Rob Warden

Rob Warden
Born (1940-11-24) November 24, 1940 (age 83)
Carthage, Missouri
Occupation(s)Co-director, Injustice Watch; Executive Director emeritus, Center on Wrongful Convictions; American Journalist
Websiteinjusticewatch.org

Rob Warden is a Chicago legal affairs journalist and co-founder of three organizations dedicated to exonerating the innocent and reforming criminal justice: the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of California-Irvine, and Injustice Watch, a non-partisan, not-for-profit, journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality.[1] As an investigative journalist in the 1970s, he began focusing on death penalty cases, which led to a career exposing and publicizing the injustices and misconduct in the legal system.[2] Warden's work was instrumental in the blanket commutation of death row cases in Illinois in 2003 and in the abolition of the Illinois death penalty in 2011.[3][4][5]

Warden has done pioneering research work in the field of wrongful convictions that has paved the way for widespread changes in criminal justice practices, including changes in interrogation methods, in eyewitness identification procedures as well as exposing the over-reliance by prosecutors of jailhouse informants and false confessions.[6][7] Warden is also the author of several books on wrongful conviction cases.

  1. ^ "Injustice Watch: Mission". InjusticeWatch.org. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  2. ^ "Rob Warden papers, 1972-1989". Explore Chicago Collections. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  3. ^ "Change of Subject: A toast to all who wrote the death-penalty abolition story". blogs.chicagotribune.com. Retrieved 2018-10-10.
  4. ^ Wilgoren, Jodi (14 October 2002). "Illinois Moves to Center Of Death Penalty Debate". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  5. ^ Wilgoren, Jodi (12 January 2003). "Citing Issue of Fairness, Governor Clears Out Death Row in Illinois". The New York Times. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  6. ^ "Jailhouse Snitches: The Ticks on the Underbelly of the Criminal Justice System - The Davenport Firm APLC". www.davenportfirm.com. Retrieved 2018-10-11.
  7. ^ Warden, Rob (Winter 1988). "Consequences of False Confessions: Deprivations of Liberty and Miscarriages of Justice in the Age of Psychological Interrogation". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. 88 (2): 429–496. doi:10.2307/1144288. JSTOR 1144288 – via Scholarlycommons at Northwestern School of Law.