I don’t usually write on these matters, but this issue deserves all the attention it can garner, including the very modest contribution I can make here.
Bravo to the New York Times for giving this subject the attention it deserves. In the Times’ business section today, David Carr rounds up the situation in Cook County, Illinois, where the state’s attorney, who apparently has had enough of students exonerating ill-convicted death row inmates, has brought the full weight of her office to bear on the students, their professors and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
I went to Medill myself. But that is of no issue here.
What is going on here is hackneyed, Chicago-style intimidation.
Since the mid 1990s, the Innocence Project at Medill has exonerated 11 incarcerated people. Five of those people were on death row. Medill students are currently working on the case of Anthony McKinney, who was convicted of a 2004 murder that, according to piles of evidence the students have uncovered, he may not have committed. Wrongful murder convictions, of course, are nothing new in Illinois, where dozens of cases have been overturned in addition to the cases Medill has misproven. Things got so bad former Illinois governor and pro-capital punishment man George Ryan, who himself now resides in jail, suspended Illinois’ death penalty in 2000 because Illinois’ system was, he said, “deeply flawed.”
Medill’s progress on the McKinney case is just the latest dollop in a history of botched convictions and, of course, NU students’ own history of digging deeper than Cook County prosecutors. For this latest case, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern’s law school has filed for a hearing based on the new evidence on McKinney’s behalf.
This development brought Anita Alvarez, who was elected Cook County State’s Attorney a year ago, lurching to action. Alvarez has drawn a line. It’s a line that says, “Don’t play in my sandbox. Don’t exonerate innocent people. Don’t make me look bad. Prosecutors will do the prosecuting, truth be damned.”
The county has subpoenaed everything it can possibly think of when it comes to the students involved in this case. They want notebooks, emails, tapes, class materials, syllabi, tests, papers, assignments, homework. They even want report cards — report cards that might show a grade-derived motivation to find evidence that shows innocence. And, by the way, what of the motivation? If there’s trenchant new evidence, there’s trenchant new evidence. What does it matter if the students were drawing a grade? As if there isn’t motivation and pressure within the state’s attorney’s office to convict, convict, convict.
Alvarez clearly has had enough of meddling students who drive down death row conviction rates for her squad — not to mention the ugly publicity that comes with every overturned case. So she’s dumping these students’ and professors’ lives on their heads in what’s tantamount to a legal shakedown. Outsiders aren’t welcome in the justice process, apparently. She thinks she can cow, frighten and outmaneuver a group of journalism students by filing copious and intrusive subpoenas. Perhaps if she makes an example of this group, she thinks, the next group will be more reticent before it starts digging into one of her cases. What she wants to precipitate, quite simply: for Medill to stay out of the County’s justice process.
Let’s hope Northwestern fights this bully with both fists. Let’s hope the clarity of justice wins out over the murky entitlements of Cook County politics. Let’s hope Alvarez and her cronies — Mr. Todd Stroger and others — learn that indignance has no place in governance but that transparency and accountability do.
Thank you, Medill. And thank you, David Carr and the New York Times.
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