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Death Penalty Controversy
"The day of my arrest is something that's unforgettable—one of the officers
said, '...you're gonna fry.'"
For years, Dennis Williams lived on death row, just 25 feet away from the electric chair. If not for DNA testing and the hard work of a journalism professor and his students, Dennis would be dead today. In 1978, a white suburban Chicago couple was found dead after being kidnapped and shot at point-blank range. After receiving an anonymous tip, the police arrested four young black men, including Dennis Williams. Prosecutors charged the four men with murder, even though they had no real physical evidence. Although Dennis maintained his innocence, he was tried and convicted, and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. In jail, his cell was only yards away from the execution chamber, a constant reminder of his sentence. Dennis got a new lawyer and a second trial, but in 1987 he was again sentenced to death. He lost all faith in the legal system, but he refused to stop fighting for his freedom. Across town at Northwestern University, journalism professor David Protess gave his students an assignment—to find the truth. According to Protess, "The case involving Dennis Williams was the worst miscarriage of justice in Illinois history. You had police misconduct, you had prosecutors more interested in securing convictions than finding the truth, you had defense ineptitude." A mere month into their investigation, Protess' students uncovered the key piece of evidence that defense attorneys had overlooked. At the bottom of a box, they found a street file showing that within a week of the crime the police knew who the real killers were, but they buried that information. A DNA test exonerated Dennis and the other men, and after 18 years on death row, they were finally free. For Dennis, justice came belatedly—his original lawyer was disbarred, an inmate who was an informant admitted he lied, and the real killers confessed on tape to the journalism students. Even today, Dennis still doesn't feel completely free. He never leaves the house without calling someone, so that he has an alibi. It continues to amaze him that "a journalism professor got more justice in this case than anybody in law enforcement ever had the courage to get." Larry Marshall, of The Center on Wrongful Convictions, worked on Dennis' case. He continues to fight for death penalty reform. 
Is our justice system broken?
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