceived of by a political entity, the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission (TIRC). A wet dream of the washout radicals in Chicago who once threw rocks and bags of urine at police in the 1960s, then moved on to bombing public buildings, TIRC granted the authority of unelected commissioners to send long-settled criminal cases back into the criminal courts, thereby breathing new life into them. The justification for the creation of TIRC were the claims that a former police commander, Jon Burge, and his men engaged in torture to extract confessions. This was the justification, but a cynical observer might describe the creation of TIRC as, in truth, a plot to direct tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers into the coffers of the radicals, especially since the exoneration movement has been rocked by scandals since TIRC was first conceived.

It’s as if the left in Chicago believes: So what if TIRC violates the separation of powers built into the fabric of the republic by allowing a legislatively created entity to completely undermine the judicial process?

And what a boon TIRC has been to the exoneration movement, resurrecting once-doomed murder exoneration claims that ultimately paved the way for massive settlements in federal civil court. Once released, previously convicted killers, with the help of the most corrupt media in the nation, peddled their fraudulent claims of innocence in laughable civil complaints after TIRC helped get them out of prison.

And so, dear reader, whereas the state attorney general of Philadelphia now has a role in overseeing the outrageous exoneration decisions by Philly prosecutor Krasner, a similar reform of TIRC or any renegade Soros prosecutor like Foxx is unlikely in Illinois. After all, one of the key architects of TIRC is none other than the current state attorney general, Kwame Raul.

Talk about a fox in the henhouse.

It’s not just the attorney general. The governor’s office also plays a key role in implementing unconstitutional ploys like TIRC. Former governor Pat Quinn not only embraced the creation of TIRC during his scandal-plagued administration, but in the waning moments of his administration, he freed a man convicted of trying to murder four police officers, another man convicted of murder despite no new evidence of innocence, and a man convicted of perjury in a case in which the man’s perjured testimony could have sprung two convicted murderers.

No state has had such broad collusion with a powerful, utterly unconstitutional, radical commission like TIRC than Illinois.

Let’s get back to the family members of victims in Illinois, who have already tried to reform the corrupt exoneration movement in the same way family members succeeded in Philly.

In 1983, two notorious criminals, Jerry and Reginald Mahaffey, traveled from the South Side to the Far North Side of Chicago in a friend’s beat-up van, planning the burglary of a store. When they arrived early in the morning, there was a police car parked in the lot, so they abandoned their plan.

They did, however, find an open window facing an alley. Once inside, they killed a couple and attempted to murder the couple’s son in the course of a home invasion. The mother was also raped by the men. They loaded up the couple’s sports car with loot and returned to the South Side. The crime shocked the entire city.

In 1984, while awaiting trial, the Mahaffey brothers staged one of the most daring escapes in the history of the Cook County Jail. They convinced a paramedic to smuggle a gun into the facility, taking a corrections officer hostage. They opened up the cells of other inmates, many of whom joined them. They were all eventually recaptured.

Ultimately, the brothers were convicted and sentenced to death, but the death penalty would be abolished in Illinois before they could receive their sentence. Nevertheless, it would be almost impossible to find a murder case with more overwhelming evidence, including police recovering the loot from the home invasion from the apartments of the two brothers and the fact that the brothers repeatedly admitted they had committed the murders. They confessed to a state’s attorney and admitted no police personnel had treated them badly.

With the creation of TIRC, it didn’t matter. TIRC is comprised of some of the most radical voices in the nation. And so the commission, incredibly, took up the claims of Jerry Mahaffey.

And here is where one can understand clearly the difference between Philly and Chicago when it comes to hearing the voices of family members who have been left to deal with the murder of their loved ones. According to the TIRC statute, the commission was obligated to notify family members that the commission was taking up a case. This never happened. Instead, the family members of the Mahaffey murder victims learned TIRC was taking up the Mahaffey case when they received a phone call from a reporter.

The family then discovered the commission had not notified several other families in other cases. In fact, the commission never bothered to notify most of the family members in TIRC cases. Family members lashed out at the commission, ultimately leading to Executive Director Dave Thomas’s resignation amid the chorus of outrage. But even then, several commissioners stood by Thomas.

Public officials took the opportunity to weigh in on their skepticism about the legitimacy of TIRC. Then-top prosecutor Anita Alvarez wrote a letter to then-governor Pat Quinn, asserting the commission acted illegally.

“There’s no oversight to this commission. I don’t know who they report to, if anybody. I don’t think anybody’s watching or vetting what they’re doing,” she said.

Even with the scandal of TIRC violating its own mandate by ignoring victims’ family members, the vote on whether to toss Jerry Mahaffey’s case back into the courts and potentially allow Mahaffey a chance to secure his freedom, as so many others have done through TIRC, was close.

If there is a chapter in the history of the exoneration movement that revealed the cold, calculating, devious inhumanity of the radical left in Chicago, it is the creation of TIRC and the decision by its commissioners to take up the Mahaffey case.

Philly and Chicago reveal that the exoneration movement is a national phenomenon, essential to the modern Democratic Party. But Chicago shows its true mendacity in that it has placed so many institutions under the control of this movement. Philly and other cities have not sunk to the level of Chicago’s depravity.

Not yet, anyway.

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Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

Apart from the false promise of a workers’ paradise, Marxism served the criminal left with vital rhetoric and philosophy to justify the most heinous, brutal acts and corruption under the guise of revolutionary pursuits.

No two figures of the radical left in Chicago exemplified this abhorrent narcissism disguised in radical Marxist philosophy more than Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, founding members of the terrorist group the Weather Underground.

A new book, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, attempts to shed light on the appalling story of two middle-class kids who joined forces with a host of other criminals to destroy what they claimed was one of the most violent, unjust countries in the country. This would be the United States, that terribly evil country millions of people attempt to run to every year as they flee the hellhole countries like Cuba that Dohrn and Ayers once celebrated. The book is authored by the eldest child of the couple, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, named after one of the militant black terrorists so dear to the Weather Underground.

Every cop learns early on that narcissism is a root force in the criminal mind. Narcissists see themselves as the center of drama, willing to ignore their own crimes and indifferent to the cruelty they have imposed upon others. Instead, they see themselves as victims. The narcissist not only lies, but also believes their own lies. Zayd as a writer is trapped in his parents’ narcissistic web, too often embracing the revolutionary jargon used to justify his parents’ crimes rather than questioning them with a journalistic eye. It’s understandable in one sense. Who wants to see their parents as criminals? But in deciding to recount his parents’ violent, fugitive lives through the lens of militant radicalism, Zayd becomes almost an agent, if not an apologist, of his parents’ duplicity, rather than a writer illuminating a key chapter of American history.

It’s too bad. Zayd had a front-row seat. He was born and lived much of his early life on the run as his parents moved from one place to another in the years Dohrn and Ayers were being hunted by the FBI.

Those years in which the FBI were searching for Zayd’s parents make up one of the biggest radical lies permeating the book. The left wants to condemn the measures adopted by the FBI in trying to stop the likes of the Weather Underground, with the support of Nixon, by engaging in “black bag” tactics. These tactics ignored the constitutional rights of Dohrn and Ayers and their ilk in 1970s in the FBI’s desperate attempt to stop the militants before they could kill hundreds, if not the thousands. Despite their chronic protestations against the FBI, these radicals posed such a grave threat to public safety and the republic itself that Nixon and former FBI top dog Mark Felt were justified in engaging such unconstitutional tactics.

In law enforcement, such actions are sanctioned in what is called exigent circumstances. It is why federal agents were so outraged when criminal charges were brought against Felt and other top FBI officials for the black bag jobs that the agents demonstrated on the Capitol steps. It is why President Nixon volunteered to testify on behalf of Felt at Felt’s criminal trial, with Nixon saying he approved of the tactics and would employ them again. And it is why President Reagan fulfilled his campaign promise shortly after he was elected by pardoning Felt after he was convicted and sentenced to probation.

Indeed, knowing the background of Ayers and Dohrn and their allies, one cannot wonder at the nightmare political state these zealots would create had they been more successful in their revolutionary aims. North Korea might look enlightened compared to what these maniacs would have created in the name of revolutionary justice. But doesn’t the last century of Marxism provide evidence?

Zayd’s memoir, then, serves not in justifying or even providing meaning to the lives of his parents, but rather for the insights it reveals about “the movement,” insights that help explain the current state of the republic and certainly Chicago.

One compelling glimpse into the book is the profound shift in strategy of the American left in the ascendance of militant radicals like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. The WU were at the core of this shift from the traditional Marxist strategy of organizing workers to focusing on American youth. This transition came as Weather Underground members broke away from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the old-guard Marxists who comprised the SDS and turned their attention to radicalizing the youth:

On one side was Progressive Labor (PL), the largest faction within SDS at the time. PL was made up of Marxist intellectuals who believed the revolution would inevitably come from the working class, so student activists should commit themselves to becoming blue-collar workers—taking jobs in factories and hotels and union shops, where they could help organize and build a broader class consciousness. PL was ideologically disciplined and culturally conservative; members tended to avoid drugs, long hair, cursing, and public promiscuity, all of which they felt might isolate them from their natural proletariat allies. Bernardine once called them “cultural aliens.”

On the other side of the split was Bernardine and her group, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, known within SDS as the Action Faction. The Action Faction, in contrast to the economic Marxists of PL, wanted to focus less on class and more on race.

This was perhaps the most influential change in the radical left, shifting its focus to college campuses rather than factory floors. From the earliest days of the WU terrorist movement, Dohrn and Ayers focused on corrupting youth. After they were set free and came aboveground, they both ended up at prestigious universities. So too did many of their radical brethren. They burrowed their radical agenda into journalism schools, law schools, and education departments. It was hugely successful. This is one reason American journalism, particularly in Chicago, has been transformed from an institution protecting the republic into an agent of its demise.

Embracing the claim that the American republic is one of most corrupt and evil countries is one of the most enduring fabrications of Zayd’s book. The history of racism in the country, the Vietnam War, and the other central issues that lit the fire under Dohrn and Ayers in no way justify the acts of terror the couple engaged in and covered up, nor does any remotely rational person compare the corruption of America with the horror shows of Germany and the Soviet Union of the last century, to name just a few.

But some of Dohrn’s lies are so blatant that even the couple’s son cannot justify them. One of Dohrn’s most appalling lies was her attempts at justifying her praise of the Manson murders, statements Dohrn delivered during the crucial Flint meeting when the WU began its transformation into a terrorist organization.

“Dig it,” she told her War Council. “First, they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach? Wild!”

Here is what Zayd has to say about it:

“My mom would later claim this was meant to be a dark joke—an extreme metaphor for the way the American media celebrated war and fetishized sex and violence,” Zayd waxes on about his mother.

Dark joke? What is an extreme metaphor?

He goes on:

But it’s clear to me now, after talking to her and other people who were there and looking more closely at the context, that it was less a joke than a provocation—that Bernardine invoked the Manson cult’s end-times barbarism not as a cautionary tale but as a battle cry…”

What? Context? The context was a war council. Provocation? Battle cry for what? Such meaningless blather attempting to explain away the clearly “violence fetishizing” of the WU permeates Zayd’s book.

It was the Weather Underground, not the American media in the late ’60s and ’70s, who “celebrated war and fetishized sex and violence,” a fact that brings us to the central lie that permeates the Weather Underground’s legacy and the failure of Zyad to capture the true narrative of his parents’ pathetic lives: the claim that the group renounced harming people through their radical overtures after members of the group accidentally blew themselves up while making bombs in a New York townhouse. Three members died. Several others escaped.

Before and after this explosion, regardless of the claims by the members about renouncing harm to people through their actions, a “fetishized violence” permeated the WU.

Shortly after the Flint war council meeting in which Dohrn gave her famous speech calling for violent attacks and extolling the tactics of Charles Manson, WU tried to burn down the house of a judge overseeing a case against several Black Panthers.

[Justice John Murtagh Sr.] was the state judge then presiding over the Panther 21 trial in New York. And he and his family had just become the first civilian targets of an increasingly radicalized East Coast Weatherman cell.

Here’s what his son John Murtagh Jr. had to say about the bombing:

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn’t have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us, but for years, the sound of a fire truck’s siren made my stomach knot and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill my entire family didn’t fully hit me until years later, when, a father myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Zayd’s accounts of his father’s role in helping to spring Assata Shakur from prison—allowing her to flee to Cuba and live freely for the rest of her life, despite the fact that she gunned down two police officers during a traffic stop, killing one—don’t hold much water. Breaking cop killers out of prison is not fetishizing violence? Another passenger in the car Shakur was riding in just before she gunned down the cops was Black Liberation Army member Zayd Shakur, who was killed in the shootout. Zayd Dohrn was named after Zayd Shakur.

A few miles away, Bill waited in the parking lot, listening to the radio and watching the clock. He didn’t know exactly what was happening—or even what his role would be—but he knew something was in process, and whatever it was had to be illegal and dangerous. “It was a dramatic time,” he told me. “You knew that an action was underway, you knew that all these gears were in motion, and you were one of the gears.”

Ayers didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know he was involved in breaking out a woman who murdered a cop?

Breaking Assata out of prison was a sign that while the WU members might not have harmed people through their own violent actions, they certainly aided other militants who continued to support and engage in such violence. Indeed, Ayers and Dohrn would adopt the child, Chesa Boudin, of fellow WU members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert after the couple was imprisoned for her role in a 1981 armored car robbery in New York.

In that “nonviolent” action, the robbers killed one security guard, wounded two others, and then murdered two police officers, one of whom was the first African American officer ever hired in the city.

Chesa Boudin would eventually get elected top prosecutor in San Francisco, echoing the philosophy of his parents by letting out offenders rather than prosecuting them, until voters in San Francisco woke up and drove Boudin out of office.

Nevertheless, throughout the book, I found it interesting that Zayd made no mention of the 1970 Park Place bombing in San Francisco that killed Sergeant Brian McDonnell and severely wounded several other officers. I traveled to the police station about a decade ago to see what I could find out about the bombing for my book Crooked City. Sure enough, I made contact with people who put me in touch with family members of Sgt. McDonnell. In investigating the book, I also spoke to several retired FBI agents who stated they believed Dohrn was responsible for the bombing. Another source pointing to Dohrn as the bomber was a Vietnam veteran from Ohio, Larry Grathwohl, who infiltrated the Weather Underground and reported his findings to the FBI. Grathwohl testified that Ayers told Grathwohl that Dohrn was the San Francisco bomber who killed Sgt. McDonnell.

Members of the San Francisco Police Department asked federal authorities to re-investigate the case.

“There are irrefutable and compelling reasons to believe that Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn are largely responsible for the bombing of Park Police Station,” the officers stated in the letter.

This incident is not mentioned in Zayd’s memoir, but shouldn’t it be, even if to deny the accusations? Did Zayd’s mother commit this bombing? If she didn’t, does she know who did?

There are incidents in the sordid lives of Dohrn and Ayers that are not covered in Zayd’s book. Throughout the memoir, Zayd mentions lawyers who worked with his parents, particularly when they were on the run. Zayd barely mentions the law firms for whom at least some of these attorneys are no doubt tied. But he does once: The People’s Law Office (PLO), a collection of radical attorneys who represented the Black Panthers in the group’s early days and who were closely tied to Dohrn and Ayers in their years on the run. One attorney from the PLO was named Dennis Cunningham. Dohrn formed an extremely close relationship with Cunningham’s wife, Mona Cunningham, according to Zayd. How close was it? Dohrn ultimately borrowed the Cunninghams’ children as part of a disguise to scout out bombing locations.

Zayd:

“So, if, for example, Bernardine…needed to scope out a potential target for a bombing, they could bring Sunflower along and they would seem more like a respectable all-American family, out for a stroll.”

The ties of the PLO to violent radicals is a largely untold story in Chicago. It’s a strange silence. The reason is that perhaps no law firm in the city has played such an influential role in transforming the city’s criminal justice system as the PLO. The ties between Dohrn, Ayers, and the PLO suggest that the revolutionary fervor guiding Dohrn and Ayers, even after evidence against them was tossed, never abated. In fact, it may have become more sophisticated and successful.

The crowning achievement of Dohrn’s PLO buddies was their pivotal role in creating what is now known as the wrongful conviction movement, the claim that former Chicago cops like Jon Burge tortured confessions out of suspects, usually minorities, out of racial animus.

One of the achievements of the PLO was obtaining the release of Jackie Wilson, who, like Assata Shakur, had been convicted for his role in gunning down two Chicago police officers during a traffic stop in 1982. For decades the PLO fought to get Wilson out, a case that polarized the radical left and cops throughout the city, who claimed the accusations against Burge and his men were bogus.

An ominous body of evidence has emerged pointing to corruption in the wrongful conviction movement, which has siphoned off well over a billion dollars from taxpayers in legal fees, settlements, and jury verdicts. One place where a series of scandals has arisen over wrongful conviction claims is Northwestern University, the very same university that gave Dohrn a job teaching American youth about “justice.” These ties of Dohrn to the PLO beg questions, like how truthful are the police misconduct claims arising from a movement whose prolific leader was celebrating the murderous cruelty of Manson followers as a legitimate expression of revolution?

To say that Zayd’s book is unsatisfying and suspiciously incomplete about the real conduct and aims of the radicals from an earlier era is an understatement. One does not get to choose their parents, but in dressing up his parents’ sordid lives in revolutionary rhetoric, Zayd does a disservice to the truth.

There are some insights into the evolution of the radical left in his book, now the most powerful faction of the Democratic Party.

But the writing does not rise above the ideological, suggesting that, despite Zayd’s book, the truth is still on the run.

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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“A divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court, including two Democrat justices, ordered Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office to face new outside scrutiny over its post-conviction concessions after the state’s high court found the office’s handling of one convicted murderer’s case was unreliable and said similar problems extended beyond just that single case…

The case was brought to the high court by family members of murder victims Michael Richardson and Robert Crawford. Brown was convicted by a Philadelphia jury in the 2004 murder of Richardson and convicted by another Philadelphia jury in the 2005 murder of Crawford, according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office.”

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Getting Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes released from prison in 2017 for their conviction of stabbing a couple to death then kidnapping their children was a major accomplishment for the lawyers at Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. With the release of Solache and Reyes, a whole new revenue stream of federal lawsuits opened up for exoneration lawyers. The Solache/Reyes exoneration was a key case in the police misconduct mythology manufactured largely through the media against a retired detective, Reynaldo Guevara, whose transformation into a bogeyman of police corruption has netted tens of millions to exoneration attorneys and their clients.

But from the outset, the road to freeing the two men for the heinous crime was rocky at best for Northwestern attorneys like Karen Daniel, who worked at the CWC. Learning that the men would be released from Pontiac Correctional Center, Daniel waited outside the prison gates. But the men never showed up. Instead, they were taken into federal custody because they were illegal immigrants.

But even before Daniel planted herself outside the prison, the signs that Solache/Reyes represented yet another dubious exoneration were reverberating throughout the city, even with the media virtually in Daniel’s back pocket. For one, a third offender in the case, Adriana Mejia, who hatched the plan to murder the couple and kidnap their newborn child, remained in prison, continuing to finger Solache and Reyes as her accomplices.

For another, Kimberly Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, refused to release offenders whose convictions were tied to Guevara. The contrast between the determinations of the two state’s attorneys, Alvarez and Foxx, in Guevara cases was in many ways the more compelling and legitimate media story, providing a chilling glimpse into the lengths that prosecutors supported by radical philanthropist George Soros would go to undermine big city criminal justice systems.

Another stumbling block was the fact that Foxx’s top prosecutor at the time, Eric Sussman, stated the men were guilty of the murders.

“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,” he said.

Sussman’s statements about the case—coupled with the fact that Alvarez wouldn’t overturn Guevara convictions—are enough to compel the DOJ to investigate Foxx and question why she chose to release these men and so many others.

But what truly threw everything into chaos that even the Chicago media is having a tough time covering up is the fact that Foxx was recently called into a deposition about the case, a deposition in which she admitted the men were guilty of the crime. Foxx also suggested, incredibly, that the decision to release the men was made by her staff members.

In the wake of Foxx’s bombshell statements about the Solache/Reyes case, former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas recently penned an article for the Chicago Contrarian demanding a federal investigation into Foxx’s exonerations.

“Federal investigators should determine whether these decisions were the product of legitimate individualized prosecutorial review or predetermined outcomes negotiated outside public view. The question isn’t whether wrongful convictions should be corrected. Of course, they should be. The question is whether the public was misled about how so many of these convictions were undone. Whether political actors, government lawyers, and private civil rights attorneys collaborated in ways that denied taxpayers, courts, victims’ families, and the public the transparency they were entitled to.”

Of the myriad questions that emerge from Foxx’s depositions—questions the corrupt Chicago media will certainly never pose—several go back to Karen Daniel and the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Here is one compelling question: If the guilt of the men is so clear to Foxx, her underling at the time Eric Sussman, and so many others familiar with the case, why was it not clear to the likes of Daniel? Why was there no doubt whatsoever in Daniel’s claims or in her actions? Why didn’t the media grill her about all the evidence that the men were guilty and hold her accountable?

Such questions become even more compelling when one considers the scandal that had rocked Northwestern in the years before Daniel vainly waited outside the Pontiac prison. This previous scandal suggested that staff and students at Northwestern had crossed the boundaries of fairness and honesty in their claims. They took shape in the university’s Medill School of Journalism involving a controversial professor, David Protess, and various private investigators and students working under Protess as part of the school’s Innocence Project. The original scandal emerged after prosecutors under Anita Alvarez became suspicious about witness recantations in cases that Protess, his private investigators, and his students had investigated. In the end, the university conducted its own investigation and barred Protess from teaching his class.

The university issued this statement:

In sum, Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters to students, alumni, the media and the public. He caused the University to take on what turned out to be an unsupportable case and unwittingly misrepresent the situation both to the Court and to the State.

(Lying to the court and the state? Care to expound Northwestern?)

Nevertheless, the Northwestern scandal under Protess was contained to the Medill School of Journalism, even though an ominous question emerges: Why were the suspicious tactics of Protess and his minions apparent to prosecutors but not to the attorneys like Daniel working at the very same university as Protess?

The answer to this compelling question might be revealed in observing cases in which Protess and his students’ investigations were embraced by the CWC and Daniel.

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One case in particular comes to mind: the exonerations of Armando Serrano, a member of the Imperial Gangsters who received a $20 million settlement from the city in 2021 in a federal civil lawsuit alleging he was wrongfully convicted for a 1994 murder. Fellow gang member Jose Montanez was also “exonerated” along with Serrano.

The Serrano/Montanez saga included ominous allegations involving Protess’s Innocence Project, including the by-now familiar questions about witness retractions obtained in the case, with the exonerations hinging on the retraction of a witness statement by a fellow gang member named Francisco Vicente.

Here’s what attorneys for the city stated in court proceedings:

In 2004, Medill succeeded in extracting Vicente’s recantation. But discovery has
revealed that prior to recanting, Plaintiffs’ gang, the Imperial Gangsters, threatened Vicente’s life because of his testimony against Plaintiffs. Thereafter, and in consideration for his recantation, both Plaintiffs offered Vicente protection from assassination, and along with Medill, offered him other hidden incentives, including a prison transfer and a fortune (described by Plaintiff Montanez as “ching-ching”) from the proceeds of Plaintiffs’ anticipated civil lawsuits.

Ching-ching?

Check out this passage from a Chicago Tribune article about this case:

Prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled documents that suggested students and staff with Northwestern University’s Medill Innocence Project arranged a visit from a female student as a “treat” for a prisoner, in addition to making unspecified promises, before he recanted his testimony in a 1993 murder and armed robbery case.

“[The woman], a previous student of David’s [Protess] who worked on the case and formed a good relationship with [Vicente], will accompany us as a ‘treat’ for him, since he has requested to see her again,” the student wrote in an April 2004 e-mail to Serrano’s lawyer, Jeffrey Urdangen, a Northwestern law professor.

It wasn’t just questions about obtaining witness statements that arose in the Serrano case. City attorneys also made this allegation:

Plaintiff Serrano’s agents deliberately destroyed and/or intentionally lost inculpatory audiotapes, memos, and notes relating to key witness interviews.

But there is another chapter in the Serrano case that adds to the urgency of Vallas’s call for a federal investigation. It wasn’t just cops who were accused of misconduct in the Serrano/Montanez investigation. Prosecutors who worked the case back in 1993 were also accused of misconduct in convicting Serrano. Matthew Coghlan, a former prosecutor who worked the Serrano case, went on to become a respected judge. Another judge, Maura Slattery Boyle, had the Serrano “exoneration” claims in her courtroom. She rejected a post-conviction petition by Serrano, forcing Serrano’s lawyers to take his case up with the Appeals Court.

Both judges were targeted by the Chicago media in subsequent elections in their efforts to remain on the bench. As the lawsuit against Coghlan proceeded, his attorneys expressed doubt about the motives of the media. Here’s what they said in court motions:

“. . . To the contrary, prior to his deposition, Plaintiffs already started to try this case in the media, engaging in repeated media attacks against Coghlan specifically, and in some instances, misrepresenting the evidence in these cases. In addition, a number of the questions posed to Coghlan during his deposition had no relevance to the merits of the case and were designed solely to embarrass or harass him.

Coghlan was ultimately voted off the bench. Boyle just survived, but a cynical person might wonder if every judge in Cook County observed firsthand what happens to judges and prosecutors who contradict exoneration cases.

Any federal investigation of exonerations under Foxx starting with the Solaches/Reyes debacle would have to ask some elemental questions about Karen Daniel and the Northwestern Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Who knows where those questions would lead?

Martin Preib is a retired Chicago Police officer. An author of three books, The Wagon and Other Stories From the City, Crooked City, and Burn Patterns, Mr. Preib’s written work has also been published in Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, New City, and Tin House. For his essay appearing in Virginia Quarterly Review, Mr. Preib was awarded the Staige D. Blackford Award for Nonfiction in 2005. In addition to his role with the City of Chicago, Mr. Preib served as the Second Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7.

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