2019 Azbee Awards of Excellence

Category

Print > Impact/Investigative > Upper Midwest

Awarded to

Kevin Davis, assistant managing editor

Entry details

Under Questioning: The Chicago Police Legacy of extracting false confessions is costing the city millions

Issue date (if applicable): 7/1/2018
Publication name: ABA Journal
Publishing company: American Bar Association
Website home page: www.abajournal.com

Please describe the publication's mission and readership:

The ABA Journal is the largest legal magazine in the country. In print and online, the Journal covers the trends, the influencers and the dynamics contributing to a fast-changing legal profession. Readership includes the more than 400,000 members of the American Bar Association and readers of abajournal.com, which is available for free to the public.

Please describe the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

Buried among thousands of pages of court documents, trial transcripts, depositions and police reports, were written confessions from four teenagers who said they were responsible for a double murder in Chicago in 1995. All four went to prison, and it took 20 years of appeals for the truth to come out. Lawyers proved that detectives obtained those so-called confessions through threats and intimidation, and the four were finally exonerated.

Kevin Davis unravels how police extracted those wrongful confessions and lays out a powerful narrative of how the Chicago Police developed a legacy of forcing false confessions for decades. Davis reveals that the city has paid out more than $500 million to settle lawsuits related to false confessions and police misconduct.

Using data from the National Registry of Exonerations, Davis was able to show that Chicago has led the nation in false confession cases for nearly 30 years. In addition to reviewing the confessions, along with other documents and data, Davis tracked downed some of those who spent time in prison due to false confessions, and writes of the human toll it took on them. He also interviewed prosecutors, defense lawyers and experts to provide insight and perspective on this troubling trend in a city where mistrust of the police has been an enduring problem.

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