ICE arrests wrongly convicted Chicago man released after 20 years in prison
By
Meenakshi Jagadeesan
31 March 2018
Last Wednesday, Ricardo Rodriguez—a Chicago man wrongfully convicted for the 1995 murder of a homeless man—was finally freed after 20 years behind bars, only to be immediately taken into custody by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Rodriguez, who had been a legal permanent resident of the United States, had lost his residency status at the time of the conviction. Now, despite the fact that the Cook County state’s attorney had finally dropped the charges against him, ICE has taken him into custody as an “undocumented immigrant.” Rodriguez now faces possible deportation.
But for the tragedy it has visited on the life of Rodriguez and his family, this travesty of justice is absurd enough to be ludicrous. Rodriguez was arrested for the murder of a homeless man, Rodney Kemppainen, who did odd-jobs for people in exchange for sleeping in garages. Kemppainen was killed in a drive-by shooting in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood.
There was no physical link connecting Rodriguez to the crime, nothing in his background that would have established motive and he never confessed to the killing. Rodriguez was, however, still arrested by Chicago police Detective Reynaldo Guevara, who claimed to have received an anonymous tip, and was eventually convicted on the basis of questionable testimony from two eye-witnesses. On Tuesday, Cook County Judge James Obbish finally threw out Rodriguez’s case at the request of the state prosecutors.
The Chicago Sun- Times, which initially reported the story, pointed out that even prior to this case, Cook County has had a rather dubious distinction. According to data compiled by the National Registry of…