More On The Battle Between The Cook County State's Attorney's Office And Northwestern University's Medill Innocence Project
The February 2010 issue of Chicago magazine contains an article "The Professor and the Prosecutor: Anita Alvarez's office turns up the heat on David Protess's Medill Innocence Project" that discusses the ongoing battle over the subpoena that the Cook County State's Attorney's Office has served on the Medill Innocence Project. The main issue in the dispute is whether the students in Protess's class were acting as reporters. The article quotes Alvarez stating: "These students wrote no newspaper story on this case, they wrote no magazine articles. . . What is the purpose of this particular class? . . . The whole purpose of this was to gather information for court, to gather information that they believe is going to exonerate someone." The article also quotes DuPage County state's attorney Joseph Birkett: "If you are working on an investigation and are assembling evidence for a team of lawyers, I'm sorry, you may be a journalist, but in that scenario you are an investigator, and the journalistic privilege is not going to apply." A court hearing on the dispute will be heard later this month by circuit court judge Diane Gordon Cannon.
