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.
[10] In 1982, The Chicago Lawyer published its first of many investigative stories focusing on the “Ford Heights Four” a highly publicized case in which 4 young black men had been convicted by an all-white jury of murder.
The Chicago Lawyer focused on many other Death Row cases including Darby Tillis and Perry Cobb, Rolando Cruz and Alex Hernandez, all of whom were later exonerated.
[3] In a law review article, Warden described how he had evolved from a supporter of capital punishment into a crusader for abolition—referring to a thesis advanced by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall that the average citizen, if fully informed of the realities of capital punishment, would “find it shocking to his conscience and sense of justice.”[12] In 1999, Warden helped found the Center on Wrongful Convictions, part of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law.
He contributed legal analysis for a 2005 Northwestern edition reprinting of The Dead Alive, a 19th-century novel by Wilkie Collins based on the 1819 wrongful murder convictions of two brothers in Vermont.