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.
A Cook County judge up for retention was reversed by the Illinois Appellate Court 16 times since voters last voted to keep him on the bench. Injustice Watch explores four of those cases.
By gagging lawyers in the case against the police officer who shot Laquan McDonald, Judge Vincent M. Gaughan has done a disservice to the people of Chicago, their police department, the city administration, and the Cook County judiciary.
Eighty-five years ago last week, the Illinois Supreme Court branded witness recantations categorically unreliable — a generalization that, albeit untrue, haunts the Illinois criminal justice system to this day, denying or delaying exonerations of innocent prisoners whose convictions rest on perjured testimony.
Eddie Johnson may be well qualified to be Chicago police superintendent. Then again, maybe he’s not. We don’t know. When Mayor Rahm Emanuel rammed Johnson’s appointment through the City Council Wednesday, the byword was due diligence be damned. Neither the mayor nor any alderperson bothered to inquire about alleged police brutality that occurred under Johnson when he was commander of the South Side Gresham district between 2008 and 2012.
Despite what you may have heard, the past statements of Alstory Simon make it clear that he committed a double murder. So how could he claim he was a victim of malicious prosecution?
An incumbent Cook County State’s Attorney has not been defeated in a primary since at least 1896. There is a message there: Anita Alvarez should resign now.
The Republican nominee to replace Anita Alvarez, Chris Pfannkuche, has a rare opportunity to restore the confidence of Cook County residents given good reason not to trust their criminal justice system.
I’m not sure which offends me more — a naked falsehood that Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez propounded in a letter to the editor published in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune or the newspaper’s naked irresponsibility in letting her get away with it.
Alvarez’s job is to put and keep killers behind bars and move to promptly to free the innocent her office has wrongly convicted, but she’s done exactly the opposite in these cases.
I refer to the incontrovertible fact that police officers lie under oath with impunity — and with full knowledge and tacit support of Alvarez, her predecessors, and myriad present and former assistant state’s attorneys in contravention of their sworn duty to uphold the law.