Page 10 - November 2018

SecondVice President’s Report
Top prosecutor selling out the police?
Is Cook County State’s Attorney Kimberly Foxx’s administration intentionally ignoring key evidence to protect her anti-police allies?
The current conduct and tactics of Foxx’s administration beg the question, particularly in the case of two men convicted of the brutal murders of Mariano and Jacinta Soto.
Arturo DeLeon-Reyes and Gabriel Solache confessed to stabbing the couple to death in their apartment and kidnapping their children
in a bizarre, macabre plot to steal the Sotos’ newborn baby girl. Jacinta was stabbed so brutally that her blood was found on the walls five feet away from her body.
Such a vicious attack would compel one to assume that the primary goal of the prosecutor’s office should be to de- termine whether the men are in fact guilty of the crime. But it’s hard to see those efforts taking shape in the current state’s attorney’s office.
The reason is that Solache and DeLeon-Reyes are claim- ing, like so many convicts in the state prison system, that they are the victims of police misconduct. Based on this argument, the men’s attorneys — including Karen Daniels from Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Con-
victions — are trying to get Solache and DeLeon-Reyes out of prison. The attorneys are arguing that the two men were coerced into confessing by Detective Reynaldo Guevara and are innocent of the murders, even though their female co-defendant fingered them as accomplices.
But more and more, it’s the conduct of Foxx’s prosecutors that should be drawing scrutiny in this case, particularly her top prosecutor, Eric Sussman.
Here is why. Attend a court hearing filled with the support- ers of Solache and DeLeon-Reyes, and you will see a court- room turned into a choreographed political protest, one harkening back to the criminal trials arising from the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention. You will see a mob all wearing T-shirts with Guevara’s image on them, as a kind of uniform. Along with this group are members from virtually the entire community of anti-police law firms, stalking the courtroom as if it were their personal playground.
In the Solache and DeLeon-Reyes case, as well as in other cases, the prosecutor’s office has reversed the previous ad- ministration’s stance of supporting Guevara from attacks by law firms making allegations of coerced false confessions.
Imagine being a detective in a city where one administra- tion backs up your investigations, and the next one throws
MARTIN PREIB
10 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ NOVEMBER 2017