Rob Warden

Last updated
Rob Warden
Born (1940-11-24) November 24, 1940 (age 82)
Carthage, Missouri
Occupation(s)Co-director, Injustice Watch; Executive Director emeritus, Center on Wrongful Convictions; American Journalist
Websiteinjusticewatch.org

Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. [1] As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system. [2] Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011. [3] [4] [5]

Contents

Warden has done pioneering research work in the field of wrongful convictions that has paved the way for widespread changes in criminal justice practices, including changes in interrogation methods, in eyewitness identification procedures as well as exposing the over-reliance by prosecutors of jailhouse informants and false confessions. [6] [7] Warden is also the author of several books on wrongful conviction cases.

Early career

Warden grew up in Carthage, Missouri. He began his journalism career in Missouri in 1960 at the Joplin Globe and went on to work at the Columbia Tribune, the Kalamazoo Gazette, and then in 1965 to the Chicago Daily News, where he was an award-winning Chicago beat reporter and a foreign correspondent until it folded in 1978. [8] At the Daily News, in the mid-1970s, he served as a foreign correspondent based in Beirut, where he and his wife and children were under siege in an ocean-front hotel for several days before they were evacuated. [9]

Career in Criminal Justice Journalism

In 1978, after Warden was asked by a progressive bar association to expand its newsletter, he launched the Chicago Lawyer, which began by reporting on the judicial selection process but soon expanded to reporting on false confessions, police misconduct and judicial incompetence. [10]

In 1982, The Chicago Lawyer published its first of many investigative stories focusing on the “Ford Heights Four” a highly publicized case in which 4 young black men had been convicted by an all-white jury of murder. Warden was first alerted to the gross prosecutorial misconduct which would later be uncovered in that case when he received an unsolicited letter from one of the defendants on death row. [10] It took another 15 years until the wrongfully convicted inmates were to be released and exonerated, after receiving help from students at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern who investigated the case for a school assignment. [11]

Warden's reporting was also instrumental in the first DNA-based exoneration in Illinois—that of Gary Dotson who had been falsely convicted of a rape that in fact had not occurred. The Chicago Lawyer focused on many other Death Row cases including Darby Tillis and Perry Cobb, Rolando Cruz and Alex Hernandez, all of whom were later exonerated. [3]

In a law review article, Warden described how he had evolved from a supporter of capital punishment into a crusader for abolition—referring to a thesis advanced by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall that the average citizen, if fully informed of the realities of capital punishment, would “find it shocking to his conscience and sense of justice.” [12]

Career in Criminal Justice Reform

In 1999, Warden helped found the Center on Wrongful Convictions, part of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law. During his tenure there (1999-2014), the Center was instrumental in approximately 25 exonerations of innocent men and women in Illinois. [8]

Warden is the co-author with James Tuohy of Greylord: Justice, Chicago Style (about "Operation Greylord" a sting investigation into judicial corruption in Chicago) and with David Protess of A Promise of Justice (about the wrongful convictions of “the Ford Heights Four”) and Gone in the Night (about the false conviction of a suburban Chicago man for the murder of his stepdaughter). He contributed legal analysis for a 2005 Northwestern edition reprinting of The Dead Alive, a 19th-century novel by Wilkie Collins based on the 1819 wrongful murder convictions of two brothers in Vermont. In 2009, Warden edited True Stories of False Confessions, an anthology of 29 articles on false confessions published by Northwestern University Press in 2009. [13] In 2018, the Journal of Law & Social Policy published a comprehensive article by Warden and co-author Daniel Lennard on the American experience with capital punishment. [14]

In 2015 he joined Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Tulsky to launch Injustice Watch.

Warden has won more than 50 awards, including the Medill School of Journalism's John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, two American Civil Liberties Union James McGuire Awards, five Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Norval Morris Award from the Illinois Academy of Criminology, the Thomas and Eleanor Wright Award from the Chicago Commission on Human Relations “for outstanding achievements in improving human relations,” the Innocence Network's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Illinois Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Promotion of Social Justice Award. [15]

He is credited as being "pivotal to the sea change in the national discourse about wrongful convictions and the death penalty" in the years since he began his investigative work. [16]

Commentary

Profile by Mara Tapp in the Chicago Tribune :

Rob Warden and David Protess are about the last people a prosecutor wants to see waiting outside the courtroom. That is just the way they like it, because they have spent their professional lives as journalists warning as loudly as they could of the unexamined power of the government to destroy innocent people through the power of wrongful prosecution. [17]

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medill School of Journalism</span> Constituent school of Northwestern University

The Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications is a constituent school of Northwestern University that offers both undergraduate and graduate programs. It frequently ranks as the top school of journalism in the United States. Medill alumni include 40 Pulitzer Prize laureates, numerous national correspondents for major networks, many well-known reporters, columnists and media executives.

Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miscarriage of justice</span> Conviction of a person for a crime that they did not commit

A miscarriage of justice occurs when a grossly unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.

Anthony Porter was a Chicago resident known for having been exonerated in 1999 of the murder in 1982 of two teenagers on the South Side of the city. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1983, and served 17 years on death row. He was exonerated following introduction of new evidence by Northwestern University professors and students from the Medill School of Journalism as part of their investigation for the school's Innocence Project. Porter's appeals had been repeatedly rejected, including by the US Supreme Court, and he was once 50 hours away from execution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law</span> Law school in the United States

Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law is the law school of Northwestern University, a private research university. The law school is located on the university's Chicago campus. Northwestern Law is among the top ten most selective law schools and belongs to the T14, an unofficial designation accepted in the legal community as the best 14 law schools in the United States.

Exoneration occurs when the conviction for a crime is reversed, either through demonstration of innocence, a flaw in the conviction, or otherwise. Attempts to exonerate convicts are particularly controversial in death penalty cases, especially where new evidence is put forth after the execution has taken place. The transitive verb, "to exonerate" can also mean to informally absolve one from blame.

<i>The Exonerated</i> American TV series or program

The Exonerated is a made-for-cable television film that dramatizes the stories of six people, some of whom, were wrongfully convicted of murder and other offenses, placed on death row, and later exonerated and freed after serving varying years in prison. It was based on a successful stage play of the same name written by Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank and first aired on the former CourtTV cable television network on January 27, 2005. It is directed by Bob Balaban and was produced by Radical Media.

Joseph H. Burrows was wrongfully convicted of the murder of farmer William E. Dulan at his home in Iroquois County, Illinois, in 1988. After his conviction and sentence to death in 1989, Burrows was held for nearly five years on death row.

Earl Washington Jr. is a former Virginia death-row inmate, who was fully exonerated of murder charges against him in 2000. He had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lyn Williams in Culpeper, Virginia. Washington has an IQ estimated at 69, which classifies him as intellectually disabled. He was coerced into confessing to the crime when arrested on an unrelated charge a year later. He narrowly escaped being executed in 1985 and 1994.

Gary Gauger is a formerly imprisoned convict, who was falsely accused and convicted of the murders of his parents, Morris and Ruth Gauger, and later exonerated. Following the murder on April 8, 1993, Gauger ultimately spent nearly two years in prison and 9 months on death row before being released in March 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delbert Tibbs</span> American poet

Delbert Lee Tibbs was an American man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and rape in 1974 in Florida and sentenced to death. Later exonerated, Tibbs became a writer and anti-death penalty activist.

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the University of Michigan Law School, Michigan State University College of Law and the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society. The Registry was co-founded in 2012 with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law to provide detailed information about known exonerations in the United States since 1989. As of February 6, 2020, the Registry has 2,551 known exonerations in the United States since 1989. The National Registry does not include more than 1,800 defendants cleared in 15 large-scale police scandals that came to light between 1989 and March 7, 2017, in which officers systematically framed innocent defendants.

The Ford Heights Four were formerly imprisoned convicts, who were falsely accused and convicted of the double murder of Lawrence Lionberg and Carol Schmal in Ford Heights, Illinois, and later exonerated. Jimerson and Williams were sentenced to death, Adams to 75 years in prison and Rainge to life. Following the murder in 1978, the four spent almost two decades in prison before being released in 1996. This miscarriage of justice was due to false forensic testimony, coercion of a prosecution witness, perjury by another witness who had an incentive to lie, and prosecution and police misconduct. The DNA evidence uncovered in the investigation to clear their names eventually led to the arrest and conviction of the real killers.

The Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, part of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law's Bluhm Legal Clinic, is a non-profit legal clinic that represents children who have been convicted of crimes they did not commit. Founded by Northwestern Law Professor Steven Drizin and directed by Professor Laura Nirider, it is the first organization in the world to focus exclusively on wrongfully convicted children. Through its intertwined research, scholarship, teaching, and advocacy, the Center has developed expertise in the problem of false confessions, police interrogation practices, and constitutional doctrine governing the interrogation room.

Steven A. Drizin is an American lawyer and academic. He is a Clinical Professor of Law at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law in Chicago, where he has been on the faculty since 1991. At Northwestern, Drizin teaches courses on Wrongful Convictions and Juvenile Justice. He has written extensively on the topics of police interrogations and false confessions. Among the general public, Drizin is known for his ongoing representation of Brendan Dassey, one of the protagonists in the Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer.

Laura Nirider is an American attorney and legal scholar working as an associate professor of law and the co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. An expert on false confessions, Nirider specializes in representing young people who confessed to crimes they did not commit, and working to reform the process of police interrogation. Nirider's work gained international visibility following her involvement in several high-profile cases involving juvenile confessions. Her clients have included Brendan Dassey, whose case was profiled on the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, and Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, whose case was profiled on the HBO series Paradise Lost and the documentary West of Memphis. She also hosts a podcast on false confessions, entitled Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions.

A Murder in the Park is a 2014 American true crime documentary directed by Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Clutter</span> American wrongful conviction advocate

Bill Clutter is an American private investigator, wrongful conviction advocate, and author. He is the co-founder of the Illinois Innocence Project and founder of the national wrongful conviction organization Investigating Innocence. His work on the Donaldson v. Central Illinois Public Service Company case led him to write the book Coal Tar: How Corrupt Politics and Corporate Greed Are Killing America's Children, which is the story of an epidemic of neuroblastoma in Taylorville, IL caused by exposure to coal tar.

References

  1. ↑ "Injustice Watch: Mission". InjusticeWatch.org. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  2. ↑ "Rob Warden papers, 1972-1989". Explore Chicago Collections. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  3. 1 2 "Change of Subject: A toast to all who wrote the death-penalty abolition story". blogs.chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  4. ↑ Wilgoren, Jodi (14 October 2002). "Illinois Moves to Center Of Death Penalty Debate". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  5. ↑ Wilgoren, Jodi (12 January 2003). "Citing Issue of Fairness, Governor Clears Out Death Row in Illinois". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  6. ↑ "Jailhouse Snitches: The Ticks on the Underbelly of the Criminal Justice System - The Davenport Firm APLC". www.davenportfirm.com. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  7. ↑ Warden, Rob (Winter 1988). "Consequences of False Confessions: Deprivations of Liberty and Miscarriages of Justice in the Age of Psychological Interrogation". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 88 (2): 429–496. doi:10.2307/1144288. JSTOR   1144288 – via Scholarlycommons at Northwestern School of Law.
  8. 1 2 Hinkel, Dan (September 22, 2013). "Head of Northwestern's wrongful convictions group to keep fighting". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  9. ↑ Randal, Jonathan (October 30, 1975). "A Suddenly Neutral Hotel". The Washington Post. pp. A1. ProQuest   146379091.
  10. 1 2 Warden, Rob (Winter 2005). "How and Why Illinois Abolished the Death Penalty". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. v. 95 Issue 2: 382–426 – via scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc.
  11. ↑ "Trio of Angels". www.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  12. ↑ "Rob Warden, An Ideological Odyssey: Evolution of a Reformer, 105 J. CRIM. L. - Google Search". www.google.com. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  13. ↑ Gutman, Amy. ""True Stories of False Confessions" edited by Rob Warden and Steven A. Drizin". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  14. ↑ Rob, Warden; Daniel, Lennard (2018). "Death in America under Color of Law: Our Long, Inglorious Experience with Capital Punishment". Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy. 13 (4). ISSN   1557-2447.
  15. ↑ "Staff, Center on Wrongful Convictions: Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law". www.law.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  16. ↑ "Advocates for the Wrongfully Convicted Honor Rob Warden". news.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  17. ↑ Tapp, Mara (February 14, 1999). "Courtroom Crusaders: When They First Met, Warden and Protess Were on Opposite Sides of an Issue". Chicago Tribune. Reprinted by Truth in Justice here .
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