Will the Obama Administration stick with the Bush Administration's opposition to DNA testing that could set a man free?

It probably surprises almost no one that the Bush Administration's solicitor general, Gregory G. Garre, filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in opposition to granting access to DNA testing...

A $4 million settlement of a civil rights case brought by a woman from whom Cook County deputy sheriffs coerced a false confession 30 years ago has driven the total tab for Illinois wrongful conviction verdicts and settlements past the $100 million mark.

The Cook County Board...

The confession of an eight-year-old boy to the murder of his father and another man last week in St. Johns, Arizona, is shocking. It also may be false.

Assuming it isn't, however, the boy is the youngest known killer in U.S. history, although not, alas, the only child of...

In the late years, the bane of Studs Terkel's life was his ever-deteriorating hearing.

"Can't hear a damn, thing," he'd mutter, incessantly adjusting and tapping his fingernails on his hearing aid, to little avail.

True to form, though, he could turn the malady into something of a comedy routine,...

If John McCain or Sarah Palin had written Milton Friedman's obit in 2006, would they have vilified the Nobel laureate economist widely regaled as the father of modern conservatism as some kind of anti-capitalist who was bent on spreading the wealth around?

Or are they simply unaware that it was...

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald finally has done what Richard M. Daley should have done 26 years ago: He has indicted retired Chicago Police Detective Jon Burge for leading a band of brutal white cops who tortured hundreds of African-American suspects in criminal cases.

It was 1982, when Daley was...

The men and women unlucky enough to enough to have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit -- and lucky enough to prove it -- had a champion in former Illinois Governor George H. Ryan.

But they don't have one in current governor Rod Blagojevich.

In a reversal of political...

The union that represents Chicago police is advising its members involved in crime scene investigations to refuse to provide samples of their DNA for forensic analysis.

Providing the samples is eminently sensible for the simple reason that unidentified DNA at a crime scene can be counterproductive in bringing a perpetrator...

All charges have at last been dropped against 55-year-old Alton Logan, who languished behind bars more than a quarter of a century for the murder of a security guard -- a crime that two Chicago public defenders knew almost from the beginning he hadn't committed.

The murder occurred on Jan....