Page 10 - FOP Magazine March 2019

SecondVice President’s Report
Kimberly Foxx: Prosecution or Revolution?
Radical ties taint top prosecutor’s administration
The Fraternal Order of Police and its members have lost faith in Cook County’s top prosecutor, Kimberly Foxx, contending that she has trans- formed her office into an agency that advocates on behalf of offenders, rather than prosecuting them.
The FOP’s loss of faith is illuminated in the recent decision by Foxx’s office to reject felony charges against Matthew Ross, accused of mak- ing social media threats against Jason Van Dyke
and his family and calling for setting Navy Pier on fire and burning the offices of city aldermen.
Only after the FOP appealed to federal authorities last week was Ross indicted by the feds. But the full measure of Foxx’s transformation of the prosecutor’s office — an office she won in a bitter election after receiving plentiful campaign dona- tions from far-left activist billionaire George Soros — may be her bizarre and suspicious ties to certain Chicago law firms specializing in vilifying and suing police officers.
Consider Foxx’s relationship with the People’s Law Office (PLO). Formed in the wake of the 1960s upheavals over the Vietnam War and civil rights, the PLO has a long history of representing groups advocating violent revolution: the Black Panthers, Weather Underground and FALN terrorists, among others.
It’s not just the law firm’s ancient history that should trou- ble any Cook County prosecutor. In 2017, the PLO, headed by attorney Joey Mogul, lost a federal lawsuit against several Chi- cago detectives that should have set off alarms regarding Foxx. A jury awarded no damages to Nicole Harris, who claimed that a collection of Chicago detectives conspired to frame her for the murder of her own child. Harris was released from pris- on, granted a certificate of innocence, incredibly, and filed her lawsuit in federal court, seeking millions.
What made the jury verdict so ominous was the fact that at- torneys representing detectives didn’t merely argue that they did nothing wrong. They argued that Harris was in fact guilty of the murder. And they won on all charges leveled against them. It wasn’t the first time that lawyers specializing in mak- ing claims of wrongful conviction based on police misconduct were defeated at trial.
So many questions went unasked. Why, then, was Harris free? Why had she been granted a certificate of innocence? Why didn’t the verdict in the case compel Foxx’s office to re- view other police misconduct claims, to consider whether a child murderer may have been released?
On the contrary, in the months after the verdict, the relation- ship between Foxx’s administration and PLO attorney Mogul seemed to solidify. A sign of this came when several Chicago
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Police Officers who had been victims of felonies found out that those felony charges had been reduced to misdemeanors by Foxx prosecutors.
The attorney representing the defendants in some of these cases? Mogul, from the PLO.
The same attorney whose accusations that detectives framed a woman for the murder of her own child was com- pletely destroyed in federal court was getting Foxx’s adminis- tration to lower felony charges to misdemeanors when police were the victims.
One case involved an officer who was bitten by an activ- ist during a public demonstration, forcing the officer to take medications for possible HIV exposure.
Mogul got a sweet deal for the alleged biting offender — a man named Lee Dewey. Here is Mogul bragging about the deal on the PLO website, including the fact that community groups sent a letter on behalf of Dewey and that Foxx allowed Dewey to use his organizing to count for community service:
“After receiving this letter, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office dropped all criminal charges against Lee. In exchange, Lee pleaded guilty to violating the Chicago municipal ordi- nance regarding public assembly (a non-criminal offense). As part of the resolution, Lee was required to pay a $200 fine and do community service. In a remarkable move, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office recognized that the outstanding orga- nizing that Lee has done for years constitutes community ser- vice.”
But all these signs of a suspicious relationship between the PLO and Foxx pale in comparison to a case taking shape in the federal courts right now. It is the exoneration of two men for the stabbing deaths of a couple and the kidnapping of their two children in 1993.
Contradicting her predecessor, Foxx overturned the murder convictions of Gabriel Solache and Arturo Reyes for the 1993 murders of Jacinta and Mariano Soto and the kidnapping of their two children. Solache and Reyes, who were in the coun- try illegally when the murders were committed, were released earlier this year on the claim that they were coerced into con- fessing by Reynaldo Guevara, a Chicago Police detective who worked the case.
What makes the exoneration of these two men poster boys for the argument that Chicago’s sanctuary city policy is a disas- ter is that Foxx admitted her office believed they were guilty.
Why, then, did she release them? And why did she not take pains to make sure they could not remain in the country? What kind of prosecutor releases two convicted killers and ad- mits they were guilty?
But that’s not the end of it. Solache has filed a federal law- suit, just as Harris did, claiming his civil rights were violated.
MARTIN PREIB