Rob Warden is 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.
Federal officials tried to big foot Illinois prosecutors, and try Brendt Christiansen in federal court so that he might face the death penalty. A jury in Peoria rejected that effort, as Injustice Watch co-founder Rob Warden writes.
Rob Warden writes that seeking the death penalty against Brendt Christensen is likely only to bring anguish to the families of both the victim and the killer, and to cost taxpayers considerable money. And in addition, writes Warden, the odds are against Christensen actually being executed.
A prosecutor with long record of winning death sentences has concluded that capital punishment is inherently arbitrary and should be abolished.
If jurors in staged performances can’t consistently come to the same result — what does that say about real life?
Rob Warden details the circumstances of Alstory Simon’s repeated confessions to murder and concludes: Northwestern University disgraced itself by settling Simon’s lawsuit against the school.
George Leighton was a legal giant, appointed to the federal district court with bipartisan support. But could he even have been confirmed today?
While Gov. Bruce Rauner’s proposal to restore the death penalty is a terrible idea for Illinois, the silver lining is that the proposal would be a step in the right direction for 31 states that still employ the practice.
Ronnie Carrasquillo has been locked in prison for decades, since being convicted of murdering a cop in 1976. As evidence mounts that the conviction, and sentence, were wrongly imposed by a corrupt judge, Rob Warden wonders: Where is the new state’s attorney?
The death of Dick Gregory caused Rob Warden to recall how low J. Edgar Hoover would stoop.
Two years after the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke’s murder case highlights the rigidity of Illinois’s firearms enhancements and truth-in-sentencing laws.