- Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Media
- Could Anthony Porter be guilty after all?
The abolition of the death penalty in Illinois is a story that goes back to the moment a bewildered governor, George Ryan, watching TV at home in 1999, saw Anthony Porter released from prison into the arms of a Medill professor and a handful of students. Ryan said to his wife, “How the hell does that happen? How does an innocent man sit on death row for 15 years and get no relief?”
On the other hand, Protess’s investigator in the Porter-Simon matter, Paul Ciolino, has nothing to say. Ciolino has been accused of tricking Simon into a guilty plea, in part by telling him Protess intended to parlay the Porter saga into a movie deal that would make everyone rich. I asked Ciolino about this three years ago, when he was chattier.
And then there are Ekl and Sotos themselves, a couple of attorneys not normally identified with the little guy manhandled by the man. (For years Sotos represented police torturer Jon Burge.) In a column last October I passed along nomenclature I thought might be helpful: the “innocence industry” (Protess and company) and the “guilty-no-matter-what-anyone-says camp” (Ekl, Sotos, and company). Much more than Simon and Porter divide these factions. In Illinois, a long list of cases makes us wonder whether the highest legal principle is that everyone’s innocent until proven guilty or guilty until proven innocent, and sometimes not even then. Viewpoints clash.
