Part 2: A career teetering on a bottle
In the early 1980s, Dick Cunningham and his fellow lawyers at the State Appellate Defender's Office had a tradition called Thursday Night Drinking. They would leave their offices in the...
All Stories
Part 1: The news spreads on Death Row
Prologue On a courtroom bench, Dick Cunningham looked like any other lawyer. He wore a nice suit that blended in with all the suits around him. But if you looked...
When jail is no alibi in murders
Early on a December morning in 1992, a 17-year-old gang member named Daniel Taylor sat in a windowless police interrogation room and confessed to a double murder committed two weeks...
Officers ignore laws set up to guard kids
Putting pressure to confess on the most vulnerable of suspects, police in Chicago and Cook County have repeatedly flouted the law while interrogating juveniles, disregarding decades-old safeguards and building murder...
Veteran detective’s murder cases unravel
He has obtained a confession from a man who, records show, was in jail when the murder occurred. He has obtained a confession from a man accused of two murders,...
Veteran detective’s murder cases unravel
He has obtained a confession from a man who, records show, was in jail when the murder occurred. He has obtained a confession from a man accused of two murders,...
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. In the first...
Secret evidence bill raises concerns
Since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration has urged Congress to expand the Justice Department's authority to detain and deport suspected terrorists. But the government...
Laws could get tougher on criminals
Last week's terrorist attacks have reverberated across the country's criminal justice system, leading to the postponement of some executions and trials, the suspension of filing deadlines, an increase in law-enforcement...
U.S. tries to walk fine line between security, ethnic bias
In a country with a history of racial profiling--where Pennsylvania police once directed banks to photograph suspicious black customers and where New Jersey's police superintendent linked race to criminal behavior--the...