Oak Park’s David Protess, crusader against wrongful convictions, along with a group of fledgling young investigative reporters, is on the brink of breaking yet another case. But this time, if and when Protess and his protégés set free an innocent man, it won’t be under the auspices of the Medill School of Journalism’s Innocence Project, of which Protess was recently director. This time, it will be the independent effort of the Chicago Innocence Project, a non-profit organization formed by Protess after he left his post as a professor at Northwestern University’s journalism school under a cloud of controversy earlier this year.
The controversy began after State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, a River Forest resident, subpoenaed documents related to a wrongful conviction case for inmate Anthony McKinney, on which Protess and his journalism students were working. Protess was accused of failing to turn over the same case material to both McKinney’s lawyers and Alvarez’s office. Eventually, a Medill dean took a position against Protess, claiming that he deliberately misled Northwestern University, and the situation led to Protess’ suspension from teaching and replacement as director of the Medill Innocence Project.
But the professional obstacle has not hindered his momentum or his dedication to overturning wrongful imprisonments. Inaction, he says, isn’t an option. His clients have waited long enough.
“This is not about any one person. It’s about the cause. The mission of our work is going on as we speak,” Protess said.
The Chicago Innocence Project is currently moving forward on a completely volunteer basis with six Medill students who have “bolted” from the program. “I am teaching them without pay, and they are doing this without getting course credit,” Protess said of his team, which is currently working on a case to free inmate Stanley Wrice.
Wrice has been incarcerated for 28 years. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison for a brutal rape and assault. But Protess said his students have proven, conclusively, that Wrice is innocent and was tortured into a confession, under the supervision of the notorious former Chicago Police Department detective Jon Burge, who was accused of torturing hundreds of criminal suspects over a period of nearly 20 years and recently convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison.
“We’re very close to freeing yet another innocent man,” Protess said.
The new incarnation of the Innocence Project will need funding to persist, but it is backed by heavy hitters in the field of wrongful convictions. Protess, who is the organization’s president, has overseen investigations that resulted in the release of 11 innocent men from prison, including five who sat on Death Row. Vice President Rubin Carter, a former professional heavyweight boxer once famous as “The Hurricane,” spent nearly two decades in prison for a triple homicide he didn’t commit. Secretary Jeanne Bishop, an attorney, is also treasurer of the board of directors for the organization Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights (her sister was murdered during a home invasion in the 1990s).
And those are just the officers. “The board includes almost every one of the wrongfully convicted men who my students and I helped to free,” Protess said.
Since he announced his intention to launch the Chicago Innocence Project, Protess said he has been flooded with requests from prisoners hoping he’ll take a look at their cases. So the need for this service is there.
“What I don’t have yet is sufficient funding to really launch the project on a full-time basis, with staff,” he said. So he’ll begin scouting out funding sources, and planning fundraisers to benefit the cause. “There will be a lot of ways that we’ll be able to get money to make this happen,” he said.
The investigators who will be involved in future cases are also yet to be determined, but Protess said his teams will continue to be made up of students. “It’s going to remain a very student-centered project,” he said. But it will remain independent of any university, although Protess said that in the future, course credit could be offered in exchange for student participation. He expects the stream of students to be diverse, from many different backgrounds and many different colleges. Even Northwestern.
Protess said he’s not sure if he’ll ever return to his teaching post at Medill, especially if he plans to continue at the helm of the Chicago Innocence Project, since Northwestern would not allow him to fundraise for independent projects while he was an active member of the faculty.
Michael Miner, a senior editor of the Chicago Reader, has reported on the issues between Protess and Northwestern in a number of articles since the conflicts emerged earlier this year. Miner said it seems unlikely that the two parties will ever again work together. But Protess’ passion and momentum have far from slowed.
“That’s his life’s work, and he’s shown that he’s very good at it,” Miner said. Of Protess’ strong opposition to the accusations, Miner said: “He’s a vocal guy. … I wouldn’t expect him to take any of this lying down.”
As far as Protess’ culpability goes, Miner said that’s difficult to say. “This could be a situation where everybody’s right,” he said, adding that if Northwestern was uneasy with the way in which Protess operated, it was their prerogative to part ways with the professor.
Meanwhile, the McKinney case continues to hang in limbo as Protess embarks on the next leg of his career, though there’s little he can do about it. In a letter send to Medill and Innocence Project alums defending himself against accusations of misconduct in the case, he reminded students that the real victim is Anthony McKinney.
“An innocent man, Anthony, has been locked up for three decades for a murder he did not commit,” he wrote. “It is a shame that a university spokesperson and the dean of a once-proud journalism school have chosen to join prosecutors in compounding one injustice with another.”