A Path to Exoneration for the Wrongly Convicted

A former Chicago police officer has been accused of framing over 50 people for murder throughout his time as a detective. Several of the defendants in his cases have had their convictions overturned, but even now, roughly a dozen men remain incarcerated based on his dubious police work. Dozens more still have murder convictions on their records.

In this extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft in May 2022 — the National Fellows Program newsletter — New America National Fellow Melissa Segura previews her forthcoming book, based on her BuzzFeed series “Broken Justice in Chicago." Here she details the misconduct in this case further — expanding on policing, race relations, and the role of investigative journalism. Sign up for The Fifth Draft to hear how the best storytellers find ideas that change the world.

Your Fellows project will be a book based on your award-winning BuzzFeed News series “Broken Justice in Chicago.” What do you plan to expand on in the book?

The series mainly explained what happened: That a Chicago detective framed more than 50 people for murders they say they didn’t commit. Simply explaining the machinations of that scandal demanded so much of our readers. I figured the book format would expand to ask why and how the responsible parties and institutions failed to stop the largest framing scandal in American history. But my characters showed me this story is about so much more. Particularly, they showed how the criminal court system has mostly been run by men but fixed by women. Specifically, women of color. Secondly, the book seeks to expand the white/Black paradigm in criminal justice discussions to include Latinos. So little research explores Latino-police relations even though what little we do know shows that Latinos are disproportionately shot by police and are the least likely to have their murders solved.

Your original reporting led to the exoneration of wrongly convicted people. What goals do you have for the book, policy, or otherwise?

Roughly a dozen men remain incarcerated based on the police work of this discredited detective. Dozens more have completed their sentences and still have “convicted murderer” show up on background searches when applying for jobs and apartments. Prosecutors, though, continue to fight exonerating most of these cases. On the most simplistic level, I’d hope that even more reporting will ease the path to exoneration for those convicted under dubious at best, preposterous at worst, police and prosecutorial practices.

On a structural level, I’m aiming to help readers think through the questions they should be asking of their own police departments and district attorneys. Are best practices used for lineups? What’s the complaint process like for police? How do prosecutors treat jailhouse informant testimony?

On a narrative level, I’d also like to highlight the invisible work that’s been done for decades by mothers, sisters, daughters, and aunts of those incarcerated.

“They showed how the criminal court system has mostly been run by men but fixed by women. Specifically, women of color.”

Before joining BuzzFeed News, you were a staff writer with Sports Illustrated (SI). While with SI, your writing was groundbreaking. What was your personal philosophy on deciding what stories to write?

Though I’m not conscious of it, there’s a two-step approach that I take — or at least I think I do — with story selection. The first is instinct. What is it that I read or heard or saw that I can’t stop thinking about? Sometimes it’s a stat that will shock me. Or, as in the case with what became the Chicago series, it was a lawyer telling me about a case he’d been working on pro bono for 20 years. 20 years. The motivating question was, “What was it about this case that held his attention for so long?”

After that visceral connection, I ask myself two questions to help frame stories, particularly investigations. First, what’s the harm? Second, who’s accountable? It’s a trick I learned from former BuzzFeed News Editor-in-Chief Mark Schoofs that’s helped my focus stories.

What role do you think investigative reporting plays in today’s media landscape filled with hot takes and Twitter?

This is a question that needs two categories:

The real: With a global pandemic, a climate crisis, widening inequality, crumbling democracies, and massive disinformation campaigns, the value of original reporting is immeasurable. Holding power to account and providing rich, accurate information to readers so that they may make informed decisions matters as much as ever.

The real according to news executives: With a global pandemic, a climate crisis, widening inequality, crumbling democracies, and massive disinformation campaigns, the value of original reporting is immeasurable. But it’s really expensive. Too expensive. So let’s slash our reporting budgets and, instead, heap huge salaries on people who can opine about the news instead. After all, that’s still much cheaper than paying for travel and logistics and the time needed to dig deeply into what’s happening.

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