Professor David Protess says the "overwhelming majority" of the roughly 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States committed the crimes for which they are jailed.

"The system works fairly well," said Protess, director of the Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern University.

But consider the percentages. If 10 percent of those people are innocent, that's 230,000 innocent people -- mostly men and disproportionately minorities -- incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.

Since 1992, Protess has guided Northwestern journalism students through investigations of possible wrongful convictions. Protess and the students have helped free 11 demonstrably innocent men from jail, five of them from death row. Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan cited Protess and the students when he imposed a moratorium on executions, then permanently stayed the pending executions of more than 150 death row inmates in 2003.

The Medill Innocence Project -- the one working on the case of Gary's Willie T. Donald -- is affiliated with the national Innocence Project. But the Northwestern chapter is one of only a few projects that use student journalists instead of law students. Protess finds witnesses, police and lawyers in the case respond more openly to "young and bright-eyed" journalists than they might to briefcase-wielding lawyers or law students.

"I was delighted to see how terrific they were. It seemed to come natural to them," Protess said.

High-profile lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld founded the national project in 1992, near the dawn of forensic DNA testing, and chapters have formed across the country to pick through innocence claims. Protess' pre-existing innocence investigation project joined the national group in 1999.

Project chapters have freed hundreds of people who did not commit the crimes for which they were convicted -- which does not mean everyone freed is harmless, just innocent in the specific instance. This distinction became clear in Wisconsin in 2005, when Steven Avery, a man freed by the project after years in jail for a rape he didn't commit, subsequently murdered and mutilated a woman.

That case didn't shake Protess' commitment to the cause, because he sees his project's goal as the journalistic excavation of the objective truth. Sometimes the investigations don't lead to the tearful uplift of winning an innocent prisoner's freedom.

"If it leads us to your guilt, we will disclose that," Protess said.

Of the 11 men freed through the Medill project, none has committed a violent post-exoneration offense, Protess said. One man went back to jail for a drug crime, Protess said. Two of the men died young of ailments that went insufficiently treated in prison, he said.

The Medill projects gets about 1,500 requests for help each year, Protess said.

Protess said the many exonerations in the Chicago area should be credited to aggressive scrutiny by his group and other advocates for innocent inmates.

"There is a more active public interest community that serves as a watchdog," he said.

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