Northwestern University fights subpoena for grades (AP, Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times agree)

AP via Ft Worth Star-Telegram ^ | Jan 11, 2010 | Associated Press

[Ready4Freddy]

CHICAGO — News organizations, including The Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, filed court papers Monday supporting Northwestern University's fight of a subpoena seeking the grades of journalism students who believe they've found an innocent man in prison.

Prosecutors are seeking grades, grading criteria and class records because they contend the students may have been motivated to find evidence of Anthony McKinney's innocence to get better grades. McKinney is serving a life sentence for the 1978 murder of a security guard and is seeking a new trial.

Northwestern University's attorneys filed a brief Monday asking Cook County Circuit Judge Diane Cannon to throw out the subpoena.

The media outlets also filed a brief, arguing that student journalists are entitled to the same protections as working reporters. The Student Press Law Center and the Society of Professional Journalists filed a similar brief.

[Ready4Freddy]

Cook County State's Atty filing - http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/files/sao_filing_11-10-09.pdf

[rbg81]

So....what if grades are their motivation? The real questions should be: is the evidence fabricated or not? Is the man guilty or innocent?

[tet68]

The media outlets also filed a brief, arguing that student journalists are entitled to the same protections as working reporters.

I think they will come to regret this position when it
is applied to citizen journalists who after all are no
different than student journalists and in fact are probably
closer to working journalists in that they are published
on the web.

[UCANSEE2]

may have been motivated to find evidence of Anthony McKinney's innocence to get better grades.

I thought that would be a given, no matter what the school, no matter what the class.

Had they been searching for and found a previously unidentified killer, wouldn't they also be getting a 'good grade'?

[null and void]

What does guilt or innocence have to do with it?

[posterchild]

Exactly. I expect grades to be partial motivation for hard and accurate work.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Northwestern University’s innocence project has been a long time thorn in the side of Illinois prosecutors.

[paudio]

Can they also sue Punahou High School, Columbia and Harvard to get grades of someone who went there?

[GovernmentShrinker]

WTF??? Let’s see these prosecutors’ employment performance reviews first. After all, we need this information in order to determine whether their motivation for seeking the students’ information is to bolster their poor work records, which may be putting them at risk of being laid off. And I want to know what law school(s) graduated these sorry excuses for lawyers.

[HiTech RedNeck]

The prosecutors are quibbling that the journalism students sat on the story for three years before breaking the news. I think I’ve heard of MSM projects with longer time lines than this.

[MediaMole]

IMHO, the innocence project has cost at least one innocent life in Wisconsin. They got a monster out of prison so he could lure a young woman to her death.

[HiTech RedNeck]

It was Scalia’s view that if, as an attorney, you found your client had committed a crime that somebody else had been imprisoned for, it was OK to keep your mouth shut “because that person probably was guilty of something else.”

At the cost of risks like this, our justice system strives for the closest thing to cosmic truth that it can reach.

[GovernmentShrinker]

Three years is about par for the course for prosecutors to actually get a murder case to trial, from the time of the initial arrest/charges. Why on earth should students, who have much less ready access to witnesses and information, take a shorter time to review the evidence behind a 30 year old case?

These prosecutors need to be smacked down hard.

[kcvl]

The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project’s director says, and an Illinois governor once cited those wrongful convictions as he announced he was commuting the sentences of everyone on death row.

But if the school gives in to such a demand, say advocates of the Medill Innocence Project and more than 50 similar projects (most involving law schools and legal clinics), the stakes could be still higher, discouraging students from taking part or forcing groups to devote time and money to legal assistance.

The students collected an affidavit from a gang member who, they say, confirmed Mr. McKinney’s alibi that he was running away from gang members when the shooting took place.

“Why are they focusing on these unrelated things?” asked Ms. Forte, a defense investigator at the Southern Center for Human Rights who said she went to Northwestern partly to get involved in Mr. Protess’s project. “I cannot even imagine what they think they are going to find.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/us/25innocence.html?pagewanted=all

[kcvl]

Anthony McKinney

Chicago prosecutors allege journalism students paid for interviews

Northwestern students paid witnesses, prosecutors allege Professor denies 2 men received money in effort to prove convicted killer is innocent

Two witnesses told investigators they were paid during a probe by Northwestern University journalism students into a 1978 shotgun slaying that the students believe unjustly sent a Harvey man to prison for life, prosecutors alleged Tuesday.

The witnesses told investigators with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office that they were given money in the hopes that their statements would help free Anthony McKinney, convicted of murdering a security guard, prosecutors said in a court filing. The witnesses were identified as Tony Drakes and Michael Lane.

“This evidence shows that Tony Drakes gave his video statement upon the understanding that he would receive cash if he gave the answers that inculpated himself and that Drakes promptly used the money to purchase crack cocaine,” according to the filing.

Prosecutors also said that students with Northwestern’s Innocence Project haven’t turned over records of two interviews with Lane, who told state investigators he was also paid “$50 to $100, but did not sign anything or give information,” the court filing alleges.

Press Here

[kcvl]

In the latest filing, prosecutors allege that Drakes told them that after a 2004 interview with the students, someone on the investigative team paid a cabdriver $60 to take him from the interview site in downstate Swansea to a gas station 2 miles away. That amount was more than the fare and tip, and the leftover cash – $40 – was given to Drakes, who used it to buy crack cocaine, the filing states.

Evan Benn, who was one of the journalism students, said he handed $60 to the driver, an amount determined by an estimated fare the driver gave for Drakes’ planned trip.

[EDINVA]

Northwestern has had a program for a long time now that is dedicated to freeing prisoners who they claim were falsely accused and inappropriately prosecuted. Given it IS Chicago, the students probably have a point. I believe they were the first to have a prisoner actually freed based on DNA. So, one supposes, activity in that group would enhance one’s academic standing.

[kcvl]

The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal clinic affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and created by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld in 1992

The Innocence Project Board of Directors

Janet Reno Former Attorney General of the United States

http://i.cdn.turner.com/trutv/trutv.com/graphics/photos/notorious_murders/not_guilty/coerced_confessions/Peter-Neufeld150.jpg

Peter Neufeld

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2393/1799185487_d6d75796a0.jpg

Barry Scheck

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, prominent national civil rights attorneys who founded the Innocence Project

The law firm Cochran Neufeld & Scheck, has represented Abner Louima and others who claimed their civil rights were violated by the police or the government. They also served on the defense team for O.J. Simpson.

[William Tell 2]

Please let’s not deify the Innocence Project or this Northwestern University professor.

Why is it that the professor and his students don’t have to stand up to the scrutiny they want for others?

Why is it that the Innocence Project says DNA evidence is exculpatory when the very man who founded the group, Barry Scheck, said DNA evidence couldn’t convict O.J. Simpson?

Let’s get rid of the double standard shall we?

[Ready4Freddy]

Who is deifying?

Is Scheck’s Innocence Project involved in this, btw?