The former head of the wrongful conviction unit in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office has filed a federal lawsuit claiming she was demoted because of race and age discrimination.
Nancy Adduci had headed the unit since it was created by State’s Attorney Kim Foxx until she was fired in December. She contends her superiors told her she was being demoted because Foxx wanted someone “more representative of the community.”
Adduci was replaced by Michelle Mbekeani. Adduci is white, Mbekeani is Black and some 20 years younger. Adduci claims Foxx fired her just weeks after she reached out to the office’s human resources department to complain that she was demoted based on her age and race.
The lawsuit states that Adduci was “shocked that she was not sufficiently ‘representative of the community,’ after serving almost three decades in the (state’s attorney’s office), living in Cook County, getting married in Cook County and sending her kids to public school in Cook County.”
She contends her supervisors told Adduci there were no issues with her job performance, and that she would serve as the de facto head of the department after her demotion, though her pay was reduced.
Adduci’s attorney, Robert Robertson, declined comment.
Adduci’s lawsuit is the latest controversy surrounding the wrongful conviction unit, which Foxx has made a prominent initiative of her two terms as top prosecutor.
While Adduci held top roles in the unit, the office vacated more than 200 convictions that were tainted by allegations of misconduct.
Mbekeani’s appointment to head the unit came as Foxx announced as a “rebranding” of the unit, including renaming it the Conviction Review Unit.
Mbekeani lasted only six months on the job before resigning in June, a departure that came not long after a judge barred her from representing the office in any cases in his court because Mbekeani had developed a web business to connect lawyers with defendants who felt they had been framed.
Adduci was one of the prosecutors in the case against three men accused of the 2011 murder of Chicago Police officer Clifton Lewis while he was off-duty. She was pulled off the case amid allegations that police and prosecutors had held back a trove of information from defense lawyers.
The office dropped the case against two of the defendants in June 2023, some 12 years after police made the first arrests in the case. Adduci was demoted about two months later.
Adduci was fired about a week after the two filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, claiming they were framed. At the time, Foxx’s office would not say whether Adduci had been fired or had resigned. The third defendant, Alexander Villa, has been sentenced to life in prison and has appealed his conviction.
In a separate case, a special prosecutor last year issued a report finding that the wrongful conviction unit had failed to perform a thorough investigation of claims of police misconduct in a 2001 murder investigation that involved allegations against a detective who was married to an assistant state’s attorney assigned to the unit.
Adduci’s memo about the case found no basis to overturn the conviction, but the special prosecutor said she failed to consider “powerful evidence” that detectives coerced a confession.