I am one of eight members of the Illinois Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission, which referred Jamie Hauad’s case to Alvarez’s office for review, and Hauad is represented by Alison R. Flaum, an attorney with the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, where I was executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Although I worked with Flaum on other cases, the Hauad case was not among them.

I have had a long association with David Protess, having co-authored two books with him — Gone in the Night/The Dowaliby Family’s Encounter with Murder and the Law (Delacorte, 1992) and A Promise of Justice/The Eighteen-Year Fight to Save Four Innocent Men (Hyperion, 1998). Protess and I worked closely with Paul Ciolino and Jack Rimland on the latter.

My colleague at the Bluhm Legal Clinic, Professor Lawrence C. Marshall, was instrumental in winning the stay of Anthony Porter’s execution, and Shawn Armbrust, one of Protess’s students involved in the Porter case, worked under my supervision for two years at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, from which I retired as executive director in 2014.

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Rob Warden was a co-founder of Injustice Watch and executive director emeritus and co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC) at Northwestern University School of Law. During his 16-year tenure, the CWC was instrumental in exonerating 31 wrongfully convicted men and women in Illinois. Before launching the CWC, Rob was editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer, where his investigations into Illinois capital cases launched a movement that culminated both in the founding of the Center in 1999 and abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011. His reporting at Chicago Lawyer was instrumental in 13 exonerations, including that of Gary Dotson, the nation’s first prisoner to be exonerated by DNA. Before that, Rob was a prize-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Daily News and Washington Post. He has won more than 50 journalism awards and is the author of seven books.