A month after Cook County State’s attorney Kim Foxx announced she was “rebranding” the unit that reviews wrongful convictions, the former head of the unit has left the prosecutor’s office.
Nancy Adduci is “no longer with the office,” a Foxx spokeswoman confirmed Friday. She declined to comment on whether Adduci had resigned or had been fired, citing “personnel matters.”
There was no response for comment from a private attorney who has represented Adduci during hearings on allegations of misconduct by police and prosecutors in the case of three men arrested for the murder of Chicago Police Officer Clifton Lewis.
Adduci’s departure comes just weeks after she was apparently demoted as head of the Conviction Integrity Unit, with Foxx’s office announcing a new name — Conviction Review Unit — and a new supervisor.
Adduci had led the unit or been a top deputy since 2019, presiding over more than 200 cases where the office agreed to vacate convictions.
But Adduci had been accused of hiding evidence from lawyers representing the three men charged in the Dec. 29, 2011, murder of Lewis, who was off duty and working as a security guard at M&M Quick Foods when he was killed during a robbery.
Two men had burst into the store and opened fire. Lewis took cover behind a counter but was fatally shot by a third man who leapt over the counter and shot him three times before making off with Lewis’ gun and $670 from the register.
The prosecution of the case has been plagued by allegations of misconduct by detectives that widened to include Adduci and another prosecutor.
New lawyers hired by one of the accused men, Alexander Villa, unearthed a trove of emails and records they claim show detectives and prosecutors failed to turn over seemingly exonerating evidence.
The lawyers said they came across FBI cellphone analysis showing that Villa and the two other men, Tyrone Clay and Edgardo Colon, were nowhere near the Austin convenience store where Lewis was gunned down.
Adduci and her fellow prosecutor, Andrew Varga, were set to testify under oath at a hearing in June on whether they and detectives wrongfully held back the evidence. But the office abruptly withdrew the charges against Colon and Clay on the hearing date in June.
Colon had been found guilty in 2017 and was several years into an 84-year sentence for acting as a lookout during the fatal robbery when an appeals court threw out his conviction, ruling that police obtained his confession after Colon had repeatedly requested a lawyer.
Clay spent nearly 12 years awaiting trial, a process delayed by an appeal that saw his confession thrown out as well, with a court ruling that his IQ was too low to understand his right to remain silent.
Both men maintain they made false confessions after days in police custody.
But the judge overseeing Villa’s case was not persuaded by the allegations of misconduct and the new evidence. Villa in August received a life sentence.
Last month, Villa asked the court to toss his conviction after prosecutors who took over Villa’s case from Adduci and Varga reported discovering a computer disk while packing up case files.
A handwritten note from Varga indicated he had seen the contents of the disk, which included location data and text messages that supported the defendants’ claims of innocence.
Clay and Colon last month filed a federal lawsuit seeking damages, naming the detectives, Adduci, Varga and a Cook County judge as defendants.
Foxx’s spokeswoman did not respond to questions about whether Varga, a veteran prosecutor, was still with the state’s attorney’s office.
Messages to Adduci’s official Cook County email address were bounced back with a notice that she was no longer with the office and instructions to contact another prosecutor.
Emails to Varga’s account at the state’s attorney’s office did not generate a bounce-back message.
