County reaches settlement for its role in wrongfully convicting eight men framed by the corrupt detective; the men’s lawsuits against the City of Chicago continue.
CHICAGO – Cook County has approved a $24.8 million settlement to eight innocent men framed by disgraced retired Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara. Federal lawsuits brought by the eight exonerated men named the County and several Cook County prosecutors as defendants, along with the City of Chicago, Guevara, and other Chicago Police Department employees involved in the conspiracies.
The agreement resolves the County’s role in the lawsuits, awarding each of the eight men $3.1 million in damages, for a total of $24.8 million.
“The County is doing what any responsible government should do when faced with an established and egregious pattern of official misconduct: It is proactively recognizing the harm that was caused, providing justice to victims, and doing so early in the case, saving Cook County taxpayers a tremendous amount of money,” says Steve Art, a partner with the civil-rights law firm Loevy + Loevy, which represents the eight plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuits are Eruby Abrego, Robert Bouto, David Gecht, Alfredo Gonzalez, Jr., Thomas Kelly, Richard Kwil, John Martinez, and Daniel Rodriguez. All were framed by Guevara and his associates between 1990 and 1999, and were convicted based on fabricated evidence and coerced confessions. Between them, the eight men spent over 190 years imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.
“The Defendants in this lawsuit threatened me, my wife, my young daughters, and multiple witnesses to frame me for a murder that they knew all along I had not committed,” said Rodriguez, when the complaint was filed in 2022. “It was a joke to them. But I missed out on decades of my life with my family because of these officers’ blatant disregard for the community.”
While the details of each of the eight men’s horrific stories are different, they were all innocent and were subjected to hours of torturous interrogation, in which they were physically beaten and psychologically brutalized. Most were subjected to threats and insults, denied access to lawyers and loved ones, and deprived of basic needs including food, water, and sleep. They were then promised that if they would sign false confessions they could go home to their families. But when they finally gave in, they were instead charged with murder, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to decades in prison. State prosecutors, the lawsuits argue, were complicit in the wrongful prosecutions.
“I told him whatever he wanted to hear,” Eruby Abrego testified of the officer who coerced his phony confession. “I thought he was going to beat on me some more.”
The eight men are among 46 people who have had their convictions thrown out by the courts after being wrongfully convicted through the actions of Guevara and the other defendants. Guevara does not deny his misconduct, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination when questioned under oath in all eight plaintiffs’ cases, and many others.
In 2022, in her ruling vacating plaintiff David Gecht’s conviction, Judge Diana Kenworthy described Guevara’s “pattern of behavior,” saying that “he would select random men as suspects in unsolved cases” and “engaged in a pattern and practice of intimidating, threatening, and influencing witnesses in prior homicide investigations.” Other Illinois courts have called Detective Guevara “a malignant blight on the Chicago Police Department and the judicial system,” and condemned his “bald-faced lies” on the stand.
To date, the City of Chicago has spent close to $100 million of taxpayer money paying for Guevara’s misconduct in court cases. A sizeable portion of that money has been paid to outside law firms to defend Guevara cases. The city has lost every single Guevara case that has gone to trial, paying out eight figure settlements and judgements in each instance.
The eight plaintiffs’ lawsuits against the City of Chicago, Guevara and the other police officer defendants remain ongoing. “We hope the City of Chicago is paying attention and will follow the County’s lead,” says Anand Swaminathan, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “It’s time to do what is right for Guevara’s victims, to do what is right for the City’s taxpayers, and to do what is right morally. It’s time to take responsibility for this dark chapter in Chicago’s history and to stop wasting taxpayer money fighting to defend one of the most corrupt police officers it has ever employed.”
“This is obviously a substantial settlement, but the County would have paid many times this amount had it fought these cases and lost,” says Jon Loevy, another attorney for the Plaintiffs. ”Any one of these cases could have resulted in a verdict exceeding the total amount paid to resolve all the cases. Settling for a reasonable and fair amount was the right thing to do.”
