Medill students' findings, not motives, important

Technically, you do not need a degree in journalism to be a journalist. Student journalists across the country are doing quality work and should be treated the same as their professional colleagues. But, lately, that hasn’t been the case.

Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism Innocence Project is a group of students working to free those wrongfully convicted under the legal system. They might be only students, but if being from one of the most prestigious journalism schools in the country doesn’t carry enough credibility, their track record speaks for itself: 11 men exonerated, five of whom were on death row.

But they’ve hit a snag in their latest case. The group is attempting to prove the innocence of Anthony McKinney, who was given a life sentence in 1982 on murder and robbery charges.

Two witnesses recently have stepped forward to claim that students flirted with them and gave them money for their testimonials. And suddenly prosecutors have stopped looking at the evidence the students collected and begun to scrutinize the students themselves. Prosecutors have gone so far as to subpoena the students’ grades, claiming they are looking for evidence the students only were interested in McKinney’s innocence to ace their classes — as if the motivation for the students uncovering evidence is more important than the implication of the evidence itself.

It’s true that looking to exonerate someone with only a 4.0 in mind might not be very ethical, but if the information alone is enough to bring justice after 31 years behind bars, then the students’ grades need to be taken out the of equation.

And while prosecutors sit shuffling through binders of information and in boxes of e-mails and other items taken under subpoena by the prosecutors, McKinney’s freedom hangs in the balance.

Such an investigation of journalists wouldn’t be allowed under Illinois’s shield laws, which state that unless the information is essential to public security and all other related sources of information have been exhausted, reporters have the right to keep information about their sources private. Prosecutors, however, claim the law doesn’t protect students.

Although the charges officially are against Northwestern University and the prosecution has been trying to label the students as an investigative agency, the shield law of Illinois gives the title of reporter to anyone who “regularly engaged in the business of collecting, writing or editing news for publication through a news medium on a full-time or part-time basis.”

In the meantime, professors fear students will become discouraged from joining not only Medill’s Innocence Project, but more than 50 similar projects all across the country. Overall, these groups have saved hundreds of people wrongly convicted of crimes, and never before have students involved in an investigation had to hand over personal information.

The prosecution should not be spending so much time and energy scrutinizing the students while the possibility exists that an innocent man is behind bars.

They’re wasting time. Justice already has been postponed for McKinney for 31 years. Now is the time for the evidence to speak for itself.