Judge Should Laugh Subpoena Request out of Courtroom
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Anita Alvarez is a menace to your freedom.
That's why you should care about Alvarez's bid to force my Medill colleague David Protess to open his grade book to prosecutors as they attempt to -- well, I still haven't figured out what Alvarez and her cohort are attempting to do, because it is baffling on almost every front.
The case in question is that of a man who has been in jail for more than 30 years, convicted of killing another man. Student journalists in Protess' investigative journalism course have said they have new evidence that exonerates Anthony McKinney. The judge scheduled a hearing on the matter; Alvarez has asked the judge to force Protess and the students to turn over their notes, their grades, the course syllabus and other items pertaining to the students' investigation, as a way, apparently, to poke holes in the effort to free McKinney.
As many, including Protess, have pointed out, you would think Alvarez would be fighting the case on its merits -- pointing out the solidity of the state's case that sent McKinney to prison to begin with -- rather than launching an ad hominem attack on the methods of the student journalists who say they have evidence that will set McKinney free.
What Alvarez is doing is dumb.
You may think it doesn't affect you: You're not a journalist, you're not a college student, you're not in jail for a murder you may or may not have committed.
You're wrong.
It matters urgently to you and to everyone because it's an attempt by prosecutors to perpetrate one of the starkest erosions of constitutional rights to due process.
Not to mention that the request for student grades violates federal privacy statutes -- we as teachers can't even talk about a student's grades among ourselves and are forbidden from telling a student's parent his or her academic record without the student's express consent.
But by even talking about privacy and grades, Alvarez is forcing us into parsing something so far afield as to be laughable.
At root, we're talking about a man who has been in prison for murder who may have been convicted in error.
Don't we owe him, at the very least, a hearing on the merit of the evidence? Even if the state's record was unblemished in cases such as this, I don't think bleeding hearts are alone on this one. Whenever society is going to accuse someone of a crime so grave as murder, it owes itself the assurance that the accused is guilty.
The speculation is that Alvarez hopes to show that performance in the class was tied to getting dirt that would free the subject of the investigation and that students may have been motivated less by truth and more by grade.
I spoke this week with a former student of mine, who had Protess' course about 10 years ago and worked on a different case. She is offended -- as offended as all of us at Medill are -- by Alvarez's presumptions. "No one in the class was there for the grades," she said. "We didn't pile into my car at 6 a.m. to drive more than an hour to the South Side to interview eyewitnesses, or spend hours in a law office conference room poring over documents, for our GPA. We were there as journalists, learning to be better journalists."
I have news for Alvarez -- and this is apparently something she has a troublingly dim understanding of -- we journalists are concerned about justice, not about poking a thumb in the eye of the system. It may be hard for her to discern the difference, but I would hope that the county's chief prosecutor would understand the meaning of justice and see that we are working for it, as she should be.
The reason there is a need for journalists at all is because the power of the state is too great. Unchecked, it is far too great. Journalists give each of us a way to be heard when power is arrayed against us.
It's simple. And it's sad that Alvarez doesn't get it.
It's sadder still that Cook County is saddled with this out-of-her-depth prosecutor for at least another three years.
UPDATE: Three twenties?
So now we see what has Anita Alvarez so vexed: Someone working to learn whether a man jailed for 31 years for a murder he may not have committed is guilty or innocent slipped a cabbie $60 to take a witness home after an interview, and there was no way, Alvarez contends, the ride could have cost that much.
So, y'know, that constitutes a payment to the witness for testimony, which, y'know, would then impugn the integrity of the witness.
Alvarez, with this revelation, descends into the pantheon of Chicago politicians who make us a laughingstock.
Let's hope the judge has little patience for this thin broth and gets on with the business of whether McKinney has paid 31 years of his life for a crime someone else committed.
It sounds to me as though the Cook County state's attorney's office could use an infusion of student prosecutors.
Cook County prosecutors continue their relentless attempt to discredit the work of the students of the Medill Innocence Project in their efforts to exonerate Anthony McKinney.
Judge H. Lee Sarokin: Gestapo Knocks at Door of Northwestern University Journalism School
I believe that the attempt of prosecutors to subpoena the grades, class materials and e-mail messages of journalism students at Northwestern University warrants the Gestapo label.
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This isn't as open-and-shut as the poster would have us believe. In a trial, both sides have the ability to file motions for various reasons. If an attorney filed a motion to prove that the moon was made of blue cheese, they could do that. Practically, they wouldn't, because the judge has to rule on the motion and does not appreciate having his/her time wasted. The judge will rule here, and may well deny some parts of the motion and uphold others. The unstated assumption of this posting - that students are free to bring evidence without having their motives questioned - is absolutely wrong. If I were a prosecutor and thought that there might be something fishy with the way evidence is collected, I might well challenge it; that is my right as a party to the case. I would say the prosecutor is being savvy here; if they can prove that the purpose of evidence collection was to improve their grades, the evidence the students bring could rightly be impugned.
Just because you don't like the motion doesn't mean it's not a good idea.
Sorry, but attornies on either side are fully free to investigate and impugn the motives and methodolody of the evidence on either side. If this were a defense attorney requesting all the notes and procedures and background of the crime lab people who worked on developing the evidence would you be just as upset. I admit that the breath of the subpoena may intended to present a nussiance to the opposition, but defense attornies do that all the time too.
If these students learn a lesson about stubborn prosecutors then well, welcome to the real world.
The idea behind sovereign immunity came from a convenient myth popular among royalty that the king was annointed by God and couldn't possible do wrong. Fortunately most of us now know better - so the next step was for the state to intimidate its critics by misuse of its judicial powers. If allowed to do so - there are always people who will. Don't let them.
Let's hope the Supreme Court now hearing a case about responsibility of Prosecutores. It is way past time they are held accountable for their actions, more so when they are dirty or corrupted to "win" as most seem more interested in number of those they can jail and how they can do it, no matter how underhanded.
ALL in the "legal systesms" need their "protection" removed, prosecutors are the worse as as most have political growth goals then justice in mind, breed that beast with being a lawyer, well it would make a shark blush and most terrorists weep in envy.
This kind of thing, much worse in many other cases, mostly impacts the poor, are unlawfully pillared, This whole thing demands a much better system for Prosecutor accountability, in fact, for many in the :legal flow systems, start to finsh that need tighter controls..and a lot more accountability to the citizens
Tit for tat! As you raise a question that you want answered a certain way it is important that all recovered information be allowed to be shed. It's interesting how the prosecutors bad but the defense feels no reason to have ALL of their evidence produced that they have uncovered. Obviously a student with high marks answers the question as desired where it is possible that a student with low marks uncovered evidence that opposes the desired out come. It's all manipulation in which the truth is skewed for the purpose of saying see I was right. This time, but what about the other 100,000 times?
The heavy handed attempts to go nosing around into school and student records come on the heels of a miserable record of wrongful convictions in Illinois, and in Cook County in particular. The State's Attorney's office, as well as several police departments, have been made to look like schmucks by the Innocence Project. The information gathered by those student journalists and passed along to the law school has resulted in 11 overturned murder convictions in ten years, and exposed dozens of cases of police misconduct.
Ms. Alvarez is relatively new to her office. Maybe she should have a chat with ex-Gov. George Ryan, who enacted a moratorium on executions in 2000 and granted clemency to all death-row inmates three years later.
Aw nuts, he's locked up for corruption....
Prosecuters who are aggressive and think nothing of going beyond the bounds are sure nothing new.
Best of luck to these students. They are doing important - necessary - work.
As for Anita Alvarez; she should be disbarred. I think the term "overreaching" was invented for just such an occasion.
You go, student journalists, speak truth to power and don't back down!
Damn right.
No truer words: "The reason there is a need for journalists at all is because the power of the state is too great. Unchecked, it is far too great."
This Innocence Project controversy could not have come at a better time to highlight what can happen when government officials are allowed to foster investigation-squelching policies and rhetoric.
The sad part, though, is that the same people who are the side of the student journalists in this case, are often too partisan to apply the same criticism against our President and his administration. Their war onFox News is thuggish and all Americans should recognize that this is Power trying to marginalize and discredit Challenge.
(*chuckle*) You make it sound like Fox News didn't go to court to win the right to lie during their news broadcasts and call it news. No, not the opinion sections, but the news.
And they won.
"War on Fox News." That's so precious.
Has anybody been put in jail? Has anybody been denied access the way the Bush presidency shut out MSNBC? Has anybody been investigated by the FBI? Been followed by the CIA? Any attempts to get anybody fired?
No?
Not much of a war, then, is it?
Thank you so much for making my partisan point for me! I couldn't have illustrated it any better. Hee Hee. Too funny. Best chuckle of the day!
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