Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, Part Two. Texas Monthly, December 2012. This is Part Two of a two-part story. Part One was published in November 2012. “During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who had killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.”
November 1, 2012
The Innocent Man, Part One
Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, Part One.Texas Monthly, November 2012. This is Part One of a two-part story. Part Two was published in December 2012. “On August 13, 1986, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed. His nightmare had only begun.”
December 16, 2001
Chicago Tribune Watchdog Investigation: Cops and Confessions. Chicago police substitute interrogation for thorough investigation
Ken Armstrong, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley, Tribune Watchdog Investigation: Cops and Confessions. Chicago Tribune, 16 December 2001. 6-Part Series, December 2001-January 2002. Part 1: Coercive and illegal tactics torpedo scores of Cook County murder cases. “Substituting interrogation for thorough investigation, police in Chicago and Cook County have repeatedly closed murder cases with dubious confessions that imprison the innocent while killers go free.” Part 2: Veteran detective’s murder cases unravel. “Some statements cop has extracted stand out for way they fall through.” Part 3: Officers ignore laws set up to guard kids. “Detectives grill minors without juvenile officers or parents present.” Part 4: When jail is no alibi in murders. “Just as [Daniel Taylor] was going to be formally charged with two counts of murder [to which he had previously confessed], Taylor protested to detectives that he could not have committed the crimes because he had been in police custody when they occurred.” Part 5: DNA voids murder confession. By Kirsten Scharnberg and Steve Mills. “In the first case of a videotaped murder confession unraveling in Cook County, a man who was recorded saying he stabbed his mother was freed on Friday after DNA tests linked another man to the crime.” Part 6: Cops urged to tape their interrogations. By Steve Mills and Michael Higgins. “Chicago videotapes only confessions.”
Winner of the 2001 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.
November 14, 1999
Justice Derailed: Capital Punishment in Illinois
Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills, Justice Derailed. Chicago Tribune, 14 November 1999. 5-Part Series in November 1999. Part 1: Death Row justice derailed. “Capital punishment in Illinois is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken, a Tribune investigation has found.” Part 2: Inept defenses cloud verdict. “Since Illinois reinstated capital punishment in 1977, 26 Death Row inmates…have received a new trial or sentencing because their attorneys’ incompetence rendered the verdict or sentence unfair, court records show.” Part 3: The jailhouse informant. “Even prosecutors acknowledge that jailhouse informants are among the least reliable of witnesses. Yet in Illinois, at least 46 inmates have been sent to Death Row in cases where prosecutors used a jailhouse informant, according to a Tribune investigation that examined the 285 death-penalty cases since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977.” Part 4: A tortured path to Death Row. ” For police and prosecutors, few pieces of evidence close a case better than a confession. After all, juries place a remarkable degree of faith in confessions; few people can imagine suspects would admit guilt if they were innocent. But, in Illinois, confessions have proved faulty.” Part 5: Convicted by a hair. “[O]ver the last decade or so, hair-comparison evidence has been exposed as notoriously untrustworthy.”