On Friday, a 14-year-old B-minus journalism assignment helped free an innocent man from jail.
Carolyn Nielsen, Medill ’95, investigated the story of 14-year-old Thaddeus Jimenez, who was convicted as an adult for a murder he claimed he did not commit.
After 16 years behind bars, Jimenez, 30, was released from prison, his conviction and 50-year sentence vacated.
“I thought, ‘In 10 years I may look back on this and people will think I’ve been played a fool,'” Nielsen said. “‘But I really believe this kid is innocent.'”
Her legal reporting class assignment became a story for the Medill graduate program newspaper. The article, “Life on the Line,” questioned the lack of critical pieces of evidence from the trial and showcased poems that Jimenez wrote from prison. The story tipped the Northwestern School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions to take the case in 2005, said Stuart Chanen, a partner at Katten Muchin Rosenman.
Katten lawyers joined the Center on Wrongful Convictions lawyers, devoting more than 1,200 hours of pro bono time to working on the case.
Since the original trial, two witnesses have retracted their statements and the reinvestigation brought up ignored evidence, such as a taped confession from Juan Carlos Torres, whom police arrested Friday, Chanen said.
“When I read (Jimenez’s) letter describing what had happened to him, I was shocked at the injustice that had occurred and was troubled by the evidentiary issues,” he said. “There was a lot of evidence pointing to a different man that it seemed the police ignored.”
Chanen said he was shaking as he and Steve Drizin, the legal director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions, waited outside the Galesburg Henry C. Hill Correctional Center for Jimenez’s release at 7 p.m. Friday.
“It was the most amazing moment I’ve ever had in 24 years of practice to see him walk out the doors of the prison a free man,” he said.
The lawyers took Jimenez out for a steak dinner and then home to see his family. On Monday morning, Jimenez called Nielsen, who plans to visit him in two weeks.
“It was amazing to talk to him and have him thank me for believing in his story,” Nielsen said.
Former Medill Prof. Mindy Trossman said she “vividly” remembers working with Nielsen as she investigated the story.
“Back then, no one except his family believed he was innocent,” she said. “I remember all the hard work and dedication she put in, and the more she uncovered, the more she was convinced it was a miscarriage of justice.”
Stories like Jimenez’s can be difficult to report – especially for student journalists, Trossman said. But the impact of Nielsen’s piece shows that not only can they be undertaken, but the end result is worth the work, she said.
“That’s been one of Medill’s strengths for a long time – the impact Medill has had with David Protess’s students, with my students,” Trossman said. “I hope it shows that these are the stories worth pursuing, and I hope it inspires students to take these stories.”
Medill no longer offers the Legal Reporting of Public Affairs seminar Trossman taught.
Now a Western Washington University journalism professor, Nielsen has kept everything she had from the article – from her interview notes, to the original marked-up first draft, to the letters she received from Jimenez while he was in prison.
“I think much too often we see people who have been convicted of crimes as a number, a faceless being,” Nielsen said. “We have little empathy for what they’ve gone through in their lives. In this case, this was someone who hadn’t even done anything.”
