The Chicago Tribune continues its excellent series on wrongful convictions. Today's article features Aaron Patterson, age 39, one of 17 wrongfully convicted inmates freed from Death Row in Illinois. He is not in a forgiving frame of mind.

Since his release from Death Row 10 months ago, his goals have been at once simple and far-fetched, concrete and quixotic. He is going to run for political office someday and "shake the system up from the inside." He is going to save those he left behind the walls, and bail out others who need his help.

He is going to close crack houses and use his influence among gang members to turn street corner drug dealers into productive citizens. He is going to give them jobs cutting grass and shoveling snow. He is going to bend his old world to his new vision.

His first months of freedom have been a mighty struggle, as rage and reason battle it out for his soul. The same qualities that kept him alive on the streets and in prison--his refusal to back down, his reflexive resistance to authority--now get in the way as he tries to write a new chapter in his life.

Months after his release from prison, someone asks him how he had survived. "Anger. Anger. Anger," he replies.

Photos are here. Here is a chart of the 17 wrongfully convicted inmates in Illinois.

Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. issued ten pardons Friday, including one to Michael Austin, released from prison last year after being wrongfully imprisoned on a murder charge for 27 years. How do we compensate someone for that?

Ehrlich will have plenty of say about how much money, if any, Austin receives. "Let me give you a general answer, and the answer is yes," Ehrlich said yesterday about the matter. "Then, of course, your question is how much. What's a year worth? What's six months worth? What is 27 years worth?"

In the case of Gernonimo Pratt, also wrongly imprisoned for 27 years, the city of Los Angeles and the Justice Department split a $4 million payment to Pratt. Maryland has paid far less in the past:

In 1984 the board authorized a $250,000 payment to Leslie A. Vass, released after serving 10 years for a robbery that prosecutors said he didn't commit. Ten years later, Kirk N. Bloodsworth got $300,000 after serving nine years before his exoneration by DNA evidence. Earlier this year, Bernard Webster got $900,000 after serving 20 years for a rape he didn't commit. The same annual rate in Austin's case would yield about $1.2 million.

Ehrlich, a Republican, is a welcome breath of fresh air on the issue of pardons and parole.

Maryland Governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. issued ten pardons Friday, including one to Michael Austin, released from prison last year after being wrongfully imprisoned on a murder charge for 27 years. How do we compensate someone for that?

Ehrlich will have plenty of say about how much money, if any, Austin receives. "Let me give you a general answer, and the answer is yes," Ehrlich said yesterday about the matter. "Then, of course, your question is how much. What's a year worth? What's six months worth? What is 27 years worth?"

In the case of Gernonimo Pratt, also wrongly imprisoned for 27 years, the city of Los Angeles and the Justice Department split a $4 million payment to Pratt. Maryland has paid far less in the past:

In 1984 the board authorized a $250,000 payment to Leslie A. Vass, released after serving 10 years for a robbery that prosecutors said he didn't commit. Ten years later, Kirk N. Bloodsworth got $300,000 after serving nine years before his exoneration by DNA evidence. Earlier this year, Bernard Webster got $900,000 after serving 20 years for a rape he didn't commit. The same annual rate in Austin's case would yield about $1.2 million.

Ehrlich, a Republican, is a welcome breath of fresh air on the issue of pardons and parole.

Two of the best investigative journalists anywhere, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley of the Chicago Tribune, have a special report today on the legacy of wrongful convictions. The report finds that after a wrongful conviction is exposed, police and prosecutors cling to their original theories and seldom pursue new leads and suspects.

Since the death penalty's reinstatement in the mid-1970s, more than 100 people have been sentenced to be executed, only to be set free when they were legally absolved. The Tribune reviewed 88 cases in which 97 Death Row prisoners were set free, eliminating those cases with self-defense claims or pleas to lesser charges, to focus on those where a crime was left unsolved.

Each of those Death Row releases suggested the justice system had corrected itself. Instead, the legacy of those cases is a new set of troubling legal and ethical dilemmas that is largely lost amid the burst of public attention that accompanies a condemned inmate's unexpected freedom.

As a result, rarely is anyone brought to justice for crimes once considered worthy of society's most severe punishment, a failure that takes on greater significance when there is a possibility the real killer has been allowed to commit other crimes.

Two of the best investigative journalists anywhere, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley of the Chicago Tribune, have a special report today on the legacy of wrongful convictions. The report finds that after a wrongful conviction is exposed, police and prosecutors cling to their original theories and seldom pursue new leads and suspects.

Since the death penalty's reinstatement in the mid-1970s, more than 100 people have been sentenced to be executed, only to be set free when they were legally absolved. The Tribune reviewed 88 cases in which 97 Death Row prisoners were set free, eliminating those cases with self-defense claims or pleas to lesser charges, to focus on those where a crime was left unsolved.

Each of those Death Row releases suggested the justice system had corrected itself. Instead, the legacy of those cases is a new set of troubling legal and ethical dilemmas that is largely lost amid the burst of public attention that accompanies a condemned inmate's unexpected freedom.

As a result, rarely is anyone brought to justice for crimes once considered worthy of society's most severe punishment, a failure that takes on greater significance when there is a possibility the real killer has been allowed to commit other crimes.

A big thanks to Avedon Carol over at Sideshow who picks up on our posts on Florida's deadlines for DNA testing and adds her own insightful analysis:

The very idea that there are conditions in which we can deliberately and knowingly take the life of someone who may be innocent shouldn't even be a consideration, yet we actually have laws that are clearly designed to prevent freeing the innocent. Legislators and prosecutors can rationalize all they want to, but they cannot justify the taking of innocent life; it's murder, plain and simple. And if it's okay for them to do it, why bother to prosecute murderers in the first place? It's precisely to prevent the killing of the innocent that murder laws exist; if they can do it, why can't we?

Avedon has more, we hope you will read the whole thing. There should be no deadline on justice.

In one of the most expensive settlements in its history, the City of Philadelphia bites the bullet and coughs up $1.9 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit in the "Lex Street Massacre."

Jermel Lewis, Quiante Perrin, Hezekiah Thomas and Sacon Youk - innocent men jailed 18 months awaiting a death-penalty trial - will each receive about $475,000, said Lewis' attorney, David Rudovsky. The amount includes lawyers' fees, which were not disclosed.

....Seven people were killed on Dec. 28, 2000, in a West Philadelphia crack house. It was the deadliest mass murder in the city's modern history. Two weeks later, police arrested the four West Philadelphia men, and prosecutors aggressively pursued the case - even in the face of emerging evidence that others may have committed the murders.

On the eve of the death-penalty trial last year, prosecutors were forced to drop all charges. They later charged four others with the slayings.

Florida has a two year statute of limitations on inmates requesting DNA testing to prove their innocence -- the shortest of any major state. And it's running out . With a prison population of 78,000, Florida ranks fourth among the states in the total number of inmates.

Florida's restrictive law was passed in 2001, sponsored by Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami. It provides that anyone convicted of a crime has two years after a sentence becomes final to ask a judge to review DNA testing of physical evidence. Those convicted before the Villalobos law went into effect have until Oct. 1 to file their petitions.

Lawyers in Florida have asked the Courts for a one year emergency stay of the deadline, but as of now, there has been no ruling. Villalobos has no problem with granting a stay for a specified period. But Florida Governor Jeb Bush does object.

In the federal system, since 1996 and the passage of AEDPA (the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) there has been a one year statute of limitations on all claims, including those based on new evidence showing factual innocence.

Why is the deadline so short? How harmful is the deadline?

Ohio bites the bullet and will pay Jimmy Spunk Williams $750k for the ten years he was wrongfully imprisoned:

The state will pay its largest wrongful conviction award ever to a man freed from prison after 10 years when a woman recanted testimony identifying him as the man who raped her when she was 12 years old. Jimmy "Spunk" Williams, 32, agreed Monday to a $750,000 settlement. The state also will pay about $84,600 in fees to two attorneys.

If only there was some way Mr. Williams could click his heels three times and go back to 1990 and get his ten years back too.

Update: California Governor Gray Davis today signed into law a bill to pay Rick Walker $400,000. Walker spent 12 years in jail for a murder he didn't commit.

We hope you will read Kirk Bloodsworth's oped in today's Philadelphia Inquirer. Mr. Bloodsworth was convicted of murder in 1983 and sentenced to death by two juries. He received a full pardon in 1993, based on DNA testing that proved he could not have committed the crime.

But it was not until 2003, almost twenty years after the murder, that the prosecutor ran tests on the DNA to see if the real killer in Bloodsworth's case could be identified. Sure enough, the DNA led authorities to real killer. The real killer was arrested for robbery, attempted rape, and attempted murder a few weeks after the crime for which Mr. Bloodsworth was falsely accused. He is serving a 45 year sentence for that crime. But think about it: Had the DNA testing occurred earlier, and had Mr. Bloodsworth not been falsely accused, another serious crime could have been avoided.

The point: DNA not only frees the innocent, it convicts the guilty. Please, read Mr. Bloodsworth's plea for the passage of the Innocence Protection Act.

Cheers to Chrysler Corporation....if we hadn't just bought a new car last month, we'd go right out and buy one from them now:

Lonnie Erby, freed after 17 years in prison for three rapes that DNA tests recently showed he did not commit, got his old job back Monday at the DaimlerChrysler plant in Fenton.

"He's coming back on night shift," said Louis Johnson, a steward for United Auto Workers Local No. 110. Erby had worked seven years at the plant, and DaimlerChrysler agreed to give him credit for those years, something the car company maker did not have to do, Johnson said. "It's a pretty good thing on Chrysler's side," he said.

Erby, 49, is expected to work in the paint department, the same place he worked before, Johnson said. Dan Bodene, a DaimlerChrysler spokesman, confirmed the hiring and said, "We're glad to have him back in the Chrysler family."

We had hoped this lame theory of prosecution had been put out to pasture, but it's being raised this week in Miami. In their book, Actual Innocence, DNA gurus Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld call it "the unidentified co-ejaculator" theory of prosecution: If new DNA testing excludes the defendant, the prosecutor claims the defendant is still guilty, he just didn't ejaculate, and there must have been more than one person who had sex with the victim--even though they can't identify the second perpetrator.

Here's the latest use of the theory, in which DNA tests have cleared a man in jail since 1983 for a rape of an 11 year old. Prosecutors say all the tests show is that the 11 year old victim had consensual sex earlier in the day with someone else.

... in court papers filed last week, Rundle's office argues that the DNA test results are irrelevant because the state never claimed the semen samples taken from the victim came from McKinley. The state says McKinley was caught by police in the act of raping the victim, that he never ejaculated and that the semen came from another male with whom the 11-year-old had had "consensual" sex earlier that day.

"The fact that another person's DNA was found in the victim's vaginal swabs does not establish that the defendant did not commit a sexual battery," argue Assistant State Attorneys Michael Gilfarb and Penny H. Brill in the motion. "It only provides, as the defense already knew, that the victim had sexual intercourse with someone else, sometime prior to the sexual battery."

However, the detective at trial 20 years ago testified that there was semen in the girl's underwear which was "consistent with" defendant Richard McKinley's blood type.

McKinley testified that he had seen the girl at an arcade that night. But he denied assaulting her. He said he was urinating in the alley when approached by the police officers and started running because he didn't know what was happening.