Oh, not the actual cases. No, no. What we clearly need to do is conduct a comprehensive investigation of the student group that is uncovering the details about how innocent people may have been convicted!
Wow.
Just… wow.
I wish I could say I was shocked. 
I have to add that I’m especially disturbed by the attempts to relabel them not as journalists but as an “investigative agency.” With sufficient twisting of this logic, they’ll go after any other journalists who pursue sensitive topics that make the target look bad.
They are spending more effort going after the students than re-investigating the original crime and the evidence the students uncovered.
Because that would be admitting they were wrong. How dare anyone prove the Government wrong!
I predict this will do little to dispel the perception that (some) prosecutors are far more interested in winning cases than in actual truth or justice.
Bricker, have any comments on this?
Yes. It’s absolutely true. Some prosecutors are far more interested in winning cases than in actual truth or justice. See, e.g., Nifong, Mike.
I don’t want to paint all or even most prosecutors with this brush, because most are either decent sorts to begin with or at least willing to be convinced to be decent by strong argument. But there’s a small cadre of prosecutors who are utterly driven to win, and couldn’t care less about the merits of the case apart from how those merits affect the win.
Amazing. Those prosecutors have some serious huevos. I hope they fail miserably in this endeavor.
Wow is right.
Isn’t the purpose of a “justice system” to see that justice is served, and wouldn’t that include the overturning of any erroneous or wrongful convictions???
If prosecutors were more interested in truth and justice instead of winning cases, maybe fewer innocent people would be turning up on death row. There’s really nothing else to say about all this: the prosecutors are embarrassed, so they are using the power of the office to harass the students.
Isn’t that itself a crime, or at least misconduct? And so clearly so that it should itself trigger an investigation?
Aren’t the people in power concerned about at least maintaining the appearance of constitutional rule of law?
This something journalists have had to defend decade after decade. It’s nothing new. It’s always defend the right or lose it. This isn’t a static world where you can slack off ofter defending a right once. You get respites if your lucky where you can enjoy the right before defending it again.
I couldn’t say. It sounds like it, but I don’t know.
Again, if that was the main concern, you’d think innocent people wouldn’t be getting put on death row because they look like easy convictions, or get beaten by police until they confess, or have hopelessly inadequate legal representation.
I have yet to come down on a side of this issue. But I see more knee-jerk indignation than balanced discussion here. Can someone address the specific arguments the prosecutors have given in favor of requesting the information? I found the following line from the article linked in the OP to be of particular interest:
Is it not reasonable to want to examine the veracity of such important information that is coming not from professional reporters, but from students working on a class project? Please educate me on exactly why this is wrong.
Do they have any reason to believe this is the case, or is this just a fishing expedition? How does this relate to the actual iknnocence of the convicted person? Are they investigating that?
Do you know anything about the innocence project? It’s a bit more than “a class project.”
I don’t understand why that would even be relevant. Even if the student gets a better grade for finding exonerating testimony, what reason would the witness have to make something up? They’re not getting a grade.
Please educate me on what the relevance is of the requested information. As Miller points out, the witnesses aren’t getting graded. Let’s assume the students were told they’d get better grades if they found witnesses that would indicate innocence. How does that change the course of the investigation that the prosecutors undertake? Presumably, they’d be interested in vigorously testing the witnesses’ stories anyway. What additional information does the student grading scheme supply them with?
For those interested, it sounds like NPR’s Talk of the Nation will be discussing the issue in their second hour today.