Allisha Azlan and Rachel Fobar, The Medill Justice Project

Q:                    I told you about my project, but I wanted to get your opinion about criminal justice reform from a wrongful conviction standpoint. Can you both tell me a little bit about your job?

R:                     I have worked here for [almost] two years. The Medill Justice Project is journalism center that investigates wrongful convictions. We look at cases where the person may have been wrongfully convicted and at general criminal justice issues. For example, we looked at accountability laws and three strikes law, women in prison, and death penalty. And I focus more on the writing, so I work on my own projects and I help edit the students' written stories both for summer interns and also the class.

Q:                    What's the class?

R:                     10 Northwestern students look into a potentially wrongful conviction case every quarter and they spent 10 weeks going through records and doing interviews and usually they go to the prison to meet the inmate and meet their family and meet and interview prosecutors and police and anyone involved in the case. And then they work on some sort of final product like a written story or a video. We fact check for a while which is pretty intense, and then we publish the project on our website.

Q:                    Allisha, do you have anything to add?

A:                    I've been working here almost three years and I focus more on the multimedia projects at MJP.

Q:                    For you what does criminal justice reform look like?

A:                    We do a lot of research into systematic flaws in the criminal justice system. In an ideal world, criminal justice reform would address those flaws. I think what this country really needs to focus on when it comes to putting people in prison is rehab and programs and trying to acknowledge that these people made terrible, terrible mistakes. But I think focusing on punishment and punitive measures is not the best way to a better society. I think the only way we can address these big flaws in the criminal justice system is to think about criminal justice in a different way, instead of punishment focusing more on rehab and programs. I think that I want to take back my first answer when you asked about criminal justice reform because I think that's it. I think it's, people have to change the way they see criminal justice in order for that to be reformed.

R:                     I agree with this.

R:                     Also something we've seen looking at wrongful conviction is that it's hard to address these issues after they've been convicted. It's really hard to reverse a conviction so I think trying to address a lot of the things that Allisha was talking about before they're convicted would be good. In trials sometimes, it seems like more like guilty until proven innocent, even though it's supposed to be the other way around. Having a less adversarial system where they actually are trying to figure out if a person did it and not trying to win.

Q:                    Going into a case, how do you teach students or show students that they can't go into the case with a bias?

R:                     It’s hard to not be biased because journalists are people too, but it's important to not be biased or else no one would listen to what we have to say because they just think of us as advocates so I think it's important to remind students of that, if they are convinced and no one can convince them this person did it then they're going to ignore certain facts that are important.

A:                    I think always emphasizing to not just speak to the defense side. We want to talk to everybody who was involved and we do that by making the students come up with a cast of characters list which includes the prosecutors, the judge, the jury, people from the victim's family or from the prisoner's family so it's not just talking to the defense attorney and the prisoner, we're talking to everybody who is involved in the case. So, once they come up with that list, we get students to talk to literally everyone on that list, try and contact them, try and get their side of the story. And then what we do at the end is put all of that together and highlight any questions or issues in the prisoners’ case. But we really try and talk to everybody in a case and I think that's how we show that we're not biased by reporting all sides of the story.

Q:                    How did you become passionate about these issues? How did you become an advocate?

A:                    I think we should establish that we're not advocates. We don't advocate for the prisoner at MJP. We try and tell the truth. We're not lawyers, were journalists, we're not saying this guy is innocent and he has to be out. We're saying that look at all of the questions surrounding his case and is it fair for him to still be in prison? Those are the kind of questions we're asking.

R:                      I think I got interested in criminal justice by taking the class. I was an undergrad here myself and I didn't know a lot about criminal justice or mass incarceration or prison. And then I took the class and Kate Parker, the charges were dropped against her. She was wrongfully accused of medical child abuse. Seeing that it really does happen even though you think it would only happen once in a million, but I think it really opened my eyes to how big of a problem it is.

Q:                    I think you just talked about this with Kate Parker but Allisha is there anyone that you've worked with that's changed your views on the system?

A:                    I think just talking to every inmate that we've done a case on, talking to them on the phone or meeting them in person has definitely affected how I view the criminal justice system. You know a lot of them, when they were convicted they were so young, some of them were 17, 18 when the crime happened. And then meeting them now decades later, they had a family and they're not able to see that family anymore. And seeing them, they really are at the bottom of the bottom. And knowing that they might not have even done the crime but they're in the lowest rung of society for no reason is very, very troubling to me.

Q:                    Before we conclude is there anything else that you think I should know about the criminal justice system as I'm studying criminal justice reform?

R:                     I think that you know there's this misconception out there that criminals are all bad people even if they did it or especially if they actually did it. And that's probably a misconception that I had also before working here and people I grew up with probably had that misconception, too. But I don't think we should throw people away or count them as terrible people.

Q:                    And how many letters do we get a day, like five to seven letters a day?

R:                     Right, it doesn't mean that they're bad people.

Q:                    They are people.

R:                     Even if they've done something terrible, exactly. And I, in an interview I did one time some guy said, “Oh how would you like to be labeled by the worst thing you've ever done?” We call these people murderers but if you think of the worst thing you've ever done, I would not like to be labeled as that for like the rest of my life.