Students help set agenda for US death penalty reform http://www.theage.com.au/breaking/0002/07/A3656-2000Feb7.shtml Source: AFP | Published: Monday February 7, 1:58 AM CHICAGO - Thirteen men on death row have been exonerated in Illinois - and those are the '13 mistakes we know about,' the state's governor admitted candidly. The startling admission came as Governor George Ryan declared a de facto moratorium on this state's capital punishment system amid mounting evidence of its fallibility. Perhaps equally damning is the fact that a handful of these men owe their lives, and in some cases their liberty, not to the state's criminal justice system, but a trio of crusading professors and lawyers and their foot soldiers. In the most celebrated of these cases, David Protess, a professor of Journalism at Northwestern University and a team of his students, aided by a private investigator, cleared Anthony Porter. Porter walked out of prison in 1999 having spent 17 years behind bars after he was wrongly convicted in 1983 of shooting to death a couple as they sat in a park on Chicago's South Side. Working with a private investigator, the college students proved Porter's innocence by obtaining a videotaped confession from the real killer, who later pleaded guilty to the crime. "I was shocked that here I was a 21-year-old kid, and I was doing what public defenders should have been doing," said Shawn Armbrust, one of those cub investigators. "It takes outsiders to rock the system and force it to change," said Armbrust who now works at the university's Centre on Wrongful Convictions. Last week Professor Richard Kling at Chicago-Kent College of Law began legal proceedings to overturn the murder conviction of Edgar Hope, based on evidence he and his law students painstakingly uncovered during months of investigation. "The students wrote to all the lawyers that represented Hope, and searched through tens of thousands of documents to find one critical document," Kling said. The document, an internal security report for a McDonalds restaurant on the South Side of Chicago where Hope allegedly gunned down a security officer in 1982, contained the names of witnesses to the murder that had never been interviewed. When they were questioned by Kling's team, their testimony pointed to another man, convicted cop-killer Andrew Wilson, as the killer. The new testimony may not win Hope his freedom: he is also serving a life sentence for the 1982 murder of Chicago police officer James Doyle which he confessed to. But Kling is hopeful that if he can overturn one conviction, he can also get Hope's death sentence overturned. "It's obscene that he spent 17 or 18 years fighting a case he shouldn't have been fighting," said Kling, who said he has been stonewalled by public prosecutors. "The prosecutors assigned to the case ... have been fighting tooth and nail for the last year to keep us from the evidence we have found," he said, notably the misconduct records of police officers involved in the case. The state's attorney's office did not make anyone available to answer the charges. Kling favors holding prosecutors accountable for their errors, even if that means a suspension or the sack if necessary. He welcomes last week's state Supreme Court ruling in which a justice took the unusual step of naming the prosecutors whose courtroom tactics led her to order a new trial for death row inmate Murray Blue. In spite of 'overwhelming' evidence of Blue's guilt, he did not get a fair trial, Justice Mary Ann McMorrow ruled, in part because the victim's police uniform, splattered with blood and brain, was displayed in the courtroom. "They forget they have to play by the same rules as everyone else. They think the end justifies the means," Kling said. And both Kling and Protess are reportedly in favor of appointing one of the 13 men exonerated since the death penalty was re-instated in 1977 on the panel Governor Ryan plans to set up to scrutinise the system. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
