Photo by The Chicago Tribune, courtesy of Maurice Possley
 
Maurice Possley works as a criminal justice reporter for the Chicago Tribune. With around 36 years of reporting under his proverbial belt, Possley has seen a lot—the good, the bad and the wrongfully accused.
 
This week, Possley took a few minutes to talk to Watching the Detectives about his career as a crime writer—past and present.
 
Take a listen: Talking with Maurice Possley
 
Or just read the transcript below:

Photo by radiospike photography

 
WTD: How did you start out covering investigative criminal justice?
 
MP: In 1997, I was covering the “26th and Cal” criminal courts building, as well as doing some national trial reporting—the Timothy McVeigh trial, for instance, and the Unabomber case—when he pleaded guilty. And there was another reporter at the paper by the name of Ken Armstrong who had proposed a project on prosecutorial misconduct, and I was asked to team up with him because of my experience covering the courts system. And it ultimately lead to a five-part series on prosecutorial misconduct that was published in January of 1999. And that… sort of… that series begat other series and other stories, projects came out of that.
 
WTD: Have you heard back from any of the people that you’ve written about?
 
MP: There’s a fellow by the name of Ken Berrywho is now a paralegal at a law firm that I wrote about. And he is working for people you know that are—he believes are wrongfully imprisoned. Really turned his life around. Got some awards for his work, and you know, he was a guy who was wrongfully convicted and now is, you know, doing really terrific things. And so we chat occasionally about the cases that he’s working on, or things that are happening in his life.
 
WTD: And you wrote most recently about Alton Logan?
 
MP: That was a story a few weeks ago.
 
WTD: Do you write a lot of stories like that? Or do you find that this [wrongful imprisonment] is common occurrence? I know that we have the Innocence Project at Northwestern to try to prevent that from happening.
 
MP: Well, are you talking about the suggestion that someone is in prison who is innocent?
 
WTD: Mm-hm.
 
MP: I mean, we’ve seen a number of those cases in Illinois. I mean, we’ve seen them nationally—the DNA exonerations in this country are over 250 and there have been a number of people who have been released from Death Row. That’s over a hundred. So, Illinois has a fair share of those. So, if you say… I don’t think… I don’t know how to characterize it when you hear… when someone says, ‘How often does it happen?’ You know, how many times is too many? Some would argue that one time is too many. So, we see it. In terms of the Alton Logan case, the peculiar facts of that case—in terms of the lawyers who kept something secret for a quarter of a century—I’ve never run across something like that.
 
WTD: Do you think that they acted rightly? I mean, I guess it was within the law to not reveal the truth.
 
MP: Well, it’s not for me to decide whether they acted rightly. They certainly believe that they did and that they followed their ethical… what the ethics of their profession required. Some people have taken issue with that. I’m not sure that the ones who take issue are taking issue because… they think that the ethical rules are wrong, or whether they [the lawyers] should have ignored them. There’s a lot of interesting questions that arise out of a story like this.
 
WTD: And how do you yourself deal with writing about such horrible things on such a frequent basis?
 
MP: Sometimes it helps to take a break and go write about something else, whether it’s fly-fishing in Montana or good barbecue in Texas, or something that’s different. Sometimes you just sort of have to go off, have a good cry and start all over.
 
The Maurice Possley Reading List
 
“Acquitted ex-cop taking next step: Push is for pardon to clear his name”:
A piece about Ken Berry
 
The Brown’s Chicken Massacre:
Buy it here on the Tribune’s Web site
 
“Inmate’s freedom may hinge on secret kept for 26 years”:
A piece about Alton Logan