For the last two years, David Protess, a renowned journalist and professor who spent three decades fighting to prove the innocence of others, has been locked in a battle to do the same for himself. It hasn’t gone as well.
Freed by a Journalism Professor and His Students
(June 18, 2011)
Mr. Protess, who taught at the Medill journalism school at Northwestern University, was the founder and driving force behind the Medill Innocence Project, which was instrumental in exonerating at least 12 wrongly convicted defendants and freeing them from prison, including five who were on death row in Illinois, and in prompting then-governor George Ryan to clear the rest of death row in 2003.
But during an investigation into a questionable conviction, the Cook County state’s attorney turned her attention instead on Mr. Protess and his students. Since then, questions have been raised about deceptive tactics used by the Medill students, about allegations that Mr. Protess cooperated with the defense lawyers (which would negate a journalist’s legal privilege to resist subpoenas) and, most damning, whether he altered an e-mail to cover up that cooperation.
Medill, which enjoys an international reputation, in significant part because of his work, removed him from teaching in April, and this week he retired from Northwestern altogether, and now runs the Chicago Innocence Project. It has been a breathtaking reversal for Mr. Protess, who says he believes he is being pilloried for lapses in memory and a desire to defend his students.
“I have spent three decades exposing wrongful conviction only to find myself in the cross hairs of others who are wrongfully accusing me,” he said in an interview.
It is often said that academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low, but in the matter of Mr. Protess and the wrongly convicted men he helped to free, the stakes could not have been higher.
“He is in the hall of fame of investigative journalists in the 20th century,” said Mark Feldstein, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “Using cheap student labor, he has targeted a very specific issue, and that work has reopened cases, changed laws and saved lives.”
Dennis Culloton, a lawyer who served as press secretary for Governor Ryan, said that Medill’s work led in part to the decision to essentially shut down Illinois’s death row. “I think it would have been an academic discussion if not for David’s work,” he said.
Behind that public success, however, there were gnawing tensions within Medill. Mr. Protess’s tendency to clash with authority did not end with law enforcement. He came into conflict with at least two deans of the Medill school, including the current one, John Lavine, who started in 2006 after a long career in newspapers.
Mr. Lavine is a polarizing figure at Medill: he is widely credited with stabilizing an institution that was suffering financially but he also led a successful effort to rename the school the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, a change he said reflected the school’s broader agenda but one that was widely ridiculed by alumni and journalists.
Mr. Protess said the project initially received support from the dean, but now says that was a charade, “an attempt to seem as if he were fighting for the First Amendment when in fact he was undermining the Innocence Project at every turn.” Mr. Lavine counters that he had no choice but to remove Mr. Protess: “What I saw warranted the decision that I made.”
Mr. Protess (whose son Ben is a reporter for The New York Times) started the Innocence Project at Medill in 1999 after spending much of his career looking into questionable convictions for Chicago Lawyer magazine. Working with the Center on Wrongful Convictions, a sibling project at the Northwestern Law School, Mr. Protess methodically vetted cases, laid out lines of inquiry for his student journalists and guided them through their reporting assignments.
As the list of exonerations grew, the global reputation of Medill — and Mr. Protess — soared and students were drawn to the project to be trained in the real-life crucible of capital cases.
“His class was life-changing,” said Evan S. Benn, a former student of Mr. Protess who is now a reporter at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
It was an oddity of the Innocence Project that students rarely wrote their own articles (until 2008, when the project put them online). Instead, the students, sometimes working with private investigators, would produce one-page reports about their findings, then be partnered with well-known journalists to bring new information to light. The lack of direct journalistic output concerned at least one former dean.
“It was always kind of fuzzy whether he was engaged in journalism or a kind of guerrilla social justice law operation where the ends justified the means,” said Michael Janeway, a dean at Medill from 1989 to 1996 who is now a professor of journalism at Columbia. “David was not totally irresponsible. He was zealot in pursuit of a cause, a cause you could not question.”
Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a collaborator with Mr. Protess, said that Mr. Protess was not well served by a culture of permission that came to surround him.
“In the structure of a newspaper, you have an editor who is not vested in the reporting who can push back. I don’t know if he had that kind of editor,” he said, adding “David is a character, but in my dealing with him, he’s always been incredibly professional.”
In 2003, the Innocence Project became involved in the case of Anthony McKinney, a man sentenced to life on a murder conviction. Nine teams of student journalists concluded that Mr. McKinney, who was convicted in 1981 of killing a security guard, was actually watching the Spinks-Ali championship fight at the time of the killing.
Two eyewitnesses who had identified Mr. McKinney recanted when students working with Mr. Protess questioned them, and a story by Mr. Possley, using some of the students’ work, was published in The Chicago Sun-Times in 2008.
The doubts raised by the Innocence Project led the Cook County state’s attorney to re-examine the case, but investigators found instances in which “we were not getting the same answers the students claimed to have gotten,” said Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for the state’s attorney’s office. In 2009, the state’s attorney Anita Alvarez filed a sweeping subpoena for Innocence Project materials, including students’ notes, summaries, e-mails and even grades, on the theory that they would report tendentiously in favor of innocence in the hope of getting a better grade.
Mr. Protess immediately objected, saying that, as journalists, he and his students were protected under Illinois’s shield law. He went further, saying that the prosecutor was more interested in going after students to discredit their reporting than getting to the bottom of what happened in the McKinney case.
Ms. Daly said that the state’s attorney spent two years investigating, interviewing dozens of people in six states, before asking the court to force Northwestern to produce the information.
“The professor framed it as a vendetta,” she said. “It was untrue.”
At first, the project had the school’s support. “At the time, I said if you are going to put a professor in jail because he is not turning over student grades and materials, all of which I believed were covered by the shield law, you are going to have to put me in jail first,” said Mr. Lavine.
The attorney’s office did uncover several situations in which students pushed professional boundaries. In November 2006, one of Mr. Protess’s students identified herself as a census worker while trying to find a witness. In 2009, another student posed as a worker for the power company. In both cases, Mr. Protess says he didn’t know about the tactics in advance but has no professional issue with them.
Last year, Northwestern started an internal investigation into the group. In September 2009, Karen Daniel, Mr. McKinney’s lead counsel, made an explosive admission to university investigators: she received “a significant amount of materials” from Mr. Protess’s students. That would negate the journalist’s privilege that Mr. Protess had claimed in the hope of keeping the students’ work out of Ms. Alvarez’s hands.
Mr. Protess said then that it had been several years since the events and that he could not remember what he had and had not turned over. But in a search of Innocence Project computers, the university turned up an e-mail from Mr. Protess to his assistant in 2006 that indicated the students’ reporting memos had been shared with the defense.
“My position about memos, as you know, is that we share everything with the legal team, and don’t keep copies,” he wrote, referring to Mr. McKinney’s lawyers.
But the copy of the e-mail he provided to university lawyers was altered to read, “My position about memos, as you know, is that we don’t keep copies.”
Mr. Protess said that he altered the e-mail to reflect the actual practice of the Innocence Project as he remembered it.
“Everybody assigns sinister motives to what I did, but my intent was not to mislead; it was precisely the opposite,” he said. “My part was due to memory failure about the extent to which I had shared student memos with the defense, and then I stubbornly stuck to that position when I felt ganged up on by everybody else.”
With the discovery of the e-mail, what had been a publicly united front broke down behind the scenes. At a hastily called faculty meeting at Medill on April 6, Mr. Lavine presented his colleagues with a PowerPoint presentation of statements and actions by Mr. Protess that the dean considered misleading, and asked for opinions. But by the time the faculty members got back to their desks, a press release had already been issued announcing Mr. Protess would not be teaching spring semester and making it clear he would not be welcomed back after that.
“The situation turned on a dime,” said Douglas Foster, an associate professor. “You have the most lionized member of the faculty suddenly becoming somebody who is summarily removed from teaching with no notice and subjected to a kind of banishment. It’s a textbook case of how not to manage conflict.”
Mr. Protess has since signed a negotiated agreement to leave the university. The work of the Innocence Project continues under the leadership of Alec Klein, a former investigative reporter for The Washington Post. At the beginning of June, the Innocence Project published a story students produced raising serious questions about the murder conviction of Donald Watkins, who has served 56 years in prison. Meanwhile, Mr. McKinney’s appeal is at a standstill.
Another of Mr. Protess’s former students, Jennifer Merritt, said that despite the difficulties, the Innocence Project should continue.
“The last thing I want is for the investigative journalism and the teaching to go away,” said Ms. Merritt, now an editor at The Associated Press. “There may be some things that people question, but the end results are amazing.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 18, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the conclusion of David Protess's employment at Northwestern University. He retired, he did not resign.
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