Prosecutors Turn Tables on Northwestern University's Student Journalists

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Subject: Prosecutors Turn Tables on Student Journalists
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
Date: Sun, October 25, 2009 22:00
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Prosecutors Turn Tables on Student Journalists
By MONICA DAVEY
New York Times
October 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/us/25innocence.html?th&emc=th

[excerpt]

EVANSTON, Ill. - For more than a decade, classes of students at
Northwestern University's journalism school have been scrutinizing the
work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as
part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of
11 inmates, the project's director says, and an Illinois governor once
cited those wrongful convictions as he announced he was commuting the
sentences of everyone on death row.

But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another
case, that of a man convicted in a murder 31 years ago, a hearing has been
scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request:
Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class
syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students
themselves.

The prosecutors, it seems, wish to scrutinize the methods of the students
this time. The university is fighting the subpoenas.

Lawyers in the Cook County state's attorney's office say that in their
quest for justice in the old case, they need every pertinent piece of
information about the students' three-year investigation into Anthony
McKinney, who was convicted of fatally shooting a security guard in 1978.
Mr. McKinney's conviction is being reviewed by a judge.

Among the issues the prosecutors need to understand better, a spokeswoman
said, is whether students believed they would receive better grades if
witnesses they interviewed provided evidence to exonerate Mr. McKinney.

Northwestern University and David Protess, the professor who leads the
students and directs the Medill Innocence Project, say the demands are
ridiculously overreaching, irrelevant to Mr. McKinney's case, in violation
of the state's protections for journalists and a breach of federal privacy
statutes - not to mention insulting.

John Lavine, the dean of the Medill School of Journalism, said the
suggestion that students might have thought their grades were linked to
what witnesses said was "astonishing." He said he believed that federal
law
barred him from providing the students grades, but that he had no
intention of doing so in any case..

[...]