Hopes for the end of a five-month legal battle between the Medill Innocence Project and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office faltered Monday.

The state and lawyers from the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic were summoned to court. After the hearing, Celeste Stack of the State’s Attorney’s office said the case between the state and Medill would probably move forward.

Although Monday’s hearing wasn’t directly related to Medill, it revolved around Anthony McKinney, whose case Medill students investigated from 2003 to 2006. The students found evidence suggesting McKinney was innocent of a 1978 murder, which caused the state to subpoena class records last October. The students did the entire investigation, Stack said.

At the last hearing Feb. 10, McKinney’s defense lawyers submitted an amended post-conviction petition, which removed controversial evidence. Amendments included the elimination of alternative suspect Anthony Drake, whom students were accused of bribing.Judge Diane Cannon summoned the lawyers Monday to ask for clarification on how the petition was changed.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t have said what you said Feb. 10 instead of handing me 30 pages on Jimmy Carter,” she said.

Because the new petition omitted previous evidence and included a statement from a deceased person, Cannon asked defense lawyers if the adjusted petition merited a hearing for McKinney.

As a result of the amendments, Stack said most of the evidence left already had been dealt with at trial.

Cannon questioned the defense lawyers’ motive in filing the amended petition. She asked if student-retrieved evidence was removed in an attempt to quash the subpoena against the Medill Innocence Project.

Stack said Medill should release class records and let the judge decide what information is relevant.

“We don’t know how journalism students do their investigation,” Stack said.

The next hearing is scheduled for March 10.­

-Jessica Allen