Every Cop in Chicago and Every Citizen of Chicago Should Support and Help Commander Glenn Evans

Much of recent history is now, practically speaking, unfalsifiable. Those who criticize the official narratives are fined or imprisoned. Free historical inquiry is dead; therefore, received historical narratives must be regarded with the same skepticism as ancient mythology or religious narratives. Anonymous from American Historical Association: James MacPherson defense of historical revisionism September 2003

History was always written by the victors and occasionally by people who valued the truth.  That came to a screeching halt in American universities in the 1970's.  That marked the rise of received historical narratives.  Simply put, the victory of Howard Zinn History - America is fundamentally wrong, racist, reactionary, sexist and priest ridden.

Take the Battle of Fort Dearborn Park in the south loop, as an example.  Recently, a Chicago Police Officer  was shot near the above mentioned park.  One of my neighbors, a CPD professional, remarked," Never heard of the Battle of Dearborn. Fort Dearborn Massacre, but no battle."  I agreed, but noted that  a small group of people determined that the word "Battle" was hurtful to John Low of Pokagon band of the Potowattomi Tribe and that the aggrieved demanded that history be erased and the hopelessly flawed Chicago Encylopedia's James Grossman could not be happier.

In the 1980s, the statue was acquired by the city, which moved it back to the neighborhood when the Prairie Avenue community began to be revitalized in the 1990s. Subsequently, it was again removed and placed in city storage, ostensibly to conserve it, where it remains.
The alderman's warning came true: Naming the park for Black Partridge was vetoed by various Native American organizations, including the American Indian Center. Once Black Partridge was out of the running, "Ft. Dearborn Massacre," wasn't a viable candidate.
"'Massacre' is such a judgmental word," Low said. "We discussed how, from another perspective, you might call it 'Victory Park.'"
Feldstein recalled the delicate negotiations it took to find a compromise acceptable to all parties.
"I got an unbelievable history lesson," she said
Others are less sure of what the lesson is. Grossman is pleased with the name change, from massacre to battle. He thinks it corrects a bias in the story of how the West was won -- and lost.
"If you look at standard texts, when the Indians win, it's a massacre," Grossman said. "But when the Americans win, it's a battle."
But Crimmins is troubled by the snub to Black Partridge -- and Chicago history, as he sees it.
"Historical revisionism typically takes heroes from the past and makes villains of them," Crimmins said. "As long as I write about it, I'm going to call it the Ft. Dearborn Massacre."

Remember that everything is for sale - Comiskey Park, Sears Tower, Chicago history, marriage.

Law Enforcement has been reduced to a yard sale, by revisionists and narrative architects.

Yesterday, one man fought back. Commander Glenn Evans filed suit against The City of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel's Independent Police Review Board (IPRB) and . . .my favorite . . .WBEZ.

The here you have the Leftist combine - Progressive politicians, appointed Good Government Citizens Blue Ribbon Activists and the Left Tilted Public Radio apparatus.

Commander Evans was lynched by people who see nooses everywhere as tools for public power and personal financial gain.  The so-called Innocence Industry pumps blood into print and fabricates compelling narrative doctrines to be blared from the pages of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times and screeched by panelists on WTTW, or WBEZ.  Lawyers apply the narratives while judge shopping and in preparing cases brought against police officers. Politicians pander and provide street cash for T-shirts and future Pfleger-ite marches.

Every Police Officer in this city run by clowns and grifters should line up to offer any and help to the lawyers of Glenn Evans. His small victory might prevent the continuing Star Chamber attacks on working people doing their jobs.

Most of all Chicago citizens should study the Glenn Evans case carefully and note the rhetorical flourishes throughout each article, news cast and statement by activists and politicians.  Make note of the similarities.  Make a time-line of events and paste in the characters involved, like the former cop disciplined by Commander Evans turned IPRB investigator and the WBEZ reporter playing David Protess.  Make note of a particularly damning article in DNAinfo Chicago. Draw your own conclusion.


Know this - Truth is tough and narratives are as easy as lying. A nice name for fiction.  There were not six Transgender Aztec Garment Workers putting up the flag on Iwo Jima - not yet anyway. Iwo Jima was not a property dispute, by the way.

Chicago owes much to Commander Glenn Evans

This was a the massacre of a Man's life. 

Every Cop in Chicago and Every Citizen of Chicago Should Support and Help Commander Glenn Evans

Much of recent history is now, practically speaking, unfalsifiable. Those who criticize the official narratives are fined or imprisoned. Free historical inquiry is dead; therefore, received historical narratives must be regarded with the same skepticism as ancient mythology or religious narratives. Anonymous from American Historical Association: James MacPherson defense of historical revisionism September 2003

History was always written by the victors and occasionally by people who valued the truth.  That came to a screeching halt in American universities in the 1970's.  That marked the rise of received historical narratives.  Simply put, the victory of Howard Zinn History - America is fundamentally wrong, racist, reactionary, sexist and priest ridden.

Take the Battle of Fort Dearborn Park in the south loop, as an example.  Recently, a Chicago Police Officer  was shot near the above mentioned park.  One of my neighbors, a CPD professional, remarked," Never heard of the Battle of Dearborn. Fort Dearborn Massacre, but no battle."  I agreed, but noted that  a small group of people determined that the word "Battle" was hurtful to John Low of Pokagon band of the Potowattomi Tribe and that the aggrieved demanded that history be erased and the hopelessly flawed Chicago Encylopedia's James Grossman could not be happier.

In the 1980s, the statue was acquired by the city, which moved it back to the neighborhood when the Prairie Avenue community began to be revitalized in the 1990s. Subsequently, it was again removed and placed in city storage, ostensibly to conserve it, where it remains.
The alderman's warning came true: Naming the park for Black Partridge was vetoed by various Native American organizations, including the American Indian Center. Once Black Partridge was out of the running, "Ft. Dearborn Massacre," wasn't a viable candidate.
"'Massacre' is such a judgmental word," Low said. "We discussed how, from another perspective, you might call it 'Victory Park.'"
Feldstein recalled the delicate negotiations it took to find a compromise acceptable to all parties.
"I got an unbelievable history lesson," she said
Others are less sure of what the lesson is. Grossman is pleased with the name change, from massacre to battle. He thinks it corrects a bias in the story of how the West was won -- and lost.
"If you look at standard texts, when the Indians win, it's a massacre," Grossman said. "But when the Americans win, it's a battle."
But Crimmins is troubled by the snub to Black Partridge -- and Chicago history, as he sees it.
"Historical revisionism typically takes heroes from the past and makes villains of them," Crimmins said. "As long as I write about it, I'm going to call it the Ft. Dearborn Massacre."

Remember that everything is for sale - Comiskey Park, Sears Tower, Chicago history, marriage.

Law Enforcement has been reduced to a yard sale, by revisionists and narrative architects.

Yesterday, one man fought back. Commander Glenn Evans filed suit against The City of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel's Independent Police Review Board (IPRB) and . . .my favorite . . .WBEZ.

The here you have the Leftist combine - Progressive politicians, appointed Good Government Citizens Blue Ribbon Activists and the Left Tilted Public Radio apparatus.

Commander Evans was lynched by people who see nooses everywhere as tools for public power and personal financial gain.  The so-called Innocense Industry pumps blood into print and fabricates compelling narrative doctrines to be blared from the pages of the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun Times and screeched by panelists on WTTW, or WBEZ.  Lawyers apply the narractives while judge shopping and in preparing cases brought against police officers. Politicians pander and provide street cash for T-shirts and future Pfleger-ite marches.

Every Police Officer in this city run by clowns and grifters should line up to offer any and help to the lawyers of Glenn Evans. His small victory might prevent the continuing Star Chamber attacks on working people doing their jobs.

Most of all Chicago citizens should study the Glenn Evans case carefully and note the rhetorical flourishes throughout each article, news cast and statement by activists and politicians.  Make note of the similarities.  Make a time-line of events and paste in the characters involved, like the former cop disciplined by Commander Evans turned IPRB investigator and the WBEZ reporter playing David Protess.  Make note of a particularly damning article in DNAinfo Chicago. Draw your own conclusion.


Know this - Truth is tough and narratives are as easy as lying. A nice name for fiction.  There were not six Transgender Aztec Garment Workers putting up the flag on Iwo Jima - not yet anyway. Iwo Jima was not a property dispute, by the way.

Chicago owes much to Commader Glenn Evans

This was a the massacre of a Man's life. 

Alvarez Agonistes: "60 Minutes" Had No Time for the Root of Its Interest in Anita Alvarez - David Protess

Under the spreading chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me/.There lie they, and here lie we/ Under the spreading chestnut tree. Orwell's 1984

The Two-Minute Hate Drill was crafted by George Orwell in his novel 1984 - George was off by twenty-eight years.  These days the we get a heaping helping of the Two-Minute Hate Drill every day and no time off for Sunday. We have Hate Week cycles: We got Burge; we got Palin: We got Ryan; We got Blago; We got Charlie Sheen; We got Lindsays -Lohan and Graham; We got Joe Walsh: We got Chick Fil A; We got 1%-ers: We got Catholics and We always got Israel!  We have Vanecko and we now have the Random Judge!


My favorite Chicago reporter and one of the best in the business, Natasha Korecki reported this in today's Sun Times about the "60 Minutes" tune-up:

“We are appalled, absolutely, unequivocally appalled by the lack of information [in the ‘60 Minutes’ report],” Alvarez’s spokeswoman, Sally Daly, said. “They did not include information that is critical to this case. Anita spent an hour doing this interview. We were ensured that we were going to get a fair shake ... I didn’t expect that from ‘60 Minutes.’ She could have easily not done the interview. She stood up and explained the cases publicly.”
Daly said the piece failed to report key facts in the cases — the so-called Engelwood Four case and one in which a group of Dixmoor men’s cases were dismissed after they spent years in prison. That included some suspects pleading guilty and testifying against others before judges and juries.
“These cases were presented multiple times to judges and juries,” Daly said. “Our office did a very, very thorough, careful review of these cases. She found that there was not enough evidence.”

The object of the Two Minutes Hate Drill, or a Hate Cycle are determined by the needs of the agreed upon tautologists of the academic, legal, political  and journalistic interest complex: Progressive academic, clerics (UCC, Unitarian, atheist and secularists), elected officials, funding sources (Eychaner, Van Amerigen & etc.), and the cadres of lawyers and law professors in symbiotic solidarity with Medill fashioned editors and columnists. Their reach is national but most effective when pounded out locally.  E.G. David Protess' Innocence Project, rock-rooted on the campus of Evanston, Illinois' Northwestern University and buttresses by the MacArthur and Blum Centers for Law, has trained and sent forth the hundreds of journalists to CNN, Newsweek

Dave Protess no longer operates within the ivy of Northwestern, because Cook County States Attorney Anita Alvares out-ed Professor Dave as a phony and the university booted the Tweedy Fagin - The Chicago Tribune Company's Chicago magazine tried to parse Protess back into a good light: 

“That the university had seen fit to issue a one-sided, nasty, vituperative broadside against him in the form of that press release seemed to be a violation of trust, not only of the university’s relationship with David Protess as a faculty member but a breach of trust with us.”

Cubbage responds by saying that Protess forced the university’s hand. “Northwestern University generally does not discuss publicly actions regarding its faculty and staff,” he says in an e-mail. “However, statements in the media by Professor Protess and our desire to be as forthcoming as possible on an issue of great importance to the University, its faculty, our students, alumni and our community prompted us to make the statement.” . . .A few weeks later, an article by a Medill senior, Brian Rosenthal, appeared in The Daily Northwestern, questioning the reporting methods of Protess and his students. On the same day, a lengthy piece in the Chicago Tribune raised similar questions. Both articles cited two identical episodes (neither of them denied by Protess): that one of his students said she had misrepresented herself as a U.S. Census Bureau employee to learn the whereabouts of a potential source and that another had posed as a ComEd worker to help track down a witness.

Both incidents were contained in the Ferkenhoff report, according to sources. And Protess says Jenner & Block questioned him about both. When I asked Cubbage whether the report had been leaked, he responded, “The University has no knowledge as to whether the report was shared, other than it was not shared by the University’s Office of General Counsel or its outside counsel.” Rosenthal told me that he “had no direct contact with the so-called report.” The Tribune reporter, Matthew Walberg, declined to comment.

The stories could merely have been the result of increased scrutiny brought on by the controversy over Protess and the nature of the accusations against him. Whatever the case, the effect was palpable. Protess’s reputation, as well as his 30-year legacy, suffered a staggering blow. More than that, media attention had shifted away from outrage over Protess’s ouster and onto his and his students’ professional ethics.

Protess offered his defense: There’s a long tradition of reporters going undercover, including for a Pulitzer Prize–winning series in the Tribune in which the reporter William Gaines posed as a janitor to detail hospital abuses.

And several practitioners back him up. “As a longtime investigative reporter who also holds a doctorate and specializes in the history of investigative journalism, I can tell you this,” says the University of Maryland’s Feldstein: “Exposing wrongdoing is not easy. Powerful interests do everything they can to block such challenges to their authority. I can tell you that flirting with a source or paying a source’s cab fare is a routine practice among journalistic professionals, not even a misdemeanor compared to the literal felonies that Protess exposed.”

Others disagree with the practice of journalists misrepresenting themselves. “I don’t say I condone that, and it’s not what I do as a journalist,” says American University’s Lewis. “I always disclose who I am, and that’s how I conduct myself. [But] I also understand that this is a slightly gray area.” In the end, the point was moot. Protess was out. The damage was done—both to him and to the school. “It has a long-term effect that will take a long time for the institution to get over,” says Foster. “It’s one of those moments in the 90-year history of Medill, one of those chapters in the [university’s] history, that I think will remain heartbreaking.

”Not just heartbreaking, adds Leff. Ironic. “From the minute I heard about the Anita Alvarez subpoena, I felt that she set out to ruin David’s reputation and to derail the concept of the [Medill Innocence] Project. And I think she did a damn good job. And I think that, wittingly or unwittingly, the university played right into her hands.”

At the bottom of it all, the question still remains: Why would the university go to such great lengths to not simply reprimand Protess—or even push him out—but to publicly attack him, his work, and his integrity, to virtually excommunicate a man who had brought such renown to the school? (emphasis my own)

And that, boys and girls, was how Anita Alvarez was bumped to front of the line for Two Minute Hate and now in the Hate Cycle.

"60 Minutes" sent their hard hitting team to do a job on Cook County States Attorney Alvarez and they chatted up an Innocence Project talker from a its New York affiliate, Peter Neufield to dig up necrophilia in order to smear Alvarez, but not the hometown cabbie briber and Fagin Dave Protess.  Alvarez was set up and she is now a subject for the scorn of Zorn, the malice of Marin, and eggs of the editorial boards of both papers.

Alavarez was Bush-whacked. Given the editing, the snide and syrupy slurs of CBS 'Byron Pitts, Anita Alvarez did a commendable job with the 60 Minutes advocate. She held her ground and stated the case.

Ms. Alvarez fell afoul of the Medill/NorthwesternLaw/Lawsuit-Lotto Lawyer complex when she out-ed Chicago’s Fagin – David Protess – for the hypocrite-corner cutting phony that he is; causing Northwestern to deep-six him after years allowing The Wrongful Everything Gang to burnish the university’s reputation as Progressive Dreamworks and Hogwarts Illinois

Crawford Has Innocence Project's Protess Media Pals Copping Pleas

The big onion, that is the Innocence Project's David Protess and his methods, is peeling away. More so the choir Protess not only preaches to, but writes the libretto for, Chicago's media seem to be hiding or copping a plea.

Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader, a pioneer news organ that has made challenging investigations, arrests, interrogations, indictments and convictions of every African American career criminal over the last three decades its centerpiece-even maintaining the canon of John Conroy (no longer working for The Reader) on its main page, presented the work of Pulitzer Prize winning newsman William Crawford - Chimera.

Chimera takes a second look at the role of Protess, Innocence Project and the Chicago Media in its crusade to free violent recidivist criminal Anthony Porter at the cost of Alstory Simon's freedom.

David Protess was 'relieved' of duties with his thirty year post as director of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism Innoncence Project, over ethics issues concerning his direction of student investigators.

Eric Zorn, a Protess acolyte, has an interesting comment on yesterday's article by Mike Miner. Miner, himself, appears to copp a plea having been a devout Innocence project choir boy now appearing to help peel the Protess onion.

Why is Crawford so sure Porter is guilty and Simon innocent? His analysis relies far too much on pugnacity and sarcasm to persuade anyone else half as much as it's persuaded him. But he does give us reason to think the original case against Porter might have been stronger than anyone who knows of the case only by its reputation supposes — and that Protess’s team of investigators (most of them students) did a rather superficial job of looking into it.

But Crawford’s strongest argument is implied: Porter is guilty because Simon is innocent. And in trying to get readers to accept the idea that Simon would confess to a murder he didn’t commit, Crawford accuses the Innocence Project of manipulation and misrepresentation — the kind of tactics Protess is now being held accountable for, as in this long article in Thursday’s Tribune, and this one in Wednesday’s Daily Northwestern.

Oh, heavens! Not pugnacity and sarcasm? Sarcasm? Personally, I think that sarcasm flavors the sauce that has been poured on the facts that manage to find their where into print in Chicago.

Crawford offers much more - real analysis and actually journalistic leg-work, as opposed to a chatty call over to the Medill School for some copy.

Crawford describes, largely in Simon’s words, a visit to Simon’s home in Milwaukee by Paul Ciolino, a private investigator for the Innocence Project. Crawford writes:

.Barely conscious, Simon was awakened from his stupor around 6:30 a.m. by two men, armed with guns, who identified themselves as ‘police investigators’ from Illinois. They accused Simon of having murdered two individuals years ago in Chicago’s Washington Park.
The uninvited guests [Ciolino and an assistant] told Simon that Inez [Jackson], his ex-wife, and "other witnesses" had signed statements alleging that Simon had indeed committed the murders. Despite protestations from Simon that the two men were "crazy" and that they leave his house at once, Simon said the two so-called police investigators then slapped a video into a portable player. As the tape rolled, a black male appeared on the screen, claiming to have been a witness to the Washington Park murders. The unidenfied man — who much later would be found to have been an actor hired and scripted by Ciolino — said Simon was the triggerman.

Simon’s intruders then piled on. After playing the video and producing a copy of Inez’s signed affidavit, and that of her nephew, Walter Jackson, and others also incriminating Simon, Ciolino pulled a pink rabbit out of a black hat. The private eye glanced into a mirror hanging on Simon’s wall and spotted a news report flashing across Simon’s TV, which was otherwise not viewable. The TV was turned to Milwaukeee’s CBS station, which was broadcasting a news report in which Inez is seen asserting that Simon had committed the murders…

The surreal, outrageous events unfolding around Simon that morning, in his own home, triggered a well of fear within.

“Ciolino kept tell me that they had all the evidence they needed to convict me. That I was going to go down for these murders and end up on Death Row, and there was nothing I could do about it. After seeing this story on TV, I was no longer just angry, I was scared to death. For the first time, I believed that I was actually going to be charged with committing the murders,” Simon stated in a sworn affidavit.

Now the icing on the cake. Ciolino told Simon that all Protess wanted was to free Porter, that when Porter got out, millions of dollars would be flying around from book deals, Hollywood movies and the like. And Simon would be sharing in the largesse. Simon had to move quickly, however, because Chicago police were on their way to Milwaukee at that very moment to arrst Simon and return him to Chicago in chains to face the music.

“He [Ciolino] convinced me that he was actually trying to help me by giving me a way out before the police got to my house to arrest me. He said that if I gave a statement saying I did the crimes in self-defense, that he would get me a free lawyer, that the professor would make it so I would only have to serve a short time in prison, and that when I got out, I’d be taken care of financially and would not have to work again,” Simon alleged.

If Simon agreed and confessed, Ciolino promised Simon that a Chicago lawyer, a veteran member of the defense bar by the name of Jack Rimland, would take Simon’s case. And Rimland would take it free of charge. Simple as pie.”

And Simon, who’d been insisting on his innocence, eventually “caved.”

To underscore his account, Crawford quotes from a laudatory 2002 Chicago magazine profile of Ciolino by Bryan Smith. Here’s Smith’s account of Ciolino’s showdown with Simon:

Ciolino has been threatened with subpoenas and indictments more times than he can count by people who make their living finding reasons to throw people in jail. As a result, he knows he has to do everything by the book.
He danced close to the edge in the Porter case in getting Alstory Simon, the suspected real killer, to confess to the murder.

Showing up unannounced at Simon's house in Milwaukee, Ciolino said that he was a private investigator and that he had a videotape of a witness who said Simon had committed the Washington Park murders. The "witness" was actually an employee of Ciolino's. Watching the bogus video, Simon remarked, "Man, that guy wasn't there. He ain't no witness."

'Yeah?" Ciolino shot back. "How do you know that if you weren't there?" At that point, recalls Ciolino, "he looked at me like, 'Why did I open my mouth?"' Afterwards, Ciolino convinced Simon that if he confessed on tape, things would go easier for him. "We just bull-rushed him, and mentally he couldn't recover," Ciolino says.

So there was a phony videotape of a “witness” to the murders. And as my article mentions, Simon did wind up with Jack Rimland as an attorney. And he got 37 years not two.

So was Crawford wrong about any part of this encounter?

Ciolino calls it a “fairy tale.”

There was no mention of two years, no mention of a movie deal, he says. Simon asked for the name of a lawyer and Rimland was one of three names Ciolino gave him. The CBS newscast, which Crawford suggests was a setup, was “just dumb luck.” But it was because Inez Jackson had confessioned on TV the night before that Ciolino visited Simon early the next morning. “You go late at night or early in morning. If I’m up there at noon, [by then] Inez has a couple of bullet holes in the back of her head,” Ciolino says.

He tells me he happened to run into Simon in prison years later. Simon thanked him for doing him a favor. “I’m out of here in 15 years [with good behavior],” Simon said. Ciolino says to me, “Porter was going to be smoked! Somebody think Rimland did a bad job for him!” He goes on, “I’ll tell you what I’ll tell anyone else. If anyone thinks I’d tell a lie for Anthony Porter they don’t know anything about me. I’ve yet to meet the guy I’m willing to fall on my sword for. I didn’t care about Anthony Porter particularly as a person. It was all about what happened. And there was no way Anthony Porter committed that murder. Alstory did that murder, there ain't no question about it.”

I should add one thing. Paul Meincke of Channel Seven visited Simon in prison back in 2006 and reported that Inez Jackson now claimed “she was coached and coaxed into fingering her husband with promises of money from future book and movie deals on the Anthony Porter story. As for Simon himself, Meincke tells me today that he came away from Simon’s cell “with the distinct impression he could have been telling the truth. He seemed to be fairly genuine.” Meincke says a photographer with him had the same reaction.

Here is Eric Zorn's reaction:

Eric Zorn:
Simon's multiple admissions, apology to the victims, etc. make it hard to credit the idea that he was simply acting to go along with some scheme, but, as I wrote (and as you noted I wrote) it would have been better for Simon to have gone through the plea process with a lawyer who had no ties whatever to those with a stake in the outcome of the Porter case. Just seems like common sense. As does, by the way, my suggestion to Simon and his new attorneys that they release Jack Rimland from any bonds of attorney/client privilege so he, Rimland, can tell us his version of this story.
One last thing -- I reiterate my suggestion to Mike Miner that his blog also contain his columns. It seems perverse and very 20th century to separate them.

Posted by Eric Zorn on May 6, 2011 at 5:33 PM | Report this comment

Most flavorful

Pulitzer Prize Winning Newsman William Crawford Seems to Have the Progressive "Justice" Industry Squirming

Ever since the Mumia/Burge/Innocence/Gotcha Medill/Lawsuit Lotto Lawyer collective began charging police officers, City, County, State and Federal Justice Systems with systemic race-based torture, false prosecution and intimidation via editorial board, no newsman has ever questioned the roots of the conglomerate formed to challenge arrests, investigations, prosecutions and incarcerations of career murderers, gang-bangers, arsonists and felons. Until now.

A conglomerate consisting of University based foundations like the MacArthur Center for Justice, the Center for Wrongful Convictions, the Medill School of Journalism, the Innocence Project, lawyers like G. Flint Taylor and Jon Loevy, the editorial boards of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times and iconic columnists have fed off of one anothers input, assent and agendas to undermine any and all confidence in American Justice and Law Enforcement and made millions of dollars for lawyers and their convicted felon clientele. They have exacted millions of dollars from tax-payers via settlements and judgments.

The Jon Burge saga was crafted over three decades of constant drum beats of electric shock, suffocations, burnings, beatings and games of Russian roulette upon black men. However no court has convicted any police officer for torture. Jon Burge was convicted of perjury after years of legal three-card-monte by G. Flint Taylor. The MacArthur Center for Justice's Locke Bowman* who was wildly unsuccessful in tagging Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan with torture charges, contributes a regular screed about Police racism, torture, abuse, intimidation and official cover-ups in the daffy pages of Chicago Huffington Post.

Now the onion seems to be getting peeled. Innocence Project Leader Prof. David Protess is exiled from the Medill classroom over charges of ethics violations and manipulation of student methods. One of David Protess's celebrated clients,Anthony Porter is the subject of William B. Crawford's investigation entitled Chimera.

The Chicago Reader, which for thirty years touted the contributions of John Conroy, if not the the Ahab of Jon Burge, certainly the harpoon tossed by G. Flint Taylor of the Peoples Law Office, offers the work of William Crawford for public reading:

William Crawford is a retired 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning Chicago Tribune investigative newsman. For the last few years, Mr. Crawford has studied the

Last month Northwestern accused Protess of repeatedly giving "false and misleading information" to university lawyers who were trying to deal with a subpoena from the Cook County State's Attorney's Office for certain Innocence Project documents. Dean John Lavine suspended Protess from teaching this quarter and then Protess went on leave to try to reestablish a new Innocence Project outside the university.

Besides Protess's troubles, Sotos has one more thing going for him he didn't have in 2006—an analysis of the Porter/Simon case by William Crawford, a retired Tribune investigative reporter. Crawford tells me he heard about the case, asked Sotos if he could look through the files, and wound up spending three months compiling a hundred-page narrative he calls "Chimera." He's e-mailed it to everyone in Chicago he thinks might possibly care—particularly journalists and Medill faculty. "Our purpose here," Crawford begins, is "to set the record straight [and] get that record in front of those men and women, in private and public office, who are in a position to begin at once the task of righting the colossal wrong that has taken place."

Crawford was able to get Sotos and himself a meeting this week with Bruce Dold, the head of the Tribune's editorial board. (" I can't say if we'll do anything with his research," says Dold.) Other than that—and, I suppose, the column you're reading now—he appears to have accomplished nothing and possibly done Simon harm.

Crawford did an "extraordinary job" of putting the case record into narrative form, Sotos tells me, yet "the level of abrasiveness he brings is counterproductive."

The most flagrant example of that abrasiveness I've seen is an e-mail Crawford sent John Lavine badgering him for a response to "Chimera." Crawford tells me neither Lavine nor Al Cubbage, Northwestern's vice president for university relations, reacted to repeated e-mails until Cubbage finally asked Crawford to leave him alone. Full of typos, Crawford's final e-mail to Lavine ended with this:

"You have a good night. And I will be in that courtroom when you take the shirt off your back and give it to Alstory. And you tell Protess, who threatened me, you tell him, not in your words but in mine that I will kick his ass right up through the openings in both his ear.s [sic]

"My writing, has been sent everywhere: U.s. atty., Madigan, cook county state's attorye, justice department, every editorial writer. It ain't going away. And again, my amigo will own you and your dip shit school."

Crawford admits, "I guess I got a little pissed. If they think they can sit in their ivory tower ten years later and not even acknowledge I'm asking legitimate questions, they're dealing with the wrong person. I'm going to employ the same set of standards they used."

Lavine didn't respond to my request for comment. Cubbage said "Chimera" had no impact on the university's case against Protess, and he personally didn't read it.

Crawford has also repeatedly e-mailed Protess. In March, Crawford spotted an unflattering story about Protess in the Tribune and decided to needle him. "I didn't get a copy of the Tribune this morning. May I borrow yours?" Crawford wrote. Protess responded, "Sure. Which address would you like to have Anthony Porter and his friends deliver it to?" and listed several addresses where Crawford has lived or worked—a flourish Crawford believes was meant to intimidate him.

Exclaims Crawford: "He spends 90 days convincing the world Porter is innocent, and when Protess seeks to exact revenge, it is Porter he is going to send!"

Protess calls his e-mail merely a "jocular counter punch" to a "creepy" e-mail Crawford had sent him a few days earlier:

Professor,

Question: You ever own a 94 Forest Green Infinity, four door, LP Lyd880

Have a nice night.

Call me, Sapphire, cuz the discovery is going to begin.

Protess says that after seeing the "physical threats" made in Crawford's e-mail to Lavine, he stopped responding to him.

Crawford tells me he actually regards Protess as a secondary figure in the Alstory Simon story. "Chimera" is a tale full of big shots—lawyers, state's attorneys, judges—who Crawford says collectively perfumed Porter and screwed Simon, and he wants them all held accountable. He even says his fear is that Protess has been so weakened by Medill that he will wind up taking the fall alone. "My guess is they can make a sacrificial lamb out of him and then stand up and tell the world, 'We've cured the cancer.'"

Since, according to Crawford, I was the only journalist to actually read his report and get in touch with him, he had high hopes that I'd become his champion. When I asked about his e-mails he sounded forlorn, as if his last shot at making a difference was slipping away. He responded with an e-mail that began, "A final appeal."

"I ask that your story does not become my e-mails. . . " he wrote. "Everyone has a copy of my report. They are all sitting on it, pretending it doesn't exist. And if no one acknowledges it, the hope is it will go away. . .

"I ask you on behalf of a man who deserves rehearing, please keep him in mind. . . . Please do not make Simon pay for my indiscretions."

As for Simon, if there's even half as much reason to think he confessed falsely (as Crawford and Sotos insist there is), he'd make an excellent case study for Protess's Innocent Project. Indeed, says Protess, "I was so interested in Sotos's claim that I had lunch at Ina's with him and [cocounsel] Terry Ekl to hear their side. Their story ultimately didn't add up, and a criminal courts judge agreed."

Sotos remembers the conversation. "We told him we thought in his zeal to free Anthony Porter—which was laudable, they didn't have that strong a case against him originally. They snared an innocent person. He got really defensive."

It is clear that the conglomerate of Progressive Justice Crusaders is squirming.

Keep peeling this onion, Mr. Crawford.


*

Clinical Professor of Law, Northwestern
Director, MacArthur Justice Center

Locke E. Bowman joined the MacArthur Justice Center in 1992 and has handled a wide variety of civil and criminal litigation. His work focuses on cases involving police misconduct, compensation of the wrongfully convicted, rights of the media in the criminal justice system, and firearms control. He previously served as law clerk to Judge Hubert L. Will of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois and was an associate at Mayer, Brown & Platt. He was also an assistant corporation counsel in the City of Chicago Law Department and a criminal defense lawyer at Silets & Martin before joining the center. Based on votes from fellow attorneys, Chicago Magazine named Bowman an Illinois “Super Lawyer” in 2005 and 2006 for his work in constitutional law and civil rights.

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=8978152&postID=4775520044840949560

Northwestern Professor Protess , Our Tweedy Fagin of Medill

Fagin: Clever dogs, clever dogs. Never blowed on old Fagin.

David Protess:

Maybe the Chicago Innocence Project will be going great and I won't want to go back (to Northwestern) because of the hassle ... Maybe it won't succeed and I will want to go back. Or maybe I'll want to go somewhere else, go to some other university. All of my options are on the table.

Chicago Tribune Editorial April 9, 2011:

If Protess misled administrators and attorneys in this case—and it appears he did—what does that say about all those cases he has worked on with students? That question will linger at least until prosecutors and McKinney's lawyers resolve what happened in his case.

That day can't come soon enough.

Had Anita Alvarez caved to the limitless media enabling of Professor David Protess, the Fagin of Medill, all would be just dandy and it ain't. I have long suspected that David Protess was a later-day "kidsman." A Kidsman was a 19th Century recruiter of children for training and guiding pickpockets and cut-throats. The vicious Bill Sykes was one of Fagin's students. The Artful Dodger, who befriends the naive orphaned child of privilege Oliver Twist, is on his way to the next level of crime. Fagin beats and threatens his "children" with warnings of dire consequences for "peaching," or "blowing" on Fagin's activities.

The "children" are rewarded for doing Fagin's bidding.

When Anita Alvarez initially petitioned for Fagin Protess's student e-mails, notes and records pertinent to the McKinney case, the academic, journalistic and legal communities marshaled a formidable army of protest and calumnies leveled at Anita Alvarez.

CNN, Huffington Post, Salon, The New York Times, MSNBC, joined the Chicago Tribune editorial board in terming Cook County States Attorney Alvarez a Gestapo bully. A former Federal Judge, of dubious record and achievement, wrote frequent attacks on Alvarez and defences of Fagin Protess. Click my post title and view a few.

Most telling were the star Protess pupils, now rewarded with CNN, AP, and other blue-chip journalistic postings. The kids did alright by Medill, The Innocence Project and old Fagin himself -Professor Dave Protess.

The Innocence Project and Northwestern University have been besmeared by the very advocacy they demand - outcomes be damned. That is as old as John Dewey, the bespectacled avuncular father of generations of Progressive Fagins.

Fagin was the leader of gangs of children, in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, patterned on the historical 19th Century criminal Ickey Solomon of London.

What does American philosopher and granddad of American public education have to do with David Protess's Procrustean pedagogy? Plenty.

John Dewey holds that Inquiry is Truth - play, if you will, the root of the Laboratory Method in education that established the Lab School of University of Chicago - play long enough and arrive at the original point of inquiry.

The start of an inquiry is an indeterminate situation, usually coming from some practical matter ( convicted felon we want out of jail to raise a the larger issue of systemic failure of American Justice). The first step is to getting a clearer and more specific picture of the problem; the indeterminate situation becomes a “problematic situation”. The inquiry then proceeds by coming up with possible solutions to the problem That is, hypothesis that might help to act upon in the problematic situation. Evaluation then takes place; possible consequences of different solutions are considered, and by doing this the relative value of the solutions are estimated. The final test is when a solution actually is tried as a guide to action. The question of truth and falsehood come into play at this last stage of inquiry, and it is dependent on whether the consequences of acting upon the hypothesis under test are such that they resolve the problem and settle the indeterminate situation. Here, it is important to keep in mind the fundamental that role that Dewey ascribes to the indeterminate situation. It is our conceptions of this situation that guide the rest of the inquiry, and that determines how to evaluate and praise ideas and hypotheses. The indeterminate situation is the beginning of an inquiry, but also controls it throughout [p.207]. Coming back to the correspondence relation, it could be said to hold between the between the first and last stage of inquiry.

The opposite of John Dewey was the mathematician and philosophical historian Bertrand Russell whose rigorous methodologies eschewed "play" for study. Russell takes apart Dewey's playful assertions that begin and end in the very same place. Dewey, and his child Fagin Professor Protess "look" into the assertion that the American Justice System is flawed, because it is sytemnically and intrinsically racist, brutal, dishonest, lazy and corrupt - "What do you think, kids?"

Here is Bertarnd Russell's deconstruction of Dewey in summary by Swedish student of philosophy Björn Östbring:

His (Russell) version of the ( Dewey) correspondence theory is the classical one: the relation is between statements, propositions or beliefs to an independent reality, to empirical facts. A statement is true if what is referred to also posses the properties that the statement asserts. Dewey’s theory is obviously radically different from this, and in Russell’s view it does not even deserve to be called a correspondence theory. Russell’s description of Dewey’s whole theory of inquiry and truth is as follows (2): individuals engage in inquiry with the purpose of better interacting with their environment. In an inquiry, “assertions” are tools, and these assertions can be “warranted” to different degrees. The degree to which an assertion is warranted is determined by their ability to produce the desired results. During inquiry assertions can come to be replaced by better assertions, and sometimes they are the very means that lead to better assertions. The term “better” simply means that it produces more of the desirable results, lets us cope better with our environment, and hence “better” could basically be substituted with “more warranted”. An inquiry does not end; no assertion is the best for all times. The important point in this summary is that an assertion is warranted if it produces the desired results, and that the idea of truth thus loses its static and privileged nature.

Dewey and Protess begin inquiry with the conclusion and all the rest in between is just "play." What student would not rather play than work? Bertrand Russell's logical positivism is damned hard work.

Deweyesque inquiry is tailor made for a Fagin and advocacy journalism and education provides the charming "Master" with high moral ground and an embracing protective laissez faire attitude

Unlike the probity of Russell, the Dewey trained journalists, scholars, and academics will apply no further "inquiry" to other Fagins. Protess, now in disgrace with Fortune and Men's eyes will be an anomaly. A freak.

While the Medill engine will trot out more Heater cases and our Justice System will be further deconstructed in the advocacy playland that is John Dewey's Progressive America, David Protess will disappear into the shadows. Nothing to see here, folks! Inquiry? We don't need no stinkin' Inquiry! Right, Judge Stinky Sarokin?

Police, prosecutors, judges and juries will be villainized and criminals will always have much more benefits than doubts and greater Fagins than David Protess will threaten and reward more students - so long as they don't "peach," or "blow" to the cops.

Americans are fair-minded, but not really all that stupid. No one wants an innocent man punished, but no one wants any and all faith in our justice system destroyed by Fagins and an equally culpable media. We can thank States Attornney Alvarez for sticking to her guns during this entire shabby inquiry.

*

Fagin is described as "disgusting" to look at. He is the leader of a group of children, the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates among them, whom he teaches to make their livings by pickpocketing and other criminal activities in exchange for a roof over their heads. At the time of the novel, he is said by another character, Monks, to have already made criminals out of "scores" of children who grow up to live—or die—committing the same crimes as adults. Bill Sikes, one of the major villains of the novel, is hinted to be one of Fagin's old pupils, and Nancy, Sikes' girlfriend and sex worker clearly was.
Whilst portrayed as relatively humorous, he is nonetheless a self-confessed miser who, despite the amount he has acquired over the years from the work of others, does very little to improve the squalid lives of the children he takes in, allowing them to smoke pipes and drink gin "with the air of middle-aged men". In the second chapter of his appearance, it is shown, albeit when talking to himself, that he cares less about those children who are eventually hanged for their crimes and more about the fact that they do not "peach" on him and the other children

http://bjornostbring.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/dewey-vs-russell-on-truth/