What One Detective’s Misconduct Has Cost Chicago

On October 14, the Chicago City Council voted unanimously to pay $260.8 million to seventeen men whose convictions rested on the work of one detective. Between them they had served about 383 years.

According to a WTTW News analysis, the city has now spent $472.8 million on the fifty-seven lawsuits naming former detective Reynaldo Guevara. Of that, $56.2 million went to private lawyers to defend him, and twenty-five cases are still pending.

The city did not investigate Guevara’s conduct until 2013 which was eight years after he retired. That review cost $1.9 million and has never been released.

What Chicago Actually Paid For

Guevara was accused for decades of falsifying reports, coercing witnesses, and steering identifications. In 2017 a judge found he had told “bald-faced lies” under oath. He has invoked the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times rather than answer whether he framed anyone. He was never charged with a crime and has never been convicted of one. Fifty-five people he sent to prison have since been exonerated.

The allegations were not secret. They were made, case after case, by different defendants with different lawyers who did not know about each other, in a system where nobody was assembling them into a pattern and nothing required anybody to. Each one looked like a defendant complaining about the officer who arrested him which is not uncommon.

The high cost was not the misconduct. It was the decades in which the information existed and never reached the people who could have used it. That is a discovery failure.

Strip the Guevara cases down and the mechanism is one officer’s account of what he saw and what a witness told him, repeated across many cases, tested in each one as though it were the first. Now describe an ordinary Texas DWI trial. One officer testifies about how the car was moving, how the driver smelled, how many clues appeared on a walk-and-turn he administered and scored himself. There is often no other witness. The stakes differ by orders of magnitude. The evidentiary structure is the same, and so is the question: what else does this officer have a history of seeing?

An officer with prior findings of untruthfulness, a sustained complaint for report falsification, a pattern of suppression rulings, or a history of scoring field sobriety tests in ways other officers do not is impeachment material in a DWI case exactly as he would be in a murder case.

What Texas Law Gives You

Texas is better equipped for this than most states, and the reason is Article 39.14, the Michael Morton Act.

• Subsection (a) requires the State, on a timely request, to produce designated documents and items that are material to the case and in the possession, custody, or control of the state or anyone under contract with it. Note the reach: it is not limited to the prosecutor’s own file.
• Subsection (h) is the one to lead with. The State must disclose any exculpatory, impeachment, or mitigating document, item, or information in its possession, custody, or control. It applies notwithstanding the rest of the article, and it does not depend on a request. Impeachment is named in the text.
• Subsection (k) carries the duty past verdict. Material covered by (h) that the State discovers before, during, or after trial must be promptly disclosed.

In Watkins v. State, 619 S.W.3d 265 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021), the Court of Criminal Appeals construed “material” in Article 39.14 and held it means “having a logical connection to a consequential fact” and is “synonymous with ‘relevant.’” That is a different and far lower bar than federal materiality under Brady v. Maryland, which asks whether disclosure would have had a reasonable probability of changing the outcome. The same opinion is even more direct about subsection (h), which it calls “a free-standing duty to disclose all ‘exculpatory, impeaching, and mitigating’ evidence” and says the Legislature “did not limit the applicability of Article 39.14(h) to ‘material’ evidence, so this duty to disclose is much broader than the prosecutor’s duty to disclose as a matter of due process under Brady vs. Maryland.” A prior finding that an officer lied under oath has a logical connection to a consequential fact the moment he takes the stand.

Three years later the court answered the question that matters most here. In State v. Heath, 696 S.W.3d 677 (Tex. Crim. App. 2024), it held that “the state” in Article 39.14 “means the State of Texas, which includes law enforcement agencies,” and that the article “does not contain a knowledge requirement.” A prosecutor who does not know what sits in a police file is not thereby excused, and a trial court may exclude evidence the State disclosed late without any showing of bad faith or prejudice. Judge Newell wrote for a six-to-three court; Judge Keel dissented, joined by Presiding Judge Keller and Judge Yeary. Rehearing was denied that September.

Giglio v. United States extends the disclosure duty to evidence bearing on a witness’s credibility, and federal law reaches the same place by a different route: Kyles v. Whitley held “the individual prosecutor has a duty to learn of any favorable evidence known to the others acting on the government’s behalf in the case, including the police.” Under either authority, the State does not get to say that the police department’s file belongs to somebody else.

The same fight is running in a Texas case right now. Our post on the A.J. Armstrong appeal covers a claim that the State never disclosed a Forensic Science Commission complaint against its blood-spatter expert, pleaded under Article 39.14(h) rather than only under Brady. The State’s answers there are the ones to expect: the complaint was unrelated, an unproven accusation cannot be used to impeach, and it had been public since 2019. Banks v. Dretke disposes of the last one. A rule declaring “prosecutor may hide, defendant must seek,” the Supreme Court held, “is not tenable in a system constitutionally bound to accord defendants due process.” The open question in that case is imputation, meaning whether what the State’s own witness knew counts as what the State knew. Heath answers that for law enforcement. It does not answer it for a contract expert.

What Texas Law Takes Away

In Texas civil service cities, which include Dallas and Fort Worth, a police department may keep its own personnel file separate from the civil service file. Local Government Code § 143.089(g) says the department “may not release any information contained in the department file to any agency or person requesting information relating to a fire fighter or police officer,” with a narrow exception for another law enforcement agency considering hiring the officer. Lawyers call it the G file. Misconduct that never resulted in formal discipline under the civil service chapter can hide there.

The usual workaround was the separation report every agency files with the state licensing commission when an officer leaves called the F-5. It used to carry a characterization: honorably, generally, or dishonorably discharged. That field is gone. Senate Bill 1445, enacted in 2023, repealed § 1701.452(b) and (c), which required the discharge statement and let the commission define the categories. It also repealed § 1701.4521, the license suspension for a dishonorable discharge, and § 1701.4525, the process for contesting a report. The change applies to separations on or after March 1, 2024.

The same bill created a public database of officer records. It shows the date basic training was completed, continuing education compliance, courses taken, total training hours, and the date the license issued. It does not show conduct. The bill also requires agencies to check a national database before hiring, which is a real improvement.

The current Texas picture is this: The statute governing what the State must hand you is unusually strong and was read broadly in Watkins and Heath. The records themselves are held by an agency that is told by a different statute not to release them, and the one public document that used to carry a judgment about why an officer left no longer carries it. These were written for different purposes and nobody reconciled them.

What to Actually Ask For

Make the request specific, in writing, and early.

• Sustained and unsustained internal affairs complaints involving untruthfulness, report accuracy, improper searches, or use of force.
• Any finding by any court, in any case, that the officer was not credible, including suppression rulings and the reporter’s record where one exists.
• Whether the officer appears on any list the district attorney’s office maintains of officers with disclosure issues, and the office’s written policy for maintaining it.
• Prior inconsistent statements by this officer in other cases involving the same kind of observation, which for a DWI case means field sobriety administration and scoring.
• Training and certification records, including field sobriety certification, recertification dates, and any remedial training ordered.
• The F-5 separation report for any prior agency, which still exists even without the discharge characterization and still shows the fact and timing of a departure.
• Personnel and disciplinary records in the department’s own file, by name and by subject matter, so that a refusal under § 143.089(g) is on the record and can be taken to the judge for in camera review.

That last one matters even when you lose it. A denial creates a record. A record creates an appellate issue and, if the officer turns out later to have a history, it creates the Article 39.14(k) problem for the State rather than for your client.

The Honest Limits

Heath settles the legal question and does not solve the practical one. A busy misdemeanor prosecutor with four hundred files is not going to canvass a department’s internal affairs division because you asked, and the remedy Heath approves is exclusion rather than an order making the department hand anything over. You will often still have to litigate it, and what you win may be the suppression of the State’s evidence rather than production of the officer’s file. Heath also arose over a 911 call disclosed on the eve of trial, not over a personnel file, so carrying it to an internal affairs record is an argument rather than a holding.

And winning the violation is not the same as winning the case. In Hallman v. State, No. PD-0332-22 (Tex. Crim. App. July 2, 2025), the Court of Criminal Appeals held that an Article 39.14 violation is statutory rather than constitutional error, so it is reviewed under the forgiving non-constitutional standard in Rule 44.2(b). The State’s failure to disclose impeachment evidence during guilt-innocence was “clearly erroneous,” the court said, and it still found little to no harm, reversed a court of appeals that had ordered a new trial, and let the conviction stand. Build the record on what the nondisclosure actually cost you, because that is the part you will have to prove twice.

Texas courts have not given defendants a general right to go fishing in a personnel file. The realistic ask is in camera review on a specific showing, not production.

A single complaint is not a pattern. Officers draw complaints for doing the job. The Guevara record is damning because of its volume and its consistency over decades, not because somebody once accused him of something.

The Bottom Line

Chicago has spent $472.8 million, and counting, on lawsuits arising from one detective whose conduct was alleged in open court for years before anybody put the allegations side by side. The money is the measure of how long the information stayed scattered.

In Texas the tool for putting it side by side is Article 39.14, read through Watkins and Heath, which answer the whose-file-is-it objection. The obstacle is a records regime built to manage employees rather than to inform defendants, and one that got slightly more opaque in 2024. Neither fact excuses not asking. The request costs a letter. Not making it is how a pattern stays invisible for twenty years, and our posts on forensic misconduct and on wrongful convictions describe what that looks like from the other end.

If you are facing a Texas case that turns on one officer’s account, our firm can talk with you about the specific facts.

Deandra Grant is the managing partner of Deandra Grant Law, a Texas DWI and criminal defense firm with offices across Dallas-Fort Worth and Central Texas. She and her team challenge unlawful stops, searches, and forensic evidence throughout the region.

Further Reading

• WTTW News on the total cost of the Guevara litigation; the City of Chicago’s settlement announcement; and the Chicago Sun-Times on the October 14 Council vote.
• Tex. Code Crim. Proc. art. 39.14 (the Michael Morton Act; see subsections (a), (h) and (k)).
• Watkins v. State, 619 S.W.3d 265 (Tex. Crim. App. 2021) (“material” means having a logical connection to a consequential fact, synonymous with “relevant”).
• State v. Heath, 696 S.W.3d 677 (Tex. Crim. App. 2024) (“the state” in Article 39.14 includes law enforcement agencies; no knowledge requirement; late disclosure may be excluded without a showing of bad faith or prejudice).
• Hallman v. State, No. PD-0332-22 (Tex. Crim. App. July 2, 2025) (an Article 39.14 violation is non-constitutional error reviewed under Rule 44.2(b)) and Banks v. Dretke, 540 U.S. 668 (2004) (rejecting “prosecutor may hide, defendant must seek”).
• Related on this site: when the State’s expert has a past, on the A.J. Armstrong appeal and an undisclosed Forensic Science Commission complaint against a State witness.
• Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963); Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972); and Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995) (the prosecutor’s duty to learn of favorable evidence known to others acting on the government’s behalf, including the police).
• Tex. Local Gov’t Code § 143.089 (the civil service file and the department’s own file) and the enrolled bill analysis for S.B. 1445, 88th Leg. (2023) (repeal of the F-5 discharge categories for separations on or after March 1, 2024).

This post is an informational synthesis for educational purposes and is not legal advice. Reynaldo Guevara has never been charged with or convicted of a crime, and the civil settlements described here resolved claims without any admission of liability. Texas statutes and case law are described as of October 2026. Anyone facing charges should consult a licensed Texas attorney about the specific facts of their case.