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A. I believe it was ‘98 or ‘99. I was in Menard and I was watching WGN news. There was a case. This guy, his name was Anthony Porter, and he was speaking about his case in regard to DNA evidence; he was exonerated. And I re- member when I went to call my mother when I was able to make a phone call, and she was already on top of it. She said, “I’m like, I saw this guy on the news. He was, you know, he was wrongfully convicted.” She was like, “Yeah, I saw that. I sent you the information. And I started writing, I believe it was David Protess at that time, the professor; and I started writing Northwestern then...”
Q. And when did you...when did Mr. Protess write you back?
A. I got letters over the years, you know, saying that they had a large caseload and that they had record of it and that they would get back with me.
So the exoneration of Anthony Porter, now being de- constructed as a possible fraud in federal court, was, according to Swift, the case that rallied Swift’s resolve to press his wrongful conviction bid? And the first person he communicated with, and apparently communicated fre- quently with, was Northwestern Professor David Protess?
Shouldn’t this fact alone compel any entity looking at the Englewood Four case as a wrongful conviction, whether prosecutors, city attorneys, or the media, to also be looking at it as a possible wrongful exoneration?
What kind of scrutiny would be applied to a case had it been investigated by a so-called “Burge” detective?
Swift’s testimony is another sign of how Anthony Por- ter’s 1999 exoneration from death row electrified the pris- on population. There was a belief among the inmates that if he could get out, anyone could.
Consider the statements of top El Rukn General Rick- ey Shaw, who describes in detail the impact of the Porter exoneration upon the prison population, and his belief that many guilty inmates used the same tactic to get out of prison.
The mounting evidence of a wrongful exoneration movement in Chicago compels the City and the media to review all cases for wrongdoing by the wrongful convic- tion crowd before any settlements are reached.
Here is why:
One of the accusations made against Protess and Northwestern in Simon’s federal lawsuit is that Protess obtained, or tried to obtain, false affidavits to support exonerations. In some of the cases in which misconduct is alleged by Simon’s attorneys, convicts and witnesses came forward with completely different stories after they began working with wrongful conviction representatives.
Doesn’t this sound similar to what happened in the case of new millionaire Terrill Swift in the Englewood Four case? d
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