Focus on justice, not students

One has to wonder whether the tactic taken by the Cook County state's attorney against a group of journalism students is intended to verify their work or to end it.

The students, members of the highly regarded Innocence Project at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, published a year ago a Web report claiming that Anthony McKinney of Harvey has spent the past three decades in prison for a murder he did not commit. The report cited an extensive investigation, including video and audio taped interviews as well as conversations with people who would speak only if they were not identified. At least one eyewitness recanted his testimony and he and another witness stated they were offered money "and other inducements" to testify against McKinney.

As a result of the young journalists' work, Northwestern's Center for Wrongful Convictions sought and won a post-conviction reconsideration of McKinney's case. In the course of the legal process, the Cook County's prosecutor's office sought, as is common in any murder case, a broad range of information from the students - and then introduced a new and chilling wrinkle.

Not only did prosecutors want the background on which the journalism students based their report, it also wanted transcripts of their grades, notes they had written to each other and e-mails exchanged about the case with their professor. They issued a subpoena the students are fighting. A hearing is scheduled next Tuesday.

What, one may well wonder, can such things have to do with whether or not Anthony McKinney shot security guard Donald Lundahl in his car in 1978?

Prosecutors suggest they speak to the state of mind of the students. If the students were guaranteed a better grade for "proving" McKinney innocent, they contend, the nature of their investigation could be compromised. Additionally, they say, they just want all the information they can get on a person who may be serving time for a crime he may not have committed.

But the students have turned over everything that's relevant to their investigation. They've given prosecutors documents they've uncovered as well as audio and video tapes for work published online. Surely prosecutors have enough material to conduct their own thorough investigation. Instead, they seem committed to quibbling over whether students are journalists covered by state and federal shield laws, a specious question easily answered in the students' favor.

If Anthony McKinney, now 49, did not commit murder in 1978, he already has spent nearly two-thirds of his life in prison wrongfully. Prolonging such an injustice with procedural wrangling is shameful in its own right, but pressuring students with no apparent motive beyond either demeaning their work or discouraging others from pursuing it just adds to the injury. It threatens not only journalism education, but journalism itself.

The Cook County state's attorney's office should turn its attention away from the grades of a few journalism students and toward the evidence they've uncovered about yet another Illinois murder convict who may be innocent.