Revenge for Exposing Death Row Frame-Ups

Illinois: Hands Off Northwestern Innocence Project!

We print below a December 3 Partisan Defense Committee letter to Illinois’ Cook County State’s Attorney protesting the prosecutors’ outrageous effort to subpoena student records from the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University’s journalism school. As the PDC letter explains, for many years the school’s faculty, students and staff have been instrumental in lifting the lid on a series of frame-ups of innocent people in the grips of the Illinois prison system. In 1996, Medill students working under professor David Protess won national recognition after they dug up critical evidence clearing the “Ford Heights Four,” four black men who had languished in prison for 18 years, falsely convicted of the 1978 murders of a white couple. Then in 1999, Protess’s students blew open the frame-up of innocent death row inmate Anthony Porter, after which Protess set up the Innocence Project as a permanent feature of the journalism school.

After the exoneration of Porter in 1999, Republican governor George Ryan imposed a moratorium on executions in Illinois. In 2003 he emptied death row, pardoning four innocent men and commuting the death sentences of all the other 167 inmates. Ryan’s wholesale clemency order was met with howls of protest from the Democratic machine of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, who had presided over many of those frame-ups as Cook County State’s Attorney in the 1980s. It was none other than Barack Obama, then a State Senator from Chicago’s South Side, who promoted a package of death penalty legislative “reforms” so that the state’s discredited killing machines could go back into operation. As Marxists, we welcomed Ryan’s clemency order curtailing the death penalty, which we oppose on principle, and explained: “To get rid of the barbaric state machinery of capitalist rule requires the forging of a workers party, in opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties of capital, to lead the multiracial proletariat to power” (“Illinois Governor Empties Death Row—Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!” WV No. 796, 31 January 2003).

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The Partisan Defense Committee vigorously protests your office’s effort to force the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University’s school of journalism to turn over student grades, e-mails, academic records, investigative materials, and course syllabi. This is a transparent effort to intimidate the Innocence Project faculty and students for their efforts to expose frame-ups of innocent men and women in the Illinois prisons.

For more than a decade, Medill journalism faculty and students have been instrumental in exploding frame-ups in a number of high profile cases in Illinois, including that of death row inmate Anthony Porter in 1999, which ultimately led Republican governor George Ryan to commute the sentences of all the inmates on the state’s death row.

Most recently, the Innocence Project has exposed new evidence pointing to the innocence of Anthony McKinney, who is still in prison for a 1978 shooting of a security guard. Seething over this blow to the state’s frame-up machinery, your office responded by subpoenaing academic records from the Innocence Project under the pretext of attacking the students’ “bias, motive and interest”!

This blatant attempt to chill the Innocence Project’s journalism and investigations presents a dire threat to anyone who would dare to expose and protest state frame-ups and the machinery of repression, including the racist death penalty.

The PDC vehemently demands: Hands off the Medill Innocence Project!