Willie T. “Timmy” Donald, who was convicted of murder in 1992, used to think he had good friends at the Medill School of Journalism. But now associate dean Mary Nesbitt won’t even answer his letters. I respect her position but have more sympathy for his.
Early this year he wrote two letters to Nesbitt. “Since 2009, no progress has been made,” said the first. (Donald provided me with copies.) “I would like to move forward so I have decided to go in another direction. . . . I feel comfortable working with Mr. Protess and I would like him to continue to work on my case. I’m giving the Medill Innocence Project permission to hand over my files to Mr. Protess.”
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Donald’s troubles date to the night of February 27, 1992, when Gary, Indiana, was hammered by five armed robberies—all believed at first to have been committed by the same gunman, a man described as having an acne-scarred face. One victim, Bernard Jimenez, was accosted in his driveway with his fiancee and young children, and when he resisted he was shot to death.
The Medill Innocence Project shared court documents with Times of Northwest Indiana reporter Sarah Tompkins—an Innocence Project alum who’d become aware of Donald’s case while working on an unrelated case for Protess. Tompkins wrote several stories on Donald and, like Serritella, made a video of Williams repudiating her identification of Donald.
“Our whole family has formed a relationship with this gentle, sad man, who had his hopes raised by the Medill students and staff, and cannot understand how he is quite suddenly abandoned without any communication from Northwestern,” wrote David Lynch. “I am writing to appeal to you to find a way to release his file so that his attorney and team can continue to work on this case. I understand there are legal concerns, but I think they should be over-ridden in this case by a moral imperative not to let this injustice, which has already gone on much too long, continue.”
Apparently she did not.
The project’s director, Alec Klein, writes in a letter to the Reader: “We are not advocates. That is the job of lawyers and legal clinics.”
