Leadership turnover is rocking Kim Foxx’s rebranded Conviction Review Unit.
For the second time in six months, the agency will lose its top official. Michelle Mbekeani, an embattled and inexperienced prosecutor tapped to head the agency, resigned on June 18, after just six months on the job.
News reports say Mbekeani will leave in July to prepare for the birth of her child, months before Foxx’s second term will end in December.
Formerly called the Conviction Integrity Unit, Foxx created the agency in 2016 during her first year in office. Last December, Foxx rebranded the unit that reviews claims of innocence by individuals convicted of serious crimes that include murder and armed robbery.
Foxx at the time didn’t give a reason for the rebranding. Mbekeani was expected to usher in a new chapter at the agency, which under Foxx has thrown out 250 wrongful convictions. Many of those convictions were the result of actions by disgraced Police Commander Jon Burge and Detective Reynaldo Guevara.
Mbekeani oversaw a staff of eight which included two deputy supervisors and her predecessor, Nancy Adduci. Adduci was demoted before she resigned in January; she had worked at the agency since 2019. As a prosecutor, she was accused of hiding evidence in a case involving three men, and a fatal police shooting in Austin.
Questions remain about why Mbekeani was appointed to head the agency. A former attorney at the Shriver Center for Poverty Law, Mbekeani graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 2014 and has worked as a policy adviser for the State Attorney’s Office since 2018. She co-authored and lobbied Springfield legislation to create the nation’s first internal jail polling station, allowing individuals incarcerated pretrial to vote.
In 2020, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker appointed Mbekeani to serve as a Commissioner on the Illinois Juvenile Justice Commission.
However, Mbekeani reportedly has never worked as a line prosecutor, and her appointment appears to have rankled some senior office peers.
In the courtroom, Mbekeani experienced problems while serving in her role, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
In January, Judge Michael McHale banned Mbekeani from his courtroom during a conflicts hearing in the case of Dante Brown, who is fighting to overturn his double murder conviction.
McHale was bothered by a website that Mbekeani ran. The website Periodsentence.com, which has been shut down, helped individuals who claimed they were wrongfully convicted by connecting them to legal agencies for help. The judge believed Mbekeani’s involvement with the organization conflicted with her role in the prosecutor’s office.
Mbekeani told McHale the website was a “class project” and “not a real business.” According to the Sun-Times, McHale found Mbekeani’s answers “duplicitous, incomplete, evasive and untruthful,” when he learned that she had registered her website business with the Illinois Secretary of State.
