Illinois prosecutors must be getting really desperate. Their own governor has already declared a moratorium on executions, after all. Bur targeting journalism students is really beyond the pale.

First page of the Bill of Rights, the first of which is?NYT via Raw Story: "Lawyers in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office say that in their quest for justice in the old case, they need every pertinent piece of information about the students’ three-year investigation into Anthony McKinney, who was convicted of fatally shooting a security guard in 1978. Mr. McKinney’s conviction is being reviewed by a judge.

Among the issues the prosecutors need to understand better, a spokeswoman said, is whether students believed they would receive better grades if witnesses they interviewed provided evidence to exonerate Mr. McKinney.”

RawStory adds:

The suggestion that students were encouraged to find evidence of wrongful prosecution even if there were none has raised alarms among some legal experts, who wonder whether Cook County prosecutors may be trying to discredit the project that has caused embarrassment for numerous prosecutors over the past decade.

“They’re either trying to undermine the investigation, or they’re trying to undermine the entire project,” Don Craven, executive director of the Illinois Press Association, told the press last week.

That settles my Halloween costume. I’m wearing tha judge’s robe I used to impersonate a dead Habeas Corpus last year: this year, it’ll be a bleeding First Amendment.