The controversial head of the wrongful conviction unit at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office resigned Tuesday after roughly six months on the job.
Michelle Mbekeani took over the re-named Conviction Review Unit in December, when State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announced a “rebranding” of the office, which Foxx launched in her first years in office to examine wrongful conviction claims.
Mbekeani is planning to step down in July in anticipation of the birth of her child and because Foxx’s term will end later this year, according to a person with knowledge of Mbekeani’s thinking.
Mbekeani’s resignation has not been formally announced to the office, but news that she was leaving began spreading Tuesday afternoon.
Mbekeani, who had never worked as a line prosecutor before her appointment, rankled some of her more senior peers in the office, who noted her prior work on a website intended to connect incarcerated people to free legal support for wrongful conviction claims.
The website, Periodsentence.com, also drew the ire of a judge at the courthouse, who believed her involvement with the organization conflicted with her role in the prosecutor’s office.
Judge Michael McHale ordered Mbekeani banned from his courtroom in January after holding a conflicts hearing in the case of Dante Brown, who is fighting to overturn his double murder conviction.
She told the judge the website was a “class project” and “not a real business,” according to the judge’s order. When McHale learned that Mbekeani had registered the business with the Illinois secretary of state and asked her to explain, he said he found her answers “duplicitous, incomplete, evasive and untruthful.”
McHale banned Mbekeani from appearing in his courtroom on any case, accusing her of “brazen attempts to evade telling the truth.”
The website is no longer active, and it is not clear if any offenders were able to access legal help from the app.
Foxx issued a statement supporting Mbekeani at the time, and several veteran staffers in the office said Mbekeani remained a key adviser to Foxx.
The Conviction Review Unit, originally called the Conviction Integrity Unit, had been a signature initiative of Foxx’s two terms as Cook County’s top prosecutor.
During Foxx’s administration, the unit signed off on tossing the convictions of more than 200 defendants who made allegations of misconduct by police or prosecutors, including the first “mass exoneration” in county history.
Mbekeani is a 2014 graduate of University of Chicago Law School. She was hired by the state’s attorney in 2018 as a policy adviser. She had worked as an attorney at the Shriver Center for Poverty Law.
