How can courts stop sentencing innocent people to death? Our Unrequited Innocence project highlighted some potential solutions.
Commentary
Time for a little Lilliputian justice in Oklahoma
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Rob Warden reviews the case against two Oklahoma defendants wrongly convicted in a case that prosecutors withheld significant evidence,, and offers a suggestion on the appropriate remedy.
Commentary
Kary B. Mullis: A lament for the loss of a life that saved many
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Kary Banks Mullis, who died last week, may not be a name well known in the world of criminal justice. But as Rob Warden notes, his work certainly was.
Commentary
The novel behind the Dotson case
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Rob Warden tells how a 16-year old could so vividly, but falsely, describe being raped — a story that put Gary Dotson, though innocent, behind bars for a decade.
Commentary
The world’s first DNA exoneration, the rape that wasn’t, and a lesson unlearned
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Nationwide, approximately one in three of persons who have been exonerated by DNA had been convicted in whole or part on the testimony of witnesses who later recanted. Rob Warden writes on the 30th anniversary of Gary Dotson’s exoneration: It is long since time to stop distrusting the recantations?
Commentary
Here’s what passes for “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a gang murder case
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Rob Warden asks: Should a gang-related murder conviction stand solely on recanted identification testimony of a single gang member?
Commentary
The death penalty didn’t play in Peoria
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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.
Commentary
A Supreme Court justice’s legacy in jeopardy
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Justice John Paul Stevens, who died at 99, believed that government should be neutral. In 2019, the question is whether that model can still survive.
Commentary
Peoria death penalty case is, in a word, nuts
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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.
Commentary
In defense of how judges are chosen — and how they rule — in Illinois
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The voting is by secret ballot, and judges cast their ballots in a process that is independently administered by the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts — an arm of the Illinois Supreme Court.
Commentary
A prosecutor’s epiphany on capital punishment
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A prosecutor with long record of winning death sentences has concluded that capital punishment is inherently arbitrary and should be abolished.