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.”

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