Will Kimberly Foxx Free a Police Killer?

FOP should demand special prosecutor in murder case of Officer Clifton Lewis

Kim Foxx had one key mission when she took the reins of Chicago’s criminal justice system from her predecessor, Anita Alvarez: Restore legitimacy to the exoneration movement.

It was a tall task, requiring a prosecutor willing to toss aside every rule of evidence, every ethical rule, and every duty of a prosecutor. In short, it required a prosecutor willing to abandon every tenet of what people consider “the law.”

Here is why Foxx had her work cut out for her when she took office. Foxx’s predecessor, Anita Alvarez, had put a wrench in the machinery in Chicago that works to free killers and then make them millionaires by destroying the lives and reputations of detectives and prosecutors when Alvarez vacated the conviction of Alstory Simon in 2014 for a 1982 double murder. Alvarez’s decision put a spotlight on the corruption within the exoneration movement because it revealed that the most influential exoneration case in the state’s history was a sham, for Simon had falsely confessed to the murders at the behest of exoneration advocates—a confession that allowed the man originally convicted of the crimes, Anthony Porter, to walk free from prison and be paraded throughout the state not as a cold-blooded killer, but as a victim who had come close to being executed on death row. Alvarez condemned the actions of the exoneration advocates and released Simon from prison.

Alvarez’s deep dive into the Porter case revealed to her the bare bones of how the exoneration movement truly works, from witnesses coerced into changing statements, to media scoundrels knowingly pushing fake narratives.

It was Alvarez’s integrity and decency to take on a review of the Porter saga and the Simon conviction that spelled her doom. Chicago is such a radical stronghold and the exoneration industry such a fundamental building block of that stronghold that a legitimate prosecutor like Alvarez spelled catastrophe for the movement. Further deep dives into seminal cases by Alvarez could be so bad for the movement that some of its most strident advocates could end up going to jail.

Enter Kim Foxx. Devoid of any real trial experience, Foxx was a zealot’s zealot. She delivered for a movement whose primary design is to transform public institutions into agents of mendacious, revolutionary political factions in a manner that would impress Fidel Castro. Her campaign—actually, her war on the criminal justice system through the façade of the exoneration mythology—was dependent upon one key factor: the collusion of the Chicago media.

Without a press that is little more than cheap streetwalkers for the exoneration advocates, Foxx would have been exposed for her actions in releasing one horrific killer/rapist after another. She required a media willing to echo her decisions without question, to remain uniformly silent about any evidence contradicting her narratives, and to attack anyone who pointed out the evidence that her decision to make a hero out of a murdering gang thug was not only wrong, but fraudulent.

What was striking, and always ignored by the Chicago media, was the fact that Foxx, within weeks of taking office, began reversing the decisions by Alvarez on a host of cases—in particular, those tied to retired detective Reynaldo Guevara. Alvarez scoffed at the idea that Guevera and his partners were engaged in coercing confessions from Latino gang members and stood by the convictions and denied the claims of the attorneys and media that these confessions were coerced. Foxx, however, tossed the convictions, costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars in court costs and settlements.

Lesser players aided Foxx. The Chicago City Council refused to confront her corruption. The Fraternal Order of Police, the union that represents cops, initiated no campaign of any merit whatsoever to hold Foxx accountable, save a few bellicose media rants about Foxx. The so-called Republicans in Illinois turned their backs on the whole exoneration hustle because it might require them actually getting in the game. And while Illinois Republicans enjoy commenting on the game, ranting about the game, and predicting the outcome of the game, they rarely, if ever, want to get in the game.

All of this brings us to the 2011 murder of off-duty police officer Clifton Lewis. While working security at a side job to save money for his wedding, Lewis was gunned down by Spanish Cobra gang members. A long investigation resulted in three gang members being charged with the murder.

The prosecution of the gang members was led by two veteran, highly esteemed prosecutors, Nancy Adduci and Andy Varga. In what has now become a kind of legal and political machine in the city, allegations of misconduct arose against the detectives and prosecutors, along with claims they had the wrong guys. These allegations were embraced and manically driven by the press goons of the Chicago media, all of them clearly coveting the highest journalism prize in Chicago: the freeing of a police killer.

The whole media conspiracy was working like a charm. In the wake of this media pressure, in 2023 Foxx dropped charges against two of the offenders in one courtroom. Sensing victory, the advocates for the Spanish Cobra thugs marched into another courtroom where the third Cobra had been convicted and applied the same loony claims about police and prosecutorial misconduct as they had against the other two gang offenders.

In this courtroom, Judge James Linn rejected the entirety of the claims against the prosecutors and cops and refused to toss the conviction against the gang member. Here is Chicago in its full view: in one courtroom the charges are tossed, in another they are upheld. A ruling that should have galvanized the FOP and the Republicans in Illinois to actually support the police resulted in an ominous silence, a silence that often precedes a catastrophe that could have easily been averted.

Here is where the full maliciousness of Kimberly Foxx reveals itself. The ruling by a judge that the conviction of the third gang member was legit should have galvanized the top prosecutor to back her attorneys, especially attorneys with the reputation and record of Adduci and Varga. Certainly, Anita Alveraz would have done so. But not Kim Foxx. Not at all.

In the wake of this grand drama of corruption that takes place on a daily basis under Foxx, the self-righteous, social justice-bloviating mouthpiece for the radical left abruptly fired Adduci from the prosecutor’s office. A bold move by Foxx, the firing no doubt put desperately needed wind in the sails of the movement to free the remaining Spanish Cobra in prison and aid all three Spanish Cobras in a federal lawsuit claiming they were victims, not offenders.

But just as Adduci fought in courtrooms for decades to put dangerous predators in prison and protect the citizens of Chicago, she was not one to go gentle into Foxx’s corrupt good night. Rather, Adduci recently filed a lawsuit over her firing, hardly the move of a public servant guilty of misconduct in a police murder case. Such a lawsuit no doubt gives Foxx and the media pause, for it threatens to turn the tables on both and reveal evidence that likely both Foxx and the media would dread having see the light of day.

But if Foxx has demonstrated one quality during the two terms in which she has, along with her media dogs, destroyed any semblance of justice in Chicago, it is vengefulness. And so it should not surprise anyone that late last week, Andy Varga, the prosecutor who worked with Adduci on the murder of Officer Lewis, “resigned” from the prosecutor’s office. Rumors abound that Vargas’s exit was made as a way to head off an imminent firing by Foxx.

And another rumor has been circulating around 26th and California, the belief that the exit of Vargas is part of a larger plot by Foxx to march into court and vacate the conviction against the third Spanish Cobra, all but guaranteeing the three men will become wealthy from a federal lawsuit against the prosecutors and the cops who labored so hard to hold three miserable gang thugs accountable for murdering a hardworking police officer.

The spotlight now shifts to the Fraternal Order of Police, which, up until now, has done little to combat Foxx’s machinations in a murder case of one of their own. There is more than enough justification for the FOP to demand the prosecution in this case be taken away from Foxx and given to a special prosecutor, as it was in the Jussie Smollett debacle. No special prosecutor would, in a heartbeat, consider walking into a courtroom and vacating a conviction against a police killer.

In the meantime, it will be fascinating, if not nauseating, to observe the lengths to which the Chicago media will go to justify these most blatant acts of corruption taking shape in the last few months in the reign of Foxx’s legal terror.

Freeing a police killer would no doubt be a high note of exit for Foxx. Stopping her should be the highest priority at the FOP, then afterward demanding that charges be reinstated against the other two Spanish Cobras.

This is the best way to say good riddance to the likes of Kimberly Foxx.