As the director of the Medill Innocence Project, I am writing in response to Michael Miner’s article, “The age of innocence is over: Did Willie Donald do it? The Medill Innocence Project no longer cares,” published May 29, 2012.
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How Miner reached the conclusion that the Medill Innocence Project doesn’t care about freeing the innocent is astounding because I’ve never met Miner in person and have spoken to him by telephone maybe three times in my life for a total of about 30 minutes. It’s fair to say Miner has no idea what we do at the Medill Innocence Project on a daily basis; he’s never asked and we’ve never discussed it. What’s more, Miner never gave me a chance to respond to his sweeping statement that the Medill Innocence Project doesn’t care about freeing the innocent. As a journalist at the Washington Post and elsewhere for more than 20 years, I firmly believe it is not only common practice but essential—out of fairness—to allow your profile subjects to respond.
The work on the Donald case was done a few years ago under the direction of a different instructor, who now runs the Chicago Innocence Project, which is of course free to continue the investigation. Medill is not preventing anyone from taking up the investigation. The Reader could do so, if it wished. Indeed, The Times of Northwest Indiana has already published extensively on the case and did not release its work product related to the Willie Donald case, and yet Miner didn’t take issue with that.
