Prosecuting innocence: the liberation of Debra Brown.

Excellent article; sad story. Wrongful conviction is all too common, and justice for the innocent is not common enough...witness what happened to Courtney Bisbee.

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Logan woman convicted of murder in 1995 deemed innocent

Deseret News
Tuesday, May 3, 2011 12:49 a.m. MDT
By Emiley Morgan,

OGDEN — She has spent 17 years sitting behind bars, and all Debra Brown really wants is a bicycle.

On Monday, an Ogden judge found the Logan woman — who has been in prison for murder since 1995 — "factually innocent."

"The court now determines by clear and convincing evidence that (Debra Brown) did not engage in the conduct for which she was convicted and is, therefore, factually innocent of the aggravated murder of Lael Brown," 2nd District Judge Michael DiReda wrote in a decision released Monday.

And when Debra Brown is released, her brother Dave Scott will be waiting. She wrote to him from prison some time ago about a dream she'd had in which she was riding a nice, expensive bicycle. Her brother spent a couple of years looking for the exact bike she had described.

"Her bike is ready, and as soon as I get the word, I'll head that way," Scott said.

The judge's decision came after a first-of-its-kind evidentiary hearing that spanned six days during which attorneys presented evidence to show that Brown, 53, could not have murdered Lael Brown, her boss and friend, in 1993.

Debra Brown's daughter, Alana Williams, was so emotional upon hearing the news Monday that she had to speak through her tears. "I can't even tell you (how excited I am)," she said.

Debra Brown was the one who found Lael Brown dead with three gunshot wounds to his head. Police said there was no sign of forced entry and Debra Brown was the only person with a key to Lael Brown's home. They also said she had forged more than $3,500 in checks and had a motive to kill him.

Debra Brown was charged months later and convicted by a jury in 1995.

The woman long defended her innocence, and in 2002 the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project began an investigation into her case, which culminated in the hearing to determine whether Debra Brown was, in fact, innocent. The team of attorneys that championed her cause went to tell her the news in person Monday.

"She was overwhelmed," attorney Alan Sullivan said. "She was emotionally overwhelmed and very grateful for this ruling."

The woman who has been described as "extremely strong" and "inherently happy" was so excited, hugging attorneys and trying to lift them in the air, that Sullivan said she had to be told to sit down.

"It was too much for her," he said, noting that the woman saw the opportunity to tell her side of the story to a judge as liberation enough.

But Debra Brown's case carries a precedent far beyond her own case. Hers was the first factual-innocence case to be filed after a 2008 change in state statute that allows for such a hearing when new evidence in a case — even if it is not DNA evidence — is found.

Katie Monroe, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project, said Utah is one of only a few states that allows for a determination of innocence without DNA evidence. She said data suggests as many as 3 to 5 percent of those convicted on felony rape and murder charges are innocent, a statistic she called "conservative."

"This is incredibly important to our work because the majority of cases with people who are innocent and in prison don't have DNA evidence," she said.

For DiReda, the deciding issue was Lael Brown's time of death and Debra Brown's alibi. During Debra Brown's trial, prosecutors had argued that Lael Brown had been killed the morning of Nov. 6, 1993 — a Saturday — and a full day before his body was discovered. Debra Brown had no alibi for that morning.

Two new witnesses testified at the evidentiary hearing in March of this year that they saw Lael Brown alive that Saturday night, leading DiReda to determine that there is clear and convincing evidence that Lael Brown was still alive Saturday morning, the one time when Debra Brown would not have had an alibi. The judge said, based on testimony given by the medical examiner, that it was most likely Lael Brown actually died sometime between 9 p.m. Saturday and 3 a.m. Sunday.

DiReda wrote that the facts show that Debra Brown's whereabouts were "firmly established" from 10 a.m. Saturday through Sunday morning.

Under the factual-innocence statute, DiReda had to find that there was new evidence in Debra Brown's case that met the clear and convincing standard — not the legal innocence standard, which only requires that there be reasonable doubt.

Debra Brown's attorneys argued that their client had been convicted on circumstantial evidence and that Logan police failed to follow other leads in the case. That said, they say she continued to maintain a belief in the justice system.

"She believes in the process," Sullivan said.

The woman's family, which was characterized as "unwavering" in their support, said they had to believe that the same system that put Debra Brown behind bars would help her find a way out, Scott said. He said they also never once questioned whether or not his sister was innocent.

"Ours is a great system. We just had to hold faith. We just had to hang in the trenches."

He said he hopes his sister's case gives hope to others in a similar situation. Those in her family and the attorneys who worked with her said she was the source of optimism throughout the process.

"My mom is the one who kept all of us going," her daughter Alana Williams said. "We rooted for her from day one, but she's strongest one out of all of us. We can't even say thank you enough."

Both Williams and Scott had nothing but kind words for DiReda, who Scott said gave the family "a miracle" with his ruling.

"I'm just so grateful for Judge DiReda for his wisdom, his knowledge of the law and how he handled this because I knew he knew what needed to be done," Scott said.

An automatic five-day stay has been issued to allow the state to determine whether they will appeal the judge's decision. While he said he could not comment on the ruling, assistant attorney general Scott Reed said those in his office will be meeting with the "appropriate people" to determine what to do next.

If they choose to file an appeal in the five-day time frame, they will then have 30 days to formally file an appeal. The Logan Police Department will wait for the decision by the state and the Cache County Attorney's Office to determine what action, if any, to take next in the Lael Brown case, Assistant Logan Police Chief Jeff Curtis said.

"It's awful preliminary for us to make any kind of statement as to where we're going now until we can meet with the Cache County Attorneys Office," he said. "It's really in their court right now."

If there is no appeal, Monroe said Debra Brown will have her record expunged and will receive automatic monetary restitution. In 2008, the amount was $32,000 for each year spent in prison for up to 15 years.

Regardless, Monroe expressed her hope that Brown will be released as soon as the five-day stay expires on May 7.

"The state certainly has a right to appeal," Monroe said. "It wouldn't be unheard of, but we hope very much they choose not to."

Sullivan said he expects that even if the state should appeal, Brown will still be released for the time being. And her family will wait until the moment when they'll see Debra Brown as a free woman again.

"It's still kind of surreal," Alana Williams. "I still don't even know what to think until I can walk with her and say: 'She's out.' "

Email: emorgan@desnews.com Twitter: DNewsCrimeTeam

Executing Justice in Illinois.

Congratulations Illinois, for evolving into the 21st century ahead of the rest of us (I'm writing from Arizona - the Deep Southwest). Thanks to all the good souls who weighed in for this fight. I personally think the issue of accuracy when executing people IS an issue of morality, and that the entire criminal justice system should be taking a second look at the problem of wrongful conviction, not just the death penalty.

Prosecutorial and police misconduct were the real reasons for the demise of capital punishment in Illinois. That's pathetic - and all too common. The US has been imprisoning and executing innocent people for a long time; the folks responsible for locking us away know it and have done little about assuring real justice - evidence that their arrest and conviction rates are far more important than victims' lives really are. That's pretty gutless for a crowd that prides itself on fighting crime.

Many in law enforcement and the judiciary stood in the way of abolishing the Illinois death penalty, of course, and are whining about it tonight. Never mind the few innocent folks who might be murdered by the state - or the guilty who got off scott free - they just didn't want to lose the leverage it gave them to coerce plea deals out of whatever defendants they managed to pin charges on - preferably the very same ones they accused in sensational cases in the media in the first place. They sure don't want to admit they may have ever made a mistake, either - those cases should never have to depend on resolution from the same people who screwed them up in the first place.

That should be a red flag to us all: any judge or prosecutor who insists that the justice system is always right can't be trusted by the rest of us - they're either oblivious or corrupt. In either case, they're not only failing to protect victims by getting the wrong bad guys and not making it right, they're creating a whole new class of victims. Incarceration alone is violence, so we'd better get it right if we're going to isolate, shame, exile and brutalize those we punish in America - particularly if we plan to execute them on top of it...

"Resistance Grows"
Arizona Department of Corrections
February 23, 2011.

---------------from the Chicago Tribune-----------------

What killed Illinois' death penalty

It wasn't the question of morality but the question of accuracy that led state to abolish capital punishment

By Steve Mills, Tribune reporter

9:15 PM CST, March 9, 2011

If there was one moment when Illinois' death penalty began to die, it was on Feb. 5, 1999, when a man named Anthony Porter walked out of jail a free man.

Sitting in the governor's mansion, George Ryan watched Porter's release on television and wondered how a man could come within 50 hours of being executed, only to be set free by the efforts of a journalism professor, his students and a private investigator.

"And so I turned to my wife, and I said, how the hell does that happen? How does an innocent man sit on death row for 15 years and gets no relief," Ryan recalled last year. "And that piqued my interest, Anthony Porter."

To be sure, by the time Porter was set free, the foundation of Illinois' death penalty system already had begun to erode by the steady stream of inmates who had death sentences or murder convictions vacated: Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez in the Jeanine Nicarico case, the men known as the Ford Heights Four, Gary Gauger.

But for decades, the debate over capital punishment rarely strayed from whether it was right or wrong, a moral argument that was waged mostly by a narrow group of attorneys and abolition supporters that could be easily dismissed. Public opinion polls showed little movement. Death sentences and executions hit record levels.

Inmates like the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, whose guilt was never in question, were put to death and caused little controversy. But when a miscarriage of justice was discovered and a death row inmate was set free, the police and prosecutors contended that it was an isolated incident, an anomaly. They got little argument.

In November 1998, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University hosted 29 exonerated death row inmates at a conference, putting a human face to the death penalty's errors. Then, with Porter's case still in the spotlight, plus a series of stories in the Chicago Tribune later that year that illuminated deep frailties in the state's system of capital punishment, the debate over the death penalty was transformed.

Suddenly, it was about accuracy. No longer were the mistakes anecdotal. The problems were systemic.

Opposition to the death penalty began to win new supporters, people who looked at the issue pragmatically, not just morally, and were dismayed by the mistakes. Politicians no longer saw the issue as a third rail with voters. Ryan, who declared a halt to all executions in 2000, found it did not cost him politically.

A decade after Ryan declared a moratorium, 61 percent of voters questioned in a poll did not even know the state still had a death penalty, reflecting a stalemate of sorts that had emerged between supporters of abolition and those who wanted to bring back capital punishment. No one was being put to death, yet death row again was receiving inmates, though at a slower pace than before the Ryan moratorium.

Had Republican Bill Brady won the November general election instead of Democrat Pat Quinn, the state still would have a death penalty, and the new governor almost certainly would have lifted the moratorium and allowed executions to resume.

Ultimately, supporters of abolition in the General Assembly — frustrated that sufficient reform had not been enacted and stung by the costs of trials and appeals — voted to abolish the death penalty. On Wednesday, Quinn signed abolition into law and commuted the sentences of 15 inmates who had been sentenced to death since the moratorium.

"That isolated image of Anthony Porter is crucial," said Lawrence Marshall, a former legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions and a key player in the abolition of the death penalty. "But it only makes a difference when it comes amidst all of those other incidents. It shows (the problems weren't) isolated. This was a trend."

With Quinn's signature, Illinois became the fourth state to abandon the death penalty over the last decade, and the isolation of the use of capital punishment, mostly in the South, is a national trend, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.

The New Jersey Legislature voted to drop the death penalty in 2007. A New York appeals court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional in 2004. And in 2009, the New Mexico Legislature voted to repeal capital punishment; Gov. Bill Richardson signed the bill into law.

Other states have convened panels to study the death penalty and have considered legislation to end it, prompted by the exonerations of condemned inmates; capital punishment's high cost, particularly in a down economy; and the widening support for life in prison without parole as an alternative sentence, Dieter said.

"The life-without-parole option is not going away," Dieter said last week. "People have a lot of lingering doubts about the possibility of a person being wrongly convicted. They are willing to convict them, but when it comes to the death sentence, they want to be doubly sure of their guilt, even more than the system requires."

Between Porter's release and Quinn's signing of the abolition bill, the U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the use of the death penalty, saying the mentally disabled and those who commit their crimes as juveniles cannot be executed.

The number of death sentences dropped. The number of executions dropped. Even cases thought to be death penalty slam dunks offered surprises that suggested the death penalty was in decline. James Degorski and Juan Luna, the two men convicted in the murders of seven people in January 1993 at a Brown's Chicken & Pasta restaurant in Palatine, also were spared the ultimate punishment.

Luna, convicted in 2007, and Degorski, convicted in 2009, were sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Even Andre Crawford, convicted of 11 brutal murders on the South Side that made him one of the area's most prolific serial killers, escaped the death penalty in 2009 when he was given life in prison without parole.

While some observers saw those sentences as signs the death penalty was withering, the truth may have been more complicated. In the Brown's Chicken cases, the two juries voted 11-1 for death. Crawford's jury voted 10-2 for death, said the prosecutor in the case, James McKay, chief of the capital litigation task force for the Cook County state's attorney's office.

That, he said, was evidence jurors still were receptive to the death penalty but were stymied by holdouts.

"It tells me that our jurors overwhelmingly want the death penalty," said McKay, a veteran prosecutor.

What's more, he said, the future without the death penalty may prove more costly than with it.

"These murder trials don't go away just because the death penalty won't be a sentencing option," McKay said. "With the death penalty off the table, there'll be even more trials. There'll be no incentive to plead guilty. I do not believe for one second that taking the death penalty off the table will save the state of Illinois any money whatsoever."

With no death penalty, Illinois' last execution — its 12th since capital punishment was reinstated in the mid-1970s — will remain that of Andrew Kokoraleis, who was put to death by lethal injection in March 1999, while Ryan was governor, for the mutilation murder of an Elmhurst woman.

And while many people believe Illinois never executed an innocent man, others disagree. The 1995 execution of Girvies Davis for a downstate murder was long controversial and relied heavily on a disputed confession, one the police got when they took him out of jail in the middle of the night and, according to Davis, threatened him.

In fact, Davis confessed to numerous crimes that night and, authorities later acknowledged, many of the confessions were false, with other people later convicted of those crimes. On the other hand, Davis admitted to taking part in other crimes that led to the deaths of innocent people, though he insisted he never killed anybody himself.

One of Davis' attorneys once wrote in an essay in the Tribune that "nothing short of finding the real murderer would have saved Davis' life." So it is that the execution still haunts the lawyer, David Schwartz. He called the death penalty's end, nearly 16 years after Davis was put to death by lethal injection, "bittersweet."

"It bothers me when I hear people say that the state of Illinois never executed a person for a crime they did not commit," Schwartz said. "Because they did with Girvies Davis."

Tribune reporter Dahleen Glanton contributed.

Prosecuting Innocence: Resistance is Futile

Borrowed this post from our friends at Idaho Prison Watch...

The sentencing committee meeting was canceled again today, by the way - I have no idea when it's rescheduled for. I hung out at the Capitol awhile anyway, handing out copies of Tenacious to the women legislators I could find, since it was "Women's Day at the Legislature" today, and I didn't think they'd made any arrangements for state prisoners to participate or talk to their legislators. I also left one for Governor Brewer, with an article done by a woman who had cancer while at Perryville a few years back. She's now with an organization that helps women in prison. I'll post her story here when I get permission.


I hope those legislators I gave the zines to actually bother to read them. I don't know when or how they're going to hear a woman prisoner's voice address their conditions otherwise. Maybe we should try to get them to hold hearings out at the prisons themselves. Given the Arizona Republic and Lumley Vampire reports on the physical condition of the facilities alone, they should have organized an emergency oversight committee to check it out in person. The legislature is responsible, after all, for compromising the safety of state prisoners and corrections employees in the first place. They've now been duly warned that they'll be held liable for failing to follow up on it.

Anyway, the following article is very pertinent to the work of the House Sentencing Committee - and most of the issues I have with Andrew Thomas' office. In fact, this is a very good reason why we don't want that man to be Attorney General. He'll be putting ten times as many innocent people away, while letting the really guilty ones walk by making questionable deals - like the one that put the Scott Sisters away. The innocent don't have anything to fear, they think, nor do they have anything to trade. The guilty, on the other hand -  the "triggermen" - can trade them. 

There's nothing guaranteed to get you a more severe punishment in America than insisting that you're innocent and losing to the prosecutor at trial - and they make sure you know that when they make their offer. Their job is to prove guilt, not to find truth - don't make any mistakes about that. They're out to get convictions, by and large - not to protect the innocent. Victims are just useful tools to win their cases with, and to use to promote their own tough-on-crime image.

There are a few remarkable exceptions to that rule, of course. Some DA's have been very committed to investigating reports of wrongful prosecutions/convictions. I hope that's the beginning of a trend towards more ethical, responsible prosecutorial conduct. I have yet to see evidence of that happening in Arizona, though.

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What is Wrong with the Plea Bargain System in our Courts Today?

Frontline Interview with
John H. Langbein

John Langbein is a professor of law and legal history at Yale Law School. In this interview, he describes how the plea bargain system pressures people to buckle and accept a plea-even if they are innocent-and how prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys have a role, a stake even, in seeing that this happens. He also talks about the Supreme Court's indifference to the pressures on a defendant in the plea process, and why he believes the rampant growth of pleas is rooted in the trial system's failures.

(I have condensed this interview for the sake of this forum. You can view the entire interview on the link I provided below)

Q: "What is wrong with the plea bargain system in our courts today?"

Plea bargaining is a system that is best described as one of condemnation without adjudication. It is a system that replaces trial, which is what our constitution intended, with deals.

Second, those deals are coerced. The prosecutor is basically forcing people to waive their rights to jury trial by threatening them with ever greater sanctions if they refuse to plead and instead demand the right to jury trial.
But every defendant has a right to go to trial; it's a choice they make to plead guilty.

The problem with choice arguments is that they neglect the main dynamic of plea bargan which is the pressure that the prosecutor puts on you to do it his way.

Plea bargain works by threat. What the prosecutor says to a criminal defendant in plea bargaining is, "Surrender your right to jury trial, or if you go to trial and are convicted of an offense, we will see to it that you are punished twice. Once for the offense, and once for having had the temerity to exercise your right to jury trial." THAT is a coercive system.

And the prosecutor has many devices which increase the level of coercion: multiplying the counts, threatening to recommend the most severe end of the sentence range, keeping you locked up in pretrial detention if you're poor - most people who are in the criminal justice system are poor - prosecuting your wife as well as yourself, and things of this sort. The prosecutor can pile it on if you don't play it his way. It is therefore a deeply coercive system. Yes, you have a choice, but your choice is constrained by coercion.

Q: What is the role of the defense lawyer?

Sometimes defense counsel does a very good job for people in the plea bargaining process, and gets you a good deal. But there are many other outcomes.

In the public defender system the defense counsel is representing a hundred other people; the defense counsel can not take every case to trial....

Defense counsel in some circumstances is not very competent and is delighted simply to take his money and run, so to speak."

"So there's no particular reason to think that defense counsel is any serious answer to the intrinsically coercive nature of plea bargaining."

Q: Whom does the system benefit?

The main winner in the plea bargaining process is the prosecutor. I describe plea bargaining as a system of prosecutorial tyranny..."

What has happened is that a single officer, the prosecutor, now is in charge of investigating, charging--that is, bringing formal charges--deciding whether to prosecute, evaluating that evidence, deciding whether or not in his or her judgment you're guilty or not, and then basically sentencing you.

"....what we have now is a system in which one officer, and indeed a somewhat dangerous officer, the prosecutor, has complete power over the fate of the criminal accused."

Q: You let the defense attorney off lightly.

I think defense counsel is to some extent at the mercy of a bad system. There's not a lot you can do when the other guy has all the chips. And the prosecutor has an awesome pile of chips in our plea bargaining system, because the prosecutor can threaten ever larger sanctions if you don't do what he wants.

So I believe that by far the worst failure in the plea bargaining system is the prosecutor, and I think that's in part because the prosecutor is not always as noble as he would like you to believe he is."

"It's a lot easier to coerce somebody into waiving all his defenses than to actually investigate the case thoroughly..."

But, again, the trial is there for anyone who chooses that option.

It is true that one always has the right to go to trial, but the prosecutor can make that right so costly that only a fool will exercise the right..."

Part of the reason why we in this country have criminal sentences that are so much more severe than in the rest of the civilized world, is the need that prosecutors have to threaten people with these huge sentences in order to get them to waive the right to jury trial...."

".... most people (in the system) are too poor to afford bail, and these people are particularly likely to yield to the demand that they confess whatever it is they're being charged with rather than wait for some kind of trial, because they'll be sitting in jail for months and months and months, and therefore there is a very evil interaction of prosecutorial power with poverty, with indigence."

It is very sad that the Supreme Court, which has been so anxious to protect various rights of persons who go to trial, has been so cowardly about seeing the evils of the plea bargaining process."

"...the Supreme Court has been indifferent to the pressures on accused in the plea bargaining process, as exemplified by the famous Alford case, where the fellow actually stood up and said, "I'm innocent, but I'm pleading because the disparity of outcome that they're threatening me with is too great". It's terribly sad."

"...the prosecutor is allowed to coerce people out of trial."

"...what happens is that prosecutors don't have to prove their cases; they're simply allowed to coerce people into waiving their rights. Judges are spared the difficulty of conducting trials and the danger of being found to have erred; they (plea bargains) can't be appealed from .."

"...what actually happens is you're coerced into confessing yourself guilty, whether you are or not."

"The saddest things about plea bargaining is that it is not widely understood. Most people have the television model of Perry Mason or somebody similar contesting for a verdict of a jury."

"Plea bargaining is sometimes justified on the ground that we are giving a lighter sentence to someone who is showing contrition or remorse for the offense. But that's a pack of lies. What is in fact happening is that the accused is being told by the prosecutor, "You accept guilt and confess and bear false witness against yourself and we will then see to it that it gets characterized as contrition or remorse."

The point is that the coercion, which eliminates trial, eliminates our ability to know you were in fact beyond reasonable doubt, guilty or not. And therefore it makes the remorse talk just window dressing by apologists who want to keep this existing system which is convenient for them."

Q: Do you have a solution?

I think the solution is very complex. I think it requires facing the underlying failure of this adversary criminal justice system. The idea that having one pack of lawyers and investigators saying, "You did it," and another pack saying, "We didn't," and nobody actually looking for what actually happened, nobody having an interest in investigating the truth, is a bit mistake."

"No knowledgeable student of comparative criminal justice is likely to fall victim to the notion that our is an admirable system.

It is an appalling system.

We have ten times as large a percent of our population locked up in jail by comparison with the European countries. We have sentences which are draconian. We've just had a 12 year old put in jail for life in Florida. Things of this sort are unheard of in the rest of the world.

There are many causes, but the failure of our adversary system is central, and the political nature of our prosecutorial system is also central..."

(complete interview at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/interviews/langbein.html)

Prosecuting innocence and opposition.

No one in this country is immune to prosecutorial harassment...if we don't let them take out the people they want, they'll come straight for us instead. And these are innocent people they've helped free. It's the innocent ones that scare the prison industrial complex the most - once they've been convicted, the rest of the system becomes complicit in burying their claims, and silencing their pleas, lest the public discover that our system of justice is deeply flawed. 

We are far more concerned with punishing the guilty than protecting the innocent, which is why we haven't designed a justice system which actually reduces violent crime by transforming institutions and relationships of power in communities, not imprisoning drug addicts and gamblers and throwing their children in a setting where they're as likely to be victimized as their parents are.

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The Professor and the Prosecutor: Anita Alvarez’s office turns up the heat on David Protess’s Medill Innocence Project.

The Cook County State's Attorney's Office provides at least two reporters a memo containing scurrilous and unsubstantiated claims about the conduct of the Northwestern University journalism professor and his students in an earlier case.

By Bryan Smith

Chicago Magazine

In their own ways, they have risen to stardom on a stage built from misery, two battlers who grapple with questions of life-and-death justice: Anita Alvarez, a Chicago native and career prosecutor with working-class roots, who dramatically emerged from a pack of formidable opponents to become the first woman and first person of Hispanic descent to hold the top job in the second-largest prosecutor’s office in the nation; and the Northwestern University professor David Protess, a crusader against wrongful convictions who has guided his students to find fresh evidence that helped free five people from death row and sprang six others from imprisonment for murders they did not commit—putting prosecutors on the defensive with each notch in his belt.

Over the more than two decades they built their careers, the two rarely crossed paths. That changed when Alvarez, who took office a little over a year ago, found herself dealing with the latest Protess cause: the claim that a man named Anthony McKinney had been wrongly jailed for more than 30 years.

In this case, Alvarez turned the tables on Protess, challenging the motives and ethics of him and his students. In a court filing, her office has given voice to deeply unflattering, sometimes personal accusations: that some students may have paid a witness to recant; that other students “flirted” with witnesses, in effect, to persuade them to make incriminating statements; and that students may have been so driven to get an A that they twisted or suppressed evidence to suit their cause of freeing McKinney.

Alvarez insists that she is simply doing what a prosecutor should do—make every reasonable effort to ascertain the truth behind possible evidence and testimony in a criminal case. “I have a duty to seek out whatever evidence is out there, and that’s what I’m doing,” she told me.

Her approach, however, has set off a national controversy and ignited counteraccusations that her real interest is to intimidate, bully, and perhaps destroy Protess’s operation. Alvarez dismisses those allegations as “insulting.”

Meanwhile, outside court, her office has given at least two reporters a memo about a 1996 case as “background” information. The memo recounts scurrilous and unsubstantiated claims about the conduct of Protess and students who were working on an investigation that resulted in freeing two men from death row and two others from life sentences. “What on earth does [an old] memo based on lies and designed to smear my students have to do with the truth of whether Anthony McKinney was wrongfully convicted?” asks Protess.

Now, a case that was about whether a convicted man is innocent has morphed into an increasingly personal brawl between two heavyweights unwilling to back down—with academics, prosecutors, freedom of the press advocates, and students hanging on the judge’s decision...

(finish article at Chicago Magazine)