A federal jury has found that disgraced former Chicago police Detective Reynaldo Guevara coerced a confession and manipulated evidence in a 1989 murder case, awarding $750,000 to a former Latin Kings gang member who spent 17 years in prison for the crime.
After a three-week trial that featured Guevara invoking his constitutional rights against self-incrimination, the jury late Thursday found in favor of the plaintiff, Jaime Rios, on six of seven counts against Guevara, including that he fabricated information from confidential informants, coerced Rios’ confession, and withheld evidence from Rios’ criminal trial that he’d beaten a key witness.
The jury rejected, however, the request from plaintiffs’ attorneys for a whopping $40 million in damages, awarding only $750,000 in compensatory damages, which the city must pay, and no money in punitive damages against Guevara himself.
The same panel ruled in favor of Guevara’s former colleague, retired Chicago police Detective Michael Mason, on all counts against him.
A spokesperson for the city Law Department declined Friday to comment specifically on the verdict.
Rios’ lead attorney, Stephen Richards, told the Tribune Rios felt “vindicated” that the jury believed his claim that Guevara had framed him and that the verdict offered “further evidence of my client’s innocence.”
“Guevara was found liable on almost every claim,” Richards said. “Our witnesses were believed, while his evidence was not.”
The mixed-bag verdict is the first jury decision in a Guevara-related lawsuit since the 2018 trial in a lawsuit brought by Jacques Rivera, who was awarded $17.5 million for the 20 years he spent in prison before he was exonerated in 2011.
To date, there have been about $141 million in verdicts and settlements in some 12 lawsuits against Guevara, with at least 37 more cases pending in U.S. District Court.
While the jury’s award to Rios was one of the smallest in any Guevara lawsuit so far, it does not reflect the total amount of money the case will ultimately cost taxpayers.
As of Dec. 31, the city had shelled out more than $1.1 million to outside law firms to defend the Rios case, city records show, and that figure will climb much higher once the final bills from trial are tabulated.
Because the city took the case to trial, taxpayers will also likely have to foot the attorneys fees for the plaintiff — a figure that must be submitted and approved by the judge.
The latest trial involved allegations by Rios, an admitted former Latin Kings gang member convicted in the June 27, 1989, shooting death of rival Spanish Cobras gang member Luis Morales on North Western Avenue.
Rios’ attorneys contend that the case had gone cold when Guevara, who at the time was a gang crimes specialist, not a homicide detective, inserted himself into the investigation by claiming two confidential informants had fingered Rios as the gunman.
Guevara and two colleagues, Mason and then-Detective Ernest Halvorson, orchestrated a frame-up by coercing one witness to identify Rios by beating him with a phone book and flashlight, and another by threatening to charge him with obstruction, according to the plaintiffs’ allegations.
Rios, meanwhile, gave a court-reported confession to the murder after detectives slammed his head into a table and threatened to take away his kids, according to the allegations.
“You will see Reynaldo Guevara was not an honest cop,” Richards told the jury in opening statements. “He was not just seeking to do good things … he was perceived as a thug, a corrupt officer. Not an officer who was out to seek the truth.”
But defense attorneys called Rios’ claims a fabrication, noting he had no visible injuries despite being allegedly roughed up in his interrogation and wound up confessing to the crime on three separate occasions, including in a typed court-reported statement before a Cook County state’s attorney.
Rios spent 17 years in prison before being paroled in 2007, yet waited more than 15 years to file his petition for a new trial, the defense noted.
In his opening statement to the jury, Guevara’s attorney, Timothy Scahill, blamed then-State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for Rios’ eventual exoneration in 2022, saying her own prosecutors thought the conviction was solid and that they should fight the effort for a new trial in court.
Instead, Scahill said, Foxx ordered them to stop opposing the litigation, including Rios’ pursuit of a certificate of innocence, which was granted without investigation after a hearing that lasted “about a minute and a half,” Scahill said.
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“Kim Foxx made a decision based on nothing, case closed,” Scahill said. “We are here because the state’s attorney’s office didn’t do what they are supposed to do.”
Scahill also urged the jury to not read into Guevara’s reasons for taking the Fifth, which was not his recommendation but the strategy of another Guevara attorney.
“The Fifth Amendment protects innocent people. It protects people from government overreach (and) overzealous prosecutors,” Scahill said in his opening remarks. “Are there reasons why an 82-year-old retired man might be fearful he might be subjected to an unjust prosecution? I would submit to you there are a lot of reasons, and none of them have to do with him being guilty of anything.”
In his comments to the Tribune on Friday, Richards said the defense “turned cartwheels” to try to insinuate that Guevara was taking the Fifth to shield himself from an unjust prosecution, but in the end, the only reason for him to invoke those rights was to avoid opening himself up to perjury charges.
“It was a very difficult task for the defense (to explain), and I don’t envy it,” Richards said.
Guevara, 82, who retired in 2005 and is still pulling a $91,000 annual city pension, has testified multiple times in post-conviction proceedings and lawsuits over the years, but it’s become much more rare since he first began invoking the Fifth Amendment some 13 years ago.
Unlike in criminal proceedings, attorneys are allowed to argue in a civil case that a defendant invoking the Fifth Amendment is doing so to shield himself from potential criminal liability.
His testimony last week in Rios’ case, taken remotely from San Antonio, Texas, where he now lives, came just days after city attorneys recommended aldermen spend $29.2 million to settle four separate lawsuits tied to the notorious ex-detective.
In his 30 minutes on the stand, Guevara invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 80 times.
About midway through Guevara’s testimony, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Daniel instructed the jury that they can, “but are not required to,” assume Guevara’s answers to the questions “may have been unfavorable to him.”