Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Yes, but once a man’s been convicted of murder it doesn’t matter nearly as much whether he actually did it. Not to our justice system it doesn’t. At that point American justice becomes more interested in protecting its own dignity than in righting a wrong done some stiff who got a fair trial even if the jury reached the wrong verdict.
A few days ago I wrote about the death of Anthony McKinney, 53, who’d been in prison since 1978 for the murder of a security guard named Donald Lundahl. In 2008 McKinney petitioned the courts for a hearing on new evidence that he was innocent; he died five years later still waiting for that hearing. State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez had decided it was less urgent to examine the case for McKinney than to examine the conduct of the team that had been putting it together since 2003—students of the Medill Innocence Project and their professor, David Protess.
That’s not a typo—2004, four years before McKinney’s lawyers filed his petition. Justice creeps.
