Anand Swaminathan

The Cabinets in the Basement

For decades the Chicago Police Department kept two sets of paper. Official investigative files went to prosecutors and, through them, to defense lawyers. Street files — working notes, leads pointing elsewhere, and witness accounts naming someone else — went into cabinets and stayed there.

Nathson Fields was convicted of a double murder. He won a new trial and was acquitted in 2009. When his civil case was built, the team found the street files in basement cabinets and used them to show how favorable material had been kept from him and from others.

A federal jury awarded Fields $22 million in compensatory damages and $40,000 in punitive damages against two detectives. In 2020 the Seventh Circuit affirmed, holding that the evidence supported findings of fabrication and suppression and permitted the jury to conclude that Chicago continued withholding favorable material from police files after it knew the constitutional risk. Swaminathan worked on the case at trial and on appeal.

Across the Fields, Rivera, and Guevara matters, records that never reached defense counsel became evidence in the civil and post-conviction cases.

What the Witness Tried to Take Back

Jacques Rivera was convicted of murder on the strength of one identification. Years later the witness recanted. A judge ordered a new trial, prosecutors dismissed the charge, and Rivera left prison after more than twenty years with a certificate of innocence.

At the civil trial the witness testified to all three stages: the original identification, the recantation, and an attempt before trial to withdraw the identification that went nowhere. The jury also heard about police reports that had gone missing and investigative material that never reached Rivera's defense.

The case was never about whether the witness had been wrong. It was about what the police did when he told them so.

In 2018 the federal jury awarded Rivera $17 million in compensatory damages and a combined $175,000 in punitive damages against three former detectives. It also found the City of Chicago responsible for a practice of withholding reports and investigative material. While the appeal was pending, the parties settled for $18.75 million.

Swaminathan's post-conviction work continued. Louis Robinson's homicide conviction was vacated in August 2023 after twenty-seven years, on alibi evidence, the absence of physical proof, and manipulated identifications. Oscar Soto's conviction was vacated and the charge dismissed in July 2024 in another matter tied to former detective Reynaldo Guevara. Francisco Romero was released in June 2024 after more than twenty-two years when prosecutors dismissed the charges.

Thirteen Years

Scott Dillard, Rickey Mackey, Charles Shepherd, and Danny Rude were former military officers working for Fluor Corporation on a multibillion-dollar contract supporting American troops at forward operating bases in Afghanistan. They worked in different departments and reported the same problem: fraud in the company's accounting for Army property and false reports to the government concealing it.

They came forward.

They were fired.

Their False Claims Act case then took thirteen years to reach trial. The Act dates to 1863; Congress expanded its qui tam provisions in 1986 so private citizens could sue on the government's behalf. Loevy + Loevy litigated the case for all thirteen of those years, and Swaminathan served as trial counsel.

The evidence was a military logistics contract, which is not a thing juries are built to read. The work of the six-week trial was translation — turning the Army's property-accounting system into a record that twelve people could test against what the company had told the government.

On March 12, 2026, the jury awarded $15 million, an amount the statute trebles to $45 million.

Thirteen years is a long time to hold out, and the length was part of the strategy against them. Swaminathan described what the four had been subjected to as an effort to "bully a group of ex-military whistleblowers into submission."

Ray Fox and May Molina

Ray Fox had a seizure disorder. In custody, he went three days without his medication and then suffered a seizure and brain injury.

Swaminathan tried the case with Mike Kanovitz, Steve Art, and Cindy Tsai. The proof was a paper trail with a gap in it: the prescription requests existed, the custody logs existed, and between them was nothing for three days. After a one-week trial the jury awarded $11 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages against a prison medical official. The district court left the verdict intact.

May Molina's daughter carried her mother's medication to the Chicago lockup where Molina was being held. Staff refused it. The Seventh Circuit restored the medical-care claim in 2011. At trial, the refusal and the distress that followed were connected to a citywide lockup practice of denying medication and medical attention. The jury awarded Molina's estate $1 million.

Tony Robinson

Tony Robinson was nineteen when a Madison police officer shot him.

What the reconstruction could establish was distance — how far apart the two men were when each round was fired, read from the squad-car audio, the intervals between shots, and the trajectories. Swaminathan's team carried the excessive-force claim through discovery and final trial preparation.

Days before the February 2017 trial date, the city's insurer paid $3.35 million. Wisconsin indemnification law supplied the public funding behind the recovery.

A Marine in Grand Rapids

Jilmar Ramos-Gomez is a United States citizen and a Marine veteran. He was held on an immigration detainer and placed into deportation proceedings.

Working with the ACLU of Michigan, Swaminathan obtained a $190,000 payment from Grand Rapids. The money was the smaller part of it. The city adopted a policy barring officers from asking about immigration status or contacting ICE for civil immigration enforcement, and Kent County began requiring a judicial warrant before transferring anyone to ICE custody. A separate Federal Tort Claims Act case against the United States settled in November 2022; related public-records cases resolved in February 2024.

Swaminathan and Loevy + Loevy also joined the Center for Constitutional Rights in representing Steven Salaita after the University of Illinois withdrew his faculty appointment over his speech. The court allowed the central First Amendment retaliation, contract, and due-process claims to proceed, and the case settled in November 2015 with a $600,000 payment to Salaita.

2,310 Hours

Swaminathan worked in finance before law school. At Harvard he did 2,310 hours of pro bono work in three years — representing people facing eviction through the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, appearing for indigent clients with the Harvard Defenders, doing research and advocacy for immigrant victims of domestic violence, and organizing against proposed anti-immigrant federal legislation. It was the most of anyone in the class of 2006, and the school gave him the Andrew L. Kaufman Pro Bono Service Award for it.

He spent one of those years at the National Immigration Project as a National Lawyers Guild Haywood Burns Fellow. He graduated in 2006, clerked for Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz in the Southern District of New York, and spent several years at a plaintiff-side employment firm in New York before moving to Chicago.

He is a partner at Loevy + Loevy. Over his career his clients have recovered more than a hundred million dollars in verdicts and settlements. The practice is unusually wide — a wrongful conviction and a defense-contractor fraud trial share almost no law — but the work underneath is one thing repeated: finding the document that was not supposed to survive, and making a jury understand why it matters.