Rob Warden

Rob Warden is the co-founder and executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago and an award-winning legal affairs writer.

He is the author or co-author of hundreds of articles and commentaries on criminal justice issues and of four books about miscarriages of justice — A Promise of Justice (Hyperion, 1998), Gone in the Night (Delacorte, 1993), Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Alive (Northwestern University Press, 2005), and True Stories of False Confessions (forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2009).

After more than three decades as a working journalist — investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, columnist, and editor at the Chicago Daily News and the editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer — Warden joined with Northwestern University Law Professor Lawrence C. Marshall to start the Center on Wrongful Convictions in 1999. The Center is dedicated to identifying and rectifying wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice and has been instrumental in more than 30 exonerations. It also led the public education effort that culminated in Governor George Ryan’s decision to grant clemency to all Illinois death row prisoners in 2003.

Warden has won more than 50 journalism awards, including the Medill School of Journalism’s John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, two American Civil Liberties Union James McGuire Awards, five Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Norval Morris Award from the Illinois Academy of Criminology. In 2003, he was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame.