Disgraced former Chicago police Detective Reynaldo Guevara invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination more than 80 times Thursday in an ongoing federal wrongful conviction trial where he is accused of beating witnesses and coercing a confession in a 1989 gang-related slaying in Humboldt Park.
Guevara’s testimony, which was given 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.
How the jury weighs Guevara’s refusal to answer questions could factor heavily into how much the city will eventually pay out in the more than two dozen other lawsuits that are still pending against him — or whether the Law Department decides to roll the dice and take some of them to trial.
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.
About midway through Guevara’s testimony Thursday, 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.”
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 5th Amendment some 13 years ago.
His testimony Thursday marked his first appearance in a federal courtroom since he took the witness stand in 2018 in a lawsuit brought by Jacques Rivera, who accused the longtime gang crimes detective of framing him for the 1988 slaying of 16-year-old Felix Valentin.
In that trial, Guevara asserted his rights against self-incrimination more than 200 times, refusing to answer a barrage of questions about his policing practices, including whether he ever coerced witnesses into making identifications, falsified police reports or pinned bogus charges on suspects.
That jury found in favor of Rivera and awarded him $17.5 million for the 20 years he spent in prison before he was exonerated in 2011.
Since that verdict, the city has not gone to trial on any Guevara-related case, choosing to settle suits for often-staggering sums, despite shelling out tens of millions of dollars to outside lawyers to litigate the cases.
The current trial involves allegations by Jaime 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, then-detectives Michael Mason and Ernest Halvorson, then 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,” plaintiff’s attorney Stephen Richards told the jury in opening statements last week. “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 fighting 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.
“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.”
Guevara appeared in court Friday on a video screen that had been wheeled in front of the witness stand in Daniels’ 14th-floor courtroom. Dressed in a dark suit and blue shirt, with his beard now completely gray, Guevara seemed stiff as he fielded the first question from Richards: In 1989, were you a gang specialist?
“Yes,” Guevara said.
Guevara was then asked when he first heard of Morales’ murder in June 1989.
“On the advice of my attorney, I invoke my constitutional rights under the Fifth Amendment,” Guevara answered.
Over the next half-hour, Guevara would go on to invoke his rights against self-incrimination 81 more times, declining to answer questions about whether he falsely arrested Rios, searched his apartment without a warrant, or beat witnesses with a phone book and flashlight.
Under questioning from Scahill, Guevara told the jury he and his wife of 40 years are retired and living off of his police pension and Social Security in the suburbs of San Antonio. He said his health is OK but his “mind is not that bright like it used to be.”
Is that a concern to your wife? Scahill asked.
“Yeah, it concerns both of us,” Guevara said with a short laugh.
Overall, the city has faced over 40 lawsuits alleging Guevara falsified evidence, extracted confessions through torture and lied to wrongfully put dozens of Chicagoans behind bars.
The litigation has already cost the city nearly $100 million in jury verdicts and settlements, with the remaining cases — some of them more than eight years old — representing hundreds of millions of dollars more in potential liability.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
