In the past ten years, the city of Chicago has shelled out over $300 million in wrongful conviction settlements—pre-trial payouts stemming from civil lawsuits brought under allegations of police misconduct.
The Cook County State’s Attorney Office under Kim Foxx is responsible for over 250 exonerations since she first took office in late 2016. Most are based not on new evidence indicating innocence, but on extraordinary claims that police tortured suspects, fabricated evidence and colluded with prosecutors to win guilty verdicts.
Foxx’s benevolence towards criminals has extended beyond those convicted of violent crime; she has also been unwilling to prosecute suspects to the point that she earned an “Exhibit A” label in a government watchdog’s investigation into the alarming increase in violent crimes under prosecutors backed by progressive billionaire George Soros.
With Soros’s backing, Foxx defeated incumbent Anita Alvarez in 2016 “by promising to put fewer people in prison,” according to Ken Braun, the Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Senior Investigative Researcher. Foxx kept that promise and violent crime jumped.
Citing a Chicago Tribune analysis, Braun reported that Foxx dismissed 30 percent of the felony cases presented to her during her first three years in office. This included 6.1% of aggravated firearm battery offenses, 8.1% of homicides, 8.1% of aggravated battery attacks on police, and 9.5% percent of felony sex crimes.
“All of these were healthy increases in leniency over what her predecessor had allowed during a similar period,” Braun wrote. “During Alvarez’s time in office Chicago averaged 521 annual homicides. In the first four years under Foxx that leaped to 627 murders per year."
Despite the outcomes, Soros again backed Foxx in her re-election bid in 2020.
CRC reported that the Soros-backed Democracy PAC donated $2 million to the Illinois Justice and Public Safey PAC. Within weeks the PAC spent almost $1.9 million of the loot attacking Foxx’s rival in the primary, Bill Conway.
Foxx easily won her re-election bid, and the number of homicides jumped to 747 murders per year making Chicago the homicide capital of the nation.
CWB Chicago recently cited a couple of instances of Foxx charging suspects of violent crimes with misdemeanors, yet filing two felony charges against a man in a case that involved her personally.
In June, William Swetz was slapped with aggravated battery in a public place and aggravated assault with a motor vehicle after a run-in with Foxx near her Flossmoor home. According to reports, Swetz yelled at Foxx to get out of the road while she was on her morning walk, and then dumped a Big Gulp on her after she “made a hand gesture.”
Yet in one instance cited by CWB, Foxx charged Gary Coleman with only misdemeanor battery for punching a 60-year-old woman unconscious in the Loop in October 2021.
"Back on the street days later, Coleman allegedly pushed a 66-year-old tourist from the Cermak Green Line platform," the report said.
On May 31 of this year Foxx charged teenagers who attacked a Streeterville couple with misdemeanor battery, and they were released. News reports said that the female victim of the attack lost the baby she was carrying.
And in September 2021, Chicago police officers urged Foxx’s office to charge a man with felonies after he allegedly stabbed a 66-year-old man five times near Union Station. Prosecutors declined charge the man with a felony.
When asked about the agenda behind the soft on crime approach, Braun told the Cook County Record that he could only speculate as to the rationale.
“I have been told and understand the argument that Soros is just hell-bent on destroying America,” he replied in an email. “Maybe so, but I think idiocy and incompetence is an easier to defend assumption. He didn’t realize the damage his money would do. And now that it has occurred, he isn’t prepared to admit it, so he keeps spending it.”
“And I suppose the lesson here is that people who bring on really awful policy decisions that lead to major consequences are very reluctant to change their minds,” he continued. “See also: Fauci, Birx, several other COVID deciders whose philosophy poisoning has been exposed, but never apologized for.”
Foxx announced in April 2023 that she will not seek a third term. In November, the winner of the April Democratic Primary for State's Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke will face off against Republican Bob Fioretti and Libertarian Andrew Charles Kopinski.