Marilyn Mulero spent 28 years behind bars, including five years on Illinois death row, for a crime she did not commit. Now she has opened the Wrongful Conviction Trauma Center on Chicago's West Side, a residence meant to catch other exonerated women before they fall through the same cracks she did after her own release.
Mulero was sentenced to death at age 23 without a trial, and her conviction was later overturned before she was released from prison and fully exonerated, according to WLS-TV. She was the first Latinx woman sentenced to death in Illinois and remains the only woman ever exonerated from death row in Cook County history, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Mulero was 21 when she was arrested in 1992, and her sentence was later reduced to life before it was ultimately dismissed.
Located in Austin, the new center has capacity for up to 15 women and will initially house eight residents, with new arrivals expected soon, per the station's report. The facility supports women who were wrongfully convicted or who spent more than a decade behind bars, helping them obtain counseling and treatment as they rebuild their lives. Mulero said she made the promise to open such a home while she was still incarcerated.
A Promise Kept After a Difficult Transition
Mulero told the outlet that the transition back into society has been difficult, and that she experienced homelessness twice after her release. She said the residence is designed to make women feel at home rather than as though they are still in prison, and that it can help women relate to one another's pain in a way outside support systems often cannot.
Her own case traces back to former Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara and his now-deceased partner, Ernest Halvorsen, who authorities determined forcibly obtained confessions in cases that led to wrongful convictions, the same article notes. Lauren Kaeseberg, legal director of the Illinois Innocence Project, said Guevara's actions contributed to many wrongful convictions in the neighborhoods his unit worked. Several dozen people have had convictions overturned after authorities determined their confessions were forcibly obtained.
A Pending Lawsuit and a Costly Pattern
Mulero filed a lawsuit against the city, and it remains pending three years after it was filed. According to Romanucci & Blandin, LLC, the 13-count federal civil rights complaint, filed July 24, 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, names the City of Chicago, Guevara, and Halvorsen's estate, alleging a coerced false confession and fabrication of evidence stemming from a 20-hour interrogation and violations of her Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Mulero's case is one thread in a much larger tapestry of misconduct tied to Guevara. As of March 2025, Cook County courts had overturned at least 50 murder convictions linked to the retired detective, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. By late 2025, lawsuits and settlements tied to his conduct had cost Chicago taxpayers more than $112 million, with dozens of additional federal claims still pending, per WTTW News. Guevara stepped down from the Chicago Police Department in 2005 without facing internal discipline or criminal charges and continues to draw a taxpayer-funded pension reported at more than $80,000 annually; he has repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege when subpoenaed in civil trials.
Illinois' Broader Reckoning With Wrongful Convictions
Mulero's release fits into a pattern that has made Illinois a national outlier. Cook County leads all U.S. counties with 16 death-row exonerations since 1973, at least 14 of which involved official misconduct by police or prosecutors, per the Death Penalty Information Center. Illinois abolished the death penalty in 2011 after a string of such flawed convictions came to light, and the state led the nation in criminal exonerations for four straight years through 2021, logging 38 that year alone — 20 more than any other state, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The Illinois Innocence Project, which represented Mulero, secured the simultaneous exoneration of six men in July 2025 who had served a combined 124 years after being framed in 1989 by Guevara and Halvorsen, according to the University of Illinois Springfield. Post-conviction DNA testing in that case excluded all six men and identified an unknown male perpetrator.
Compensation Rules and Ongoing Accountability Fights
Under Illinois statute 705 ILCS 505/8, exonerees who receive a judicial certificate of innocence can seek state compensation through the Court of Claims, capped at $50,000 per year of wrongful incarceration and $25,000 per year spent on parole or probation. Those awards are separate from federal civil rights litigation against cities, and both can take years to resolve — leaving newly freed people to face housing and psychological hurdles immediately, long before any check arrives.
Chicago's reckoning with Guevara's legacy has continued to unfold across the courts and inside Cook County government. Hoodline has previously reported on Guevara repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment rights during a federal civil trial, and on a Chicago trial that was called off after a settlement was reached. In December 2025, Cook County State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke replaced the public police do-not-call list — which had featured 120 officers including Guevara — with a confidential internal disclosure system, a change that drew pushback from defense attorneys.
For Mulero, the new center represents a way to translate her own painful reentry into something concrete for the next woman who walks out of prison after being wrongfully convicted. As she put it to the station, the goal is a place where women can relate to one another's pain and begin to feel human again, rather than continuing to serve a sentence long after their release.
