Foxx Says Exonerated Men Committed Bucktown Double Murder Under Oath

Kim Foxx has turned a familiar Chicago wrongful-conviction fight into a credibility crisis inside the justice system. In a deposition that lasted more than four hours, the Cook County state’s attorney said she believed Arturo DeLeon-Reyes and Gabriel Solache committed the Bucktown double murder of Mariano and Jacinta Soto, even though both men’s convictions were later overturned.

The case has been one of the city’s most watched. DeLeon-Reyes was sentenced to life in 2000 and Solache was sentenced to death for the 1998 stabbing deaths in Bucktown. Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted every death-row sentence to life in 2003, and the men later won relief as courts revisited the evidence that put them away. Foxx also said she personally granted homicide detective Reynaldo Guevara immunity to testify because she believed the defendants had committed the crime.

That testimony lands in the middle of a much larger reckoning over Guevara’s work. Reporting says about 43 people have received exonerations in cases tied to him, many during Foxx’s tenure. In 2017, Judge James Obbish found Guevara had told “bald-faced lies” from the witness stand despite that immunity. For Chicago’s true-crime community, the pattern is hard to ignore: one detective, one office, and a long trail of cases where convictions collapsed under the weight of misconduct findings, suppressed evidence, and coerced statements.

The Bucktown case also sits beside the city’s broader wrongful-conviction ledger. Legal filings in the Englewood cases show four teenagers, Michael Saunders, Harold Richardson, Terrill Swift and Vincent Thames, were exonerated after a November 16, 2011 ruling by Judge Paul Biebel and the indictments were dismissed on January 17, 2012. Those cases involved the 1994 rape and murder of Nina Glover, with allegations of coerced confessions and police misconduct. Saunders has since settled his wrongful-conviction lawsuit with Chicago, while Gabriel Solache is set to take his civil case to a federal jury next week.

Foxx’s deposition also reached beyond the Bucktown and Englewood files. She reportedly said her City Club of Chicago retirement announcement was ad-libbed and that she had no factual basis when she told the audience Marilyn Mulero had been wrongfully convicted, a statement Mulero is now using to support her own innocence claim. That kind of remark cuts to the central tension in these cases: exoneration can erase a conviction without settling every factual question, but when a top prosecutor says she still believes the defendants were guilty, it raises the stakes for public trust, review standards, and the city’s exposure after another $29 million payout earlier in 2026.