After spending 25 years in prison due to an unjust conviction for murder, José Tinajero is now a free man.
His sentence and that of Thomas Kelly, another man who was accused of the same crime, were overturned this week by a Chicago judge.
"Being free is a real challenge for me. My mom took me to a TJ Maxx store to shop and I felt like everyone was looking at me, it was very uncomfortable. I felt like I was out of place. It's hard to deal with this "Tinajero, 45, explained in an interview this Friday with Noticias Telemundo.
Although his conviction was overturned on January 31, he remained incarcerated at the Kewanee Correctional Facility, about 150 miles southwest of Chicago, until yesterday afternoon, when he was able to return home and be reunited with his loved ones.
José Tinajero, 45, during an interview with Noticias Telemundo at his home in Chicago, Illinois, on February 2, 2024.Albinson Linares
"I was born here in Chicago, in the United States, and I was raised by a great mother who did everything she could for me. My father left us when I was very young, but my mother did a great job and she has suffered a lot from everything this," he says.
In 1999, Tinajero and Kelly were arrested for the murder of Daniel Garcia, who was beaten on October 12, 1998, in an alley near Whipple and Armitage streets.
Kelly and Tinajero, along with John Martinez, whose case was dismissed nearly a year ago, allege they were coerced into making false confessions by Reynaldo Guevara, who at the time was a Chicago police detective.
"Justice is very corrupt. And because of that corruption I had to serve 25 years in prison. The truth is, I'm not very happy with that," he laments.
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Guevara is now accused of falsely incriminating dozens of men and women between the 1980s and early 2000s. So far, 40 people have been exonerated in the cases of Guevara who, in his court appearances, has refused to answer. to questions about his alleged actions.
The former detective has not been punished, but the city of Chicago faces more than a dozen lawsuits related to cases in which he led the investigations or collaborated in the investigations.
"This is a very important case because it is one more step in correcting what I believe is one of the greatest injustices that has happened in Chicago; more than 40 people were wrongfully convicted in cases related to the same detective. And it is very important that Let's give these people justice and correct those mistakes," says Joel Flaxman, Tinajero's lawyer.
395 Latino people exonerated since 1989
Maurice Possley, senior investigator for the National Registry of Exonerations, explains that Guevara's case is one of the worst he has analyzed in recent years because it shows how an agent who worked for years as a gang crimes officer, and thus became familiar with Many people related to those gangs then began, he claims, to commit crimes.
"When he became a homicide investigator, he began to incriminate people who he knew were bad actors or who he had a grudge against because perhaps they did not cooperate in his investigations. Guevara coerced, if it was a woman, he told her that he was going to take her children away from her. "If it was a man, he threatened to lock him up unless he identified someone. In my opinion, it shows the anarchy that a bad detective can unleash," explains Possley.
At least 32 of the 40 people released in the Guevara cases have Latin roots, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
"In case after case we see Chicago spend millions of dollars on outside lawyers to defend indefensible cases. And it's time for a change. It's time for the city to stop wasting its money on lawyers and spend money on compensating victims of truly egregious misconduct," said Flaxman, Tinajero's attorney.
In 2023, an investigation by television station NBC 5 concluded that the settlements for all the wrongful convictions that the city of Chicago has paid since 2010 for the excesses and crimes committed by Guevara total more than $288 million.
In August 2022, Cook County (Illinois) State's Attorney Kim Foxx announced an investigation into Guevara's convictions from the 1980s and 1990s, saying: "We can no longer uphold these convictions. We cannot retry these cases based on the evidence we have today.
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Public agencies across the country have paid $4 billion to compensate people who, on average, spent at least nine years in prison for wrongful convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Noticias Telemundo requested comments on the Tinajero case, and other releases associated with Guevara's police action, from the Cook County Prosecutor's Office;
to the Chicago Police Department;
and to the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, but they have not responded so far.
There are still about 32 lawsuits pending in court that have been filed by exonerated people who have accused Guevara of fixing their murder cases through witness tampering, coerced confessions and more.
Tinajero is one of 395 Latino people who have been wrongfully convicted and exonerated since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Prosecutors have asked the courts to overturn the convictions of Guevara, who last year repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment (people often invoke that clause of the Constitution in order to avoid answering specific questions and incriminating themselves in criminal cases ).
Guevara retired from law enforcement in 2005 and has since kept a low profile, refusing to answer questions in court proceedings and even moving out of state.
In 2022, the WGN station located him living in Texas, but he refused to give statements and there has been no further news of the former detective.
National Registry of Exoneration databases show that of the nearly 3,500 people who have been exonerated of serious crimes in the United States since 1989, more than half of the cases are related to alleged police or prosecutorial misconduct.
Experts say coerced confessions, withheld evidence, false testimony and other bad practices that contribute to wrongful convictions are often not punished.
"60% of the cases on the registry are people of color. And that happens because those are the people the police focus on, whether for drug crimes or violence. Black people are seven times more likely of being wrongly convicted than white people. In many of these cases, police settle investigations based on false confessions or simply frame people," Possley says.
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Many of the issues that affect Black communities, and other people of color, regarding wrongful convictions and mass incarceration also affect Latino communities.
Possley explains that, in some studies, Hispanics represent a small number of convictions but that does not correspond to reality.
"In many cases they are underrepresented because, at the national level, there are states that classify people incorrectly. So they include them in categories like white or black but they don't specify that they are Latino. That's why you get the impression that the The problem of wrongful convictions in the Hispanic community is low, but that is not the reality,” says the researcher.
According to data from the Prison Policy Initiative, black people only represent 13% of the United States population, but they make up 40% of prisoners.
In the case of Latinos, this trend is also recorded because they represent 16% of the population, but they constitute 19% of those who are behind bars.
"Latinos suffer discrimination everywhere, we not only see it in prison but also in the communities. That is always happening. What I can say is that adapting to prison, knowing that I was innocent, was the most difficult thing for me. life," Tinajero said about his experience in the prison system.
The irregularities in the Tinajero case
Detective Guevara arrested Tinajero in 1999 during the investigations into the murder of Daniel García and, on September 27, 2001, he was sentenced by a jury to spend 40 years in prison.
John Martinez and Thomas Kelly were also convicted in the Garcia case.
They have all been released.
The main evidence against Tinajero was his own statement and the ocular identification of a woman named Melloney Parker.
Although Tinajero said in court that Guevara coerced him into making a false statement, and requested the suppression of that statement, the court denied the motion, according to court papers reviewed by Noticias Telemundo.
"When they killed García, at that moment I was in my house. And I always said it but they didn't believe me," says Tinajero with discouragement.
According to court documents, Tinajero's defense also challenged Melloney Parker's identification as unreliable "and a product of Detective Guevara's undue influence," but that did not prevent his conviction.
Aside from the enormous financial penalties that the cases linked to Guevara have had, they also take a great emotional toll on people who have spent years and decades unjustly imprisoned.
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"I just want to spend time with my family, you know? They were always there for me. My mom, my daughter and now I have a granddaughter. I have to make up for lost time with my daughter, because I was out of her life for 25 whole years." , and I have to make peace with her. My future is to focus on my family, and work, of course, to help support them," explains Tinajero.
As has happened with other people exonerated for Guevara's misconduct, Tinajero and his legal team are evaluating options to sue the city of Chicago for the damages he has suffered over the last 25 years.
"I would like to see the justice system improve," Tinakero concludes, "and I would also like to see the corrupt officers not only receive a pension and retire, but I would like to see them experience everything that I went through in prison."