Time For a Deep Dive into Foxx Administration

Potential ex-parte communications by Foxx glossed over by Chicago attorneys, Tribune’s Megan Crepeau…

Among the new buzzwords in Chicago’s war on the criminal justice system is the claim of “duty to intervene.”

The phrase describes the city’s demand that officers should turn in officers who commit misconduct. That is the rhetoric. In reality, it is a phrase that will be used to cast a wider net in the war on police officers by attorneys and their media lapdogs.

How lucrative. Instead of one defendant in a cut-and-paste lawsuit from a “civil rights” attorney, there can be dozens, including everyone on view of a police body worn camera. In pushing this new “accountability frontier,” the combine of exoneration attorneys and their media lapdogs have opened up a powerful new revenue stream.

Isn’t civil rights law a tough, arduous racket?

Look across the rest of the sordid and bankrupt institutions of Chicago and the high-principled rhetoric demanding parties intervening in alleged misconduct quickly disappears. Time and again, for example, Chicago’s activist reporters are caught lying or ignoring evidence that undermine their predetermined narratives, yet no other reporter steps forward to confront them, revealing a collusion in Chicago journalism on a scale never seen in the American media.

But perhaps the absence of a duty to intervene is greatest among the professional guild of attorneys in Chicago. Among these, no legal cases are crying out more for a “duty to intervene” than the willingness of city attorneys ostensibly defending Chicago detectives.

This failure to intervene emerges in a recent article at Chicago City Wire, citing a motion by attorney Guevara's attorney, Gabrielle Sansonetti, who argued in her pleading that lawyers for Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes were conflating two due process allegations in their complaint: coerced confession and fabrication of evidence.

Well, ho hum. Whether or not the judge bolsters such a motion is debatable. Whether it’s enough to dismiss the ludicrous case against Guevara is also highly debatable. A cynical and informed observer of city attorneys “defending” Guevara, and, in turn, the Chicago police, might conclude that such motions are merely going through the motions of defending rather than waging an effective attack on the allegations against their clients.

But the time has long since passed for the city attorneys to address Foxx’s conduct and her media backers on another level, especially when one considers the magnitude of crimes in which Guevara defendants have been accused and the vast amount of money they demand from taxpayers in their settlements.

Three offenders, Solache, Reyes, and Adriana Mejia were originally charged with the 1998 murders of murders of Jacinta and Mariano Soto. Prosecutors argued that the three were engaged in a bizarre and gruesome plot hatched by Mejia to kidnap the newborn child of Mariano and Jacinta Soto and pretend as if the child had actually been born to Mejia. Mejia talked Solache and Reyes into accompanying her to the Soto apartment where the three offenders stabbed the Sotos to death, leaving a bloody and gruesome crime scene. The three offenders then kidnapped the newborn and another child of the Sotos.

After the pictures of the children were flashed across the broadcast news, people recognized the children in the company of Mejia. The three eventually went to a police district where their stories imploded. Eventually they confessed to the crimes.

One detective involved in their interrogation was Reynaldo Guevara. Timing was not on the side of Guevara. Chicago’s media long ago abandoned the tenets of ethics governing journalism to wage a war on the criminal justice system. In doing so, they became public relations outlets for the exoneration attorneys making tens of millions from taxpayers in lawsuits against the city and detectives. They began pushing the Guevara misconduct mythology.

Fortunately for Chicago’s media, the allegations against Guevara took shape at the end of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s tenure as top prosecutor. Alvarez stood by all the Guevara convictions despite the media onslaught condemning them. But Alvarez lost to Kimberly Foxx and suddenly the Guevera convictions were being tossed one after the other.

Foxx’s vacating the convictions against Solache and Reyes stands as one of the most depraved acts by any prosecutor foisted upon a large city by radical philanthropist George Soros.

For even as Foxx tossed the convictions, the third offender, the mastermind of the crime, Adriana Mejia, remained in prison still fingering the other men as co-offenders.

In a spark of what city attorneys could do to undermine Foxx’s actions in the Guevara case, city attorneys deposed Foxx’s top prosecutors, who, incredibly, stated they believed Solache and Reyes were guilty. It was another sign that the case is likely not an example of a wrongful conviction, but of the corruption endemic in Soros backed prosecutors like Foxx. The question that should have been demanded of Foxx never came: Why are you vacating convictions of monsters like Solache and Reyes when your own prosecutors say they are guilty?

Despite so much evidence that Foxx has turned the criminal justice into a factory to help the worst criminals get out of jail in an effort to wage war on police, city attorneys continue to fight the cases merely on legal quibbling while refusing to address the larger issues of corruption endemic in Foxx’s administration or to confront the phalanx of quasi-journalists pushing the theories.

That larger fight might already be taking shape, but not from the city attorneys raking in money “defending” Guevara. Both Chicago City Wire and the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch have filed Freedom of Information requests from the Foxx administration for a large body of internal documents related to Foxx’s decisions in Guevara cases and others. Foxx refused to turn over the majority of documents to Chicago City Wire. The newspaper went to court to make Foxx obey the law.

(Question never posed by the media: Why, Ms. Foxx, if you are so confident in the corruption of police officers, are you so unwilling to release the documents that reveal your findings?)

But even in the few documents released, trouble emerges for Foxx, along with questions about the legitimacy of media coverage of her decisions on Guevara cases. One is an exchange between Foxx prosecutors and Tribune reporter Megan Crepeau. It surrounds the case of Jose Cruz, whose conviction was vacated on claims against Guevera.

In an email, Crepeau asks about a possible meeting that may have taken place between Foxx and Cruz in Stateville prison. Here’s what Crepeau wrote in the email:

“Cruz’s attorney says that SA Foxx visited Stateville on June 15, where she spoke to Cruz and told him she had a conversation about him with her staff the day before, and that he should ‘hold on for just a little bit’ because he was ‘coming home.’

In a story about the case the following day, Crepeau described the meeting between Foxx and Curz as “an astonishing coincidence.” That’s quite a euphemism for something that may very well be an egregious violation of attorney conduct act by the county’s top prosecutor, especially if that attorney is the top prosecutor promising a murder offender that he will soon be out of prison.

Why didn’t Crepeau look into the case as a possible violation of rules regarding ex-parte communications by an attorney? Supreme Court Rule 42 states:

In representing a client, a lawyer shall not communicate about the subject of the representation with a person the lawyer knows to be represented by another lawyer in the matter, unless the lawyer has the consent of the other lawyer or is authorized to do so by law or a court order.

Why wasn’t Foxx grilled about the potential violation of this rule? Why is Foxx running around a state prison telling an offender convicted of murder he will soon be out? Crepeau’s dismissal of Foxx’s potential egregious violation as “an astonishing coincidence” follows a long list of evidence and motions by city attorneys attacking narratives against Guevara that the Tribune has completely ignored. Why don’t city attorneys confront these reporters?

The FOIA by Chicago City Wire is tantalizing. If just these few documents reveal such ominous signs of misconduct in the Foxx administration, what will the rest of them reveal? Foxx’s refusal to release them only adds weight to the question.

In short, where is the “duty to intervene” throughout the city’s institutions when it comes to the Kimberly Foxx administration?

For accused Chicago police officers, such intervention would be “an astonishing coincidence.”

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.