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College journalism class may have helped convict wrong man for murder

The popular podcast Serial not only gave the decade-old podcasting industry its first bona fide pop-culture hit, but it gave critical visibility to the hit-or-miss nature of the American criminal justice system.

Listeners debated each other passionately – as did Serial host Sarah Koenig with herself – about whether high schooler Adnan Syed was guilty of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee’s murder in 1999, based on the voluminous yet maddening trove of evidence that Koenig laid out over the season.

When the season ends with (spoiler alert) the University of Virginia’s Innocence Project taking up Syed’s case, Serial delivers its version of a happy ending: If this kid, now in his 30s and somehow at peace in prison, is really innocent, he’ll get a new trial. If he’s guilty, well, at least we confirmed it using 21st-century technology.

Sometimes a happy ending, though, turns out to be a hellish beginning.

It’s not just prosecutors that coerce false confessions

A new documentary, A Murder in the Park, makes the case that Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism actually helped convict the wrong person in its own investigation of a long-ago murder case, The Daily Northwestern reports.

The Medill Justice Project, an investigative journalism class led by Professor David Protess, had dug into the investigation of Anthony Porter for the murder of a young couple in 1982.

The professor’s team “obtained a confession from another man that led to Porter’s immediate release” in 1999, “a tale of wrongful conviction that played a part in the end of the Illinois death penalty,” the paper says.

Last fall, however, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez overturned the murder conviction of the man, Alstory Simon, who took Porter’s place in prison, saying Protess’s team “tainted this case from the outset” with its coercive investigative tactics:

The film points to Paul Ciolino, a private investigator who worked on the case with Protess’ team, as having convinced Simon to agree to videotape a false confession with a promise of financial compensation and a reduced prison sentence. Simon says in the film he was intimidated into following the investigator’s orders.

Ciolino calls that “patently false” and said he refused to participate in the film.

While Simon was still in prison when the filmmakers interviewed him, he wasted little time in seeking justice after his release, 15 years into a 37-year sentence.

protess.TheDailyNorthwestern.screenshot

Half-assed work by a journalism class

Co-director Shawn Rech says he became convinced by interviews with detectives, lawyers and witnesses that the journalism class “failed to seek real evidence proving Simon’s guilt,” and instead trumpeted the videotaped confession in the media:

“These reporters didn’t even take the time to pull a police report,” Rech said. “They would have seen that this was all wrong.”

Protess, the journalism professor who led the project, was actually “barred from teaching his investigative journalism class in 2011 due to accusations in a separate case that he doctored emails and withheld documents from prosecutors,” the Daily reports.

Rech told the Daily he can’t figure out why Northwestern hasn’t looked into previous investigations by Protess, now president of the Chicago Innocence Center, for other red flags. (The school declined to comment.)

The temptation of a happy ending

There’s often a sense of despair among journalists about whether anything we do actually makes a difference.

Yet it horrifies me to think that the crowning achievement of these Medill students – who were probably not much older than our own student writers at The College Fix – is sending an innocent man to prison in their quest to exonerate another man.

Perhaps some of them, now well into their careers, are questioning whether they rushed to judgment or suppressed their doubts, whether they blindly trusted their leader because his crusade was noble and just.

The pursuit of a happy ending – a narrative that wraps up everything with a neat little bow – is intoxicating. It’s what powers Hollywood. It’s what made the ending of The Sopranos so frustrating. We want closure.

But, if I may speak in cliches, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And it’s not journalists who are walking it when we play savior.

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IMAGE: A Murder in the Park trailer screenshot/YouTube, The Daily Northwestern screenshot

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About the Author
Associate Editor
Greg Piper served as associate editor of The College Fix from 2014 to 2021.