Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Books

The empty man
Is lots and lots of money all there is to George W. Bush? Molly Ivins says yes, Elizabeth Mitchell says no.
By Chris Lehmann
[03/01/00]

Reviews
"Scandalmonger" by William Safire
The pundit and language columnist crafts a potboiler of sleaze and slander in the republic's infancy.
By Katharine Whittemore
[03/01/00]

Bridget Jones at 80
Calorie counting and man chasing in the golden years.
By Lucinda Rosenfeld
[02/29/00]

Reviews
"Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" by Helen Fielding
She's back, she's got her weight down, she's got Mark Darcy and she's in a Thai jail on drug charges.
By Maria Russo
[02/29/00]

Dear Mr. Blue
Strangers on a train
We met in Scotland and fell in love. He never told me he lived with his mother.
By Garrison Keillor
[02/29/00]

Complete archives for Books

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The Illinois moratorium, imposed by Republican Gov. George Ryan at the end of January, largely resulted from the extraordinary exoneration of 13 men sentenced to die after Illinois reinstituted the death penalty in 1977. (It had been invalidated in 1972 as a result of a United States Supreme Court decision in a Georgia death case.) During the same period, 12 men were executed. All 13 overturned convictions resulted from campaigning by people outside the criminal justice system, with seven cases involving academic and student investigators.

Illinois has offered some of the most dramatic examples of students and academics increasingly questioning the reliability of the criminal justice system. There are legal clinics at many law schools that occasionally take up cases of wrongful convictions, but few focus as intently on freeing the innocent -- often with special attention to people sentenced to death -- as the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago and the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University in New York. No other journalism school has had a program like the class at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where budding reporters can investigate death row prisoners' claims to innocence.

Those outside the justice system have accounted for the vast majority of the 85 death row inmates exonerated nationally since 1974, with students increasingly involved in those actions, according to Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. It's a telling indictment of American justice. "To have a hand in saving somebody's life for something they're innocent of is overwhelming," said Scott Stewart, a Northwestern University journalism student who helped prove the innocence of a man who escaped execution by two days. "But it's sad and scary that it's come down to dedicated law clinics and law and journalism students to do some of these investigations. It shows there's a breakdown in the system at some level."

President Clinton recently rejected a federal moratorium, despite prodding by death penalty opponents Sens. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Clinton has long viewed support of the death penalty as a key part of his "new Democrat" strategy to be tough on crime. He refused to stop the execution of a mentally impaired convict during his presidential campaign and also signed the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which greatly limited the rights of prisoners challenging their death sentences.

But Clinton may have been trying to keep in tune with shifting public sentiments when he invited Rubin "Hurricane" Carter to a White House viewing of "The Hurricane," the movie about the former boxer's fight for freedom. In 1967 Carter and John Artis were convicted of killing three people in a New Jersey bar. After Carter won an appeal, prosecutors claimed in his second trial that he acted out of racial revenge and convicted him again. But in 1985, a federal judge ruled that there was no proof of their theory and that prosecutors had withheld evidence disproving the testimony of a star witness.

Next page | After hours of "Matlock," refuting evidence is easy