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Battle Gets Personal Between Prosecutor and Professor

By Robert J. Ambrogi

Remember the subpoena Chicago's top prosecutor issued seeking records of students at Northwestern University's Medill journalism school? We reported on it in October, when Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez asked professor David Protess, director of The Medill Innocence Project, to turn over students' notes and recordings of witness interviews, as well as the students' grades and evaluations and e-mails they sent to each other. The subpoenas attracted national attention and resulted in harsh criticism of Alvarez. No less than a retired federal circuit judge, H. Lee Sarokin, weighed in, writing in The Huffington Post that the move "warrants and deserves the Gestapo label." Now, a Chicago magazine article describes how the stand-off between Alvarez and Medill's Protess has become personal and questions Alvarez's motives in leaking to reporters an old memo about a 1996 case that "recounts scurrilous and unsubstantiated claims about the conduct of Protess and students." The subpoenas were an outgrowth of an investigation the journalism students started in 2003 into the conviction of Anthony McKinney for the 1978 murder of security guard Donald Lundahl in the Chicago suburb of Harvey. After three years of reporting, the students became convinced that McKinney was innocent. They shared their...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on January 06, 2010 (boomark / email).