Chicago man exonerated after 23 years of wrongful imprisonment
CHICAGO (WGN) — The list of homicide exonerations tied to disgraced former Chicago Police Department detective Reynaldo Guevara grew Monday, with Antonio McDowell becoming the 51st individual exonerated in a Guevara case.
McDowell's homicide conviction was officially tossed after a court hearing at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse Monday morning. In total, he spent 23 years wrongfully imprisoned from 1997 to 2020, and has been living with the weight of a wrongful conviction for nearly 28 years.
I'm free for the first time in nearly 30 years,' McDowell said at a press conference following the court hearing. 'I'm free.'
McDowell was released in 2020 when Governor JB Pritzker granted his clemency petition and commuted his sentence to time served, based on an emergency commutation request tied to McDowell's COVID-related health risks.
Since August 2022, the State's Attorney's Office under Kim Foxx's administration no longer disputed Guevara's misconduct, particularly a well-documented pattern of threatening and abusing eyewitnesses into making identifications, manipulating alibi statements, and fabricating evidence.
Earlier this May, after a day-long evidentiary hearing, Cook County Circuit Judge Maria Judge Kuriakos-Ciesil issued a decision vacating McDowell's conviction, emphasizing his account of going from victim to suspect, and Guevara's pattern of misconduct.
This is the second post-conviction hearing in a case tied to Reynaldo Guevara since State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke took office, both resulting in the Court deciding to vacate the convictions.
What's unusual about McDowell's case is that he originally came to a CPD police station as the victim of a shooting.
'Guevara said you're going to identify this person as the person who shot you,' said Anand Swaminathan, one of McDowell's attorneys. 'Antonio said no, I did not see who shot me. Guevarra tried to force and pressure him into who Guevara wanted him to pick.'
Swaminathan said when McDowell refused to cooperate, he was punished and hounded, instead of helped.
'He came there as a victim of a crime,' Swaminathan said. 'He left with murder charges for a crime he didn't commit.'
Guevara's misconduct is well documented. He's accused of framing dozens of young men in the 1980s and 1990s, predominantly on the city's West Side. WGN TV News has found local taxpayers have spent well over $120 million investigating, settling and defending claims of misconduct made against Guevara, with dozens more lawsuits still pending in court.
'Guevara did not incarcerate me, he incarcerated justice itself,' McDowell said.
Expenditures tied to former CPD detective now more than $126M
Even with a lengthy record of misconduct by Guevara, and Cook County and state lawmakers returning McDowell's freedom, a wrongful conviction is not a universally held belief by those involved in McDowell's case.
In a 2020 article from the Chicago Tribune, Ruth Morales-Santana—the victim in a carjacking CPD connected to the fatal shooting McDowell was originally convicted of in 1997—told the Tribune she vividly remembers the crime and is certain it was McDowell who robbed her.
She was a single mother of four kids running an errand ahead of her son's birthday when an assailant pointed a gun at her stomach and repeatedly threatened to kill her.
'It was him,' Morales-Santana told the Tribune at the time. 'And he knows it.'
After being found guilty in 1999, McDowell offered condolences to the victim of the shooting and maintained his innocence during his sentencing.
'I was framed,' McDowell said at the time. 'Police know they framed me because when they arrested me I was a victim. … They placed me in the lineup. I am talking about I ain't have no knowledge of [Mario] Castro, his family. I didn't murder him. Putting me under the jail [is] not going to make the family happy because the killer is still at large. You all, I mean, I can't, I don't even know what to say. I know I didn't kill that man. That is not my M.O. That is all I have to say.'
McDowell was sentenced to 103 years in prison. Before Pritzker granted his clemency petition in 2020 and he was formally exonerated on Monday, his first opportunity for release would have been in July 2048.
Guevara has never been charged with a crime and currently lives in Texas. He's repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to comment on any of the 51 exonerations tied to his career as a CPD detective.
He retired from CPD 20 years ago and since then, has collected more than $1 million in pension benefits from the City of Chicago.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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