Released on June 12 by the Columbia University Justice Project, the "Liebman Study" is a groundbreaking report that examines every capital conviction and appeal between 1973 and 1995 (nearly 5,500 judicial decisions). It finds that in this 23-year period 68 percent of death penalty verdicts were thrown out when appealed. In other words, serious, reversible errors were found in nearly seven out of...

This major investigative series from the Tribune documents hundreds of homicide cases where innocent people were sent to jail, some to Death Row, because of the "egregious misconduct" of prosecutors, usually in the form of suppressing evidence or using evidence that they knew to be false. The study begins in 1963, when the Supreme Court ruling in Brady v. Maryland forbad prosecutors from...