Taxpayers Groomed to Accept Massive Wrongful-Conviction Payouts

Activist lawyers, sympathetic prosecutors, and their media allies are turning contested convictions into multimillion-dollar settlements.

The narrative shoveled out by political activists and their media allies ahead of the exonerations of the Central Park Five—convicted of the 1989 rape and near-fatal assault of a young woman—was right out of a how-to manual for trial lawyers ginning up lawsuits. The public’s reaction to the crime evolved from one of horror over its sheer brutality and sympathy for the victim to one of revulsion over the actions of the allegedly thuggish, racist cops and lazy, corrupt prosecutors who went along for the ride. 

The press and public were now screaming for justice—not for the victim, but for those convicted of the crime. Quickly forgotten were the confessions and ample evidence in the case. In the end, the only blemish for the lawyers was being lambasted by a federal judge for bickering over the $4 million in fees in the $40 million settlement case.

This grooming of the public with the help of a press eager to reaffirm its leftist credentials has since played out thousands of times. The cash settlements by cities and counties desperate to move on from messy headlines about purportedly innocent men (nearly always men of color) languishing in jail are piling up—and straining budgets. 

From Convicts to Victims

Four months into 2026, the city of Chicago has already handed out nearly $200 million in wrongful-conviction settlements. Some of the cases stagger the imagination. Chicago city lawyers recently reached settlements with lawyers for two men convicted of the impossibly brutal 1998 stabbing murders of a married couple and the kidnapping of their children. Mexican nationals Gabriel Solache and Arturo DeLeon-Reyes, illegal immigrants at the time of their arrest, are on the road to becoming millionaires, and George Soros-linked former Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx played a central role in their exonerations and prospective awards. 

Following the trial lawyer playbook, Foxx dismissed the charges against the two in 2017 based on claims of forced confessions and prosecutors fabricating evidence. Her office then reversed its opposition to Certificates of Innocence (COI) for the two in 2022, without explanation. 

A COI is a near guarantee of a settlement payoff with the filing of a wrongful-conviction civil lawsuit. With no opposition from the state’s attorney, a Cook County judge granted the COIs. The press went all in, and all evidence supporting the convictions was pushed aside. That includes the statements of third accomplice Adriana Mejia—still incarcerated for the crime—insisting the men were guilty, and of former top prosecutor Eric Sussman telling CBS News in 2017 that “there is no doubt in my mind, or the mind of anyone who has worked on this case, that Mr. Solache and Mr. Reyes are guilty of these crimes.”

And now, this bombshell: In a recent deposition tied to two other wrongful-conviction cases where COI petitions were not challenged, Foxx admitted that she and others in her office “believed that the evidence suggested that the defendants [Solache and DeLeon-Reyes] had committed a heinous act of murder.” Cook County’s top cop, charged with fighting crime, freed two men she believed were guilty of murder. 

The Strategy Behind the Spin

Playing a key role in creating the narrative behind the lawsuits are nonprofit wrongful-conviction projects that investigate and advocate for those claiming innocence. Many of the murder cases are decades old and would be difficult, if not impossible, to retry. Witnesses, if still alive, recant; evidence is lost. In some cases, DNA was never collected. But also missing is new evidence indicating the cops and prosecutors got it wrong, so the cases are presented in the court of public opinion as despicable instances of police abuse and corrupt prosecutions. 

One of the groups, the Exoneration Project, is staffed by one of Chicago’s most prominent plaintiff firms, Loevy & Loevy, which has filed dozens of wrongful-conviction lawsuits. 

Here’s how it works: In 2015, Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, commuted the sentence of Tyrone Hood, who was convicted in the 1993 murder of college basketball star Marshall Morgan Jr. 

Court documents show Quinn admitted in a 2015 panel discussion at the University of Chicago Law School that a 2014 New Yorker story about the case influenced his decision to commute Hood’s sentence. Exoneration Project attorneys participated in the panel discussion. 

In the story by Nicholas Schmidle, Hood claimed that detectives “slapped him in the head and thrust a gun in his face” to get him to confess. Schmidle also pointed to Morgan’s father as the real killer. 

But the story, city attorneys said in a court filing, omitted key facts and misquoted Morgan’s mother, implicating his father in the murder. 

The filing notes that Exoneration Project attorneys “credited the media with ‘playing a huge role in multiple stages with Hood,’ including the ability to either pressure Quinn or get his attention over 4,000 other petitions.” The document further cited Exoneration Project attorney Karl Leonard as saying “that ‘one of the big advantages’” his organization offered “was its media contacts and ‘friendly reporters who will report on these stories when we ask them to.’”

The same day Quinn commuted Hood’s sentence, he granted clemency in 41 other cases. One was Howard Morgan, who served 10 years of a 40-year sentence for the attempted murder of four police officers. 

CWB Chicago was one of the few news outlets to cover these cases without bias. The outlet noted city attorneys’ claims that the Exoneration Project and Foxx’s office worked very closely together to set up wrongful-conviction cases—especially those involving retired Det. Reynaldo Guevara, who handled the Solache/DeLeon-Reyes case.

Guevara, who has been pilloried in the press, has been the target of over 40 wrongful-conviction cases over claims of torturing suspects. The payouts on his cases alone could exceed $1 billion. No evidence has emerged to indicate the claims have any basis in fact. 

The cases against Guevara adopt the same narrative as pending cases against over a dozen other retired detectives and prosecutors. Police are depicted as little more than thuggish rogues beating innocent suspects into confessing to crimes they did not commit, while prosecutors are accused of conspiring with law enforcement to ensure guilty verdicts and long prison sentences.

The U.S. justice system isn’t perfect, and wrongful convictions do happen. But the powerful political and financial incentives to recast contested convictions as cases of racially motivated corruption should give taxpayers pause before footing yet another multimillion-dollar settlement. 

When facts become subordinate to politics and payouts, justice is the loser.

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