In 2008 he petitioned criminal court judge Diane Cannon for a hearing to consider new evidence, much of it developed by the Medill Innocence Project. What followed wasn’t really about McKinney. Alvarez made it about how the Medill students and their professor, David Protess, developed that evidence. The upshot was a scandal in which Northwestern University turned against Protess; he left Medill, the Innocence Project was overhauled, and McKinney languished in prison—for the rest of his life, it’s turned out.
Here’s a column I wrote in 2011 that offers an overview of the dismal Alvarez-Protess-Northwestern saga.
In 2008 Alvarez subpoenaed Protess and Medill for, among other things, the students’ “notes, memoranda, reports and summaries.” In 2010, two years later, the various parties to the McKinney petition gathered in Cannon’s courtroom—but not to discuss whether McKinney would get a new trial. “This is not [that] hearing,” said Cannon. “They’re responding to respondents to respondents to motions to amendments to motions to responses. We’re nowhere near a hearing, to my dismay.”
Another year passed before I wrote my column, yet McKinney was still no closer to a hearing. By then Protess had left Medill, admitting to record keeping that was “sloppy as hell” while accusing Northwestern and its Center on Wrongful Convictions of trying to placate Alvarez instead of standing up to her. “Every time you yielded, the prosecutors have demanded something else,” Protess told me. “It’s the equivalent of trying to negotiate with terrorists. I’m speaking metaphorically here. When people are completely unreasonable, you cannot reach an adequate compromise.”