After serving more than four decades in prison for a double murder he did not commit, 63-year-old James Soto is unsure if a couple hundred million dollars is enough to make up for time lost.
“I would say I’m deserving of probably $200 million-plus for what I’ve been through,” he said, adding he deserves the largest payout for being the longest-serving exonerated inmate in Illinois history.
In a new federal lawsuit, Soto’s lawyers at civil rights law firm Loevy and Loevy explain how police allegedly coerced confessions to implicate Soto and his cousin after failing to prosecute the two people initially suspected in the murders.
“Will people be held accountable? I don’t know,” Soto told reporters Tuesday about his lawsuit against the city, county and 32 Chicago police officers who allegedly participated in a cover-up.
Soto was 20 years old in 1981 when authorities accused him of carrying out a drive-by shooting amid a crowd during a softball game in Piotrowski Park at 31st Street and Keeler Avenue. The shooting killed a 16-year-old girl and an 18-year-old Marine who was home on leave.
Soto and his cousin David Ayala were convicted of murder and given life sentences. But they were exonerated last December after a Cook County judge vacated the convictions after serving 42 years each.
According to the lawsuit, detectives were facing pressure to convict someone and allegedly coerced a man named Wally Cruz to falsely confess that Ayala ordered the killings. Cruz had claimed that he drove Soto and another alleged shooter to the park, where they opened fire from a gangway because Latin King members were present.
The killings were witnessed by 30 people at the Little Village park, but no one ever confirmed Cruz’s story, according to the lawsuit. Others later testified to refute Cruz’s account.
The lawsuit alleges that police intimidated other witnesses to confirm the fabricated story, threatening them with harm and criminal charges.
Soto’s attorney, Jon Loevy, said he expects the case to take four or five years to get a trial.
Loevy was also an attorney for Marcel Brown, a Chicagoan who last month was awarded $50 million in damages from the city for a wrongful conviction. It set a record for the highest amount awarded to a single person in a wrongful conviction case in the U.S.
The city’s law department and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office declined to comment.
Disgraced Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara is named in the lawsuit. Loevy said it’s unclear now how he is connected to Soto’s case, though his name appears in some reports. Guevara has cost taxpayers more than $76 million in city settlements for police misconduct.
Soto spoke Tuesday about studying law in prison to help him prove his innocence.
He took vocational courses in prison, received college credits, tutored Spanish-speaking peers, worked in the law library and became a member of the United States Junior Chamber, a leadership training service organization.
A month before he was freed, Soto graduated with his bachelor’s degree as part of the first cohort of Northwestern University’s prison education program. He now works as a paralegal and plans to go to law school. He said he plans to take the law school admission test in November.
Soto said he hopes for a payout to help put his life back together, but he said it’s more important to send a message of hope to other people wrongfully imprisoned.
“Obviously, the money would help me put together my life that’s been broken in a thousand pieces,” he said. “But the message sends a shot over the bow to say, ‘This is intolerable, inexcusable, for this to happen to someone.'”
Read the lawsuit: