Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In 2008 he petitioned criminal court judge Diane Cannon for a hearing to consider new evidence, much of it developed by the Medill Innocence Project. What followed wasn’t really about McKinney. Alvarez made it about how the Medill students and their professor, David Protess, developed that evidence. The upshot was a scandal in which Northwestern University turned against Protess; he left Medill, the Innocence Project was overhauled, and McKinney languished in prison—for the rest of his life, it’s turned out.
In 2008 Alvarez subpoenaed Protess and Medill for, among other things, the students’ “notes, memoranda, reports and summaries.” In 2010, two years later, the various parties to the McKinney petition gathered in Cannon’s courtroom—but not to discuss whether McKinney would get a new trial. “This is not [that] hearing,” said Cannon. “They’re responding to respondents to respondents to motions to amendments to motions to responses. We’re nowhere near a hearing, to my dismay.”
There’s been no response yet to a request for comment from Anita Alvarez.
