The National Law Journal interviews Rob Warden, director of Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Conviction, as he prepares to retire. "Four Decades and 60 Exonerations Later…," is the title of this must-read conducted by Karen Sloan.
The National Law Journal: You’re a journalist and not a lawyer, so how did you initially get involved in investigating wrongful convictions?
Rob Warden: The whole innocence movement was really started by journalists—lawyers weren’t paying much attention. I’m proud of the fact that I happened to be one of the first. I had been an investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent and editor, in various capacities, at the Chicago Daily News. I later worked for The Washington Post. Then I had the opportunity to start a legal publication called the Chicago Lawyer.
This was in the aftermath of Watergate, and it had occurred to me that investigative reporting had focused heavily on the executive and legislative branches, but not on the third branch. Even though everything is recorded, it seemed to me that somehow it is the least accessible to the general public. I set out with Chicago Lawyer in 1978 to investigate wrongful convictions, which I had sort of known were a serious problem that had been overlooked.
NLJ: How did the Center on Wrongful Convictions come about?
Warden: In the years when I was editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer, we exposed almost 20 wrongful convictions, including those of six people who had been on death row and were ultimately exonerated. Through that capacity, I had developed relationships with people at Northwestern University, principally professor Lawrence Marshall, who was interested in these cases. We worked together and we started a conference in 1998. It was called the National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty.
We brought to a single stage at Northwestern 29 people who had been exonerated and released from death rows around the country. It really was kind of an amazing event. I remember sitting there with my wife, and there was a jam-packed auditorium and people giving a standing ovation to people who had been exonerated in cases where they had been sentenced to death. I thought, “Hey, we can abolish the death penalty.” And we basically went from there. The Center on Wrongful Convictions was an outgrowth of that conference.
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