Another Exonerated Offender Arrested for Vicious Crime

Yet another dark shadow cast on Northwestern University’s legacy of freeing convicted killers…

A man whose conviction for murder was overturned in 2022 through the efforts of a law professor at Northwestern University was arrested last week and charged with armed robbery, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated battery.

According to news reports, Kevin Dugar–released from prison in 2022 after his conviction for murder was vacated by an appeals court–was part of a three-member crew who entered a cell phone store in Palos Hills last week, began ripping the security cameras from the walls, and pistol-whipped a store employee. The offenders filled bags with various merchandise totaling around $18,000, according to reports. Dugar was reportedly the only offender caught by police.

Dugar’s release in 2022 generated the usual media frenzy when an offender convicted of a heinous crime walks out of prison on a claim of innocence. Dugar made this claim based on a letter written by his identical twin, Karl Smith, who “confessed” in the letter that he was the offender in the case, not his brother.

Dugar’s claim was initially championed by attorney Karen Daniel, a Northwestern University law school professor who directed its Center on Wrongful Convictions.

What cast a dark shadow on the confession by Dugar’s brother was the fact that the brother made the claim from prison, where “he was serving a 99-year prison sentence for a 2007 home invasion and armed robbery in which a 6-year-old boy was shot in the head.”

So let’s get this straight. Dugar was convicted of shooting two people on the North Side of Chicago in the middle of the day, one fatally, and his brother, who is serving a 99-year sentence for a home invasion in which a child was shot in the head and who has absolutely nothing to lose by confessing to the crime, suddenly comes forward and says he is the offender.

Daniel tried to sell this theory to the courts, hoping to overturn the conviction. At the hearing, prosecutors challenged Daniel’s theories, arguing it was nothing more than a ploy by one brother to get another out. Judge Vincent Gaughan agreed.

Daniel apparently was not willing to give up. Daniel then took the case to the appeals court, which overturned the conviction, saying it was up to a jury to decide if the confession by Dugar’s brother was legit.

That second trial, however, never took place, likely due to the fact that the prosecutor’s office was guided by Kimberly Foxx, an ally of the exoneration advocates, who turned her office into a virtual way station for the movement. Dugar walked free.

Now he’s back in the news again.

Those of us at the prosecutor’s office familiar with the case did not believe the note from Dugar’s brother exonerated Dugar. We thought Judge Gaughan’s rejection of this claim was fitting. The appeals court obviously disagreed. The decision not to retry Dugar was another example of the Cook County State’s Attorney under Foxx refusing to do their job, with obviously dire consequences,” according to a former prosecutor who worked in the office at the time Dugar was set free.

It’s not the first time Karen Daniel and Northwestern University have been at the core of scandals surrounding its role in the industry of freeing convicted killers.

Daniel championed the cause of two illegal immigrants, Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes, for the stabbing death of a couple and the kidnapping of their children. Daniel once stood outside the Pontiac state prison in what is now a tired media cliché of creating media hysteria in exoneration cases, particularly when the evidence of innocence is wholly lacking.

The two men never appeared. They were taken into federal custody immediately upon their release, in what might be construed as a sign that federal authorities were not buying their innocence claims and did not want them walking around the streets. Top prosecutors under Foxx ultimately admitted that they didn’t believe the men were innocent.

Daniel’s exoneration claims in the Solache/Reyes case were, as usual, embraced by Chicago’s radicalized press. In the near-daily diatribes attacking President Trump’s strong anti-illegal immigration stance that now appear in Chicago’s monolith press, the media never mentions the Solache/Reyes case, which could stand as a symbol for the dangers of unchecked illegal immigration that guide Trump’s immigration policy.

But it’s not just Daniel’s cases that have generated controversy at Northwestern. A former professor at the university, David Protess, is accused of dubious tactics in “investigating” wrongful conviction cases with students as part of a journalism class. In the wake of this scandal, the university ultimately canceled his class and 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 misrepresented the situation both to the Court and to the State.

One wonders if the victim of Dugar’s latest attack is even aware of how it came to be that Dugar is back on the street up to his old tricks.

One wonders if he knows how lucky he is to even be alive.

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.