Rob Warden is the executive director and co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. Mr. Warden is an award winning legal affairs journalist who, as editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer magazine during the 1980's exposed more than a score of wrongful convictions in Illinois, including cases in which six innocent men had been sentenced to death.

Before founding Chicago Lawyer in 1978, Mr. Warden was an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at the Chicago Daily News. Since the Chicago Lawyer changed ownership in 1989, Mr. Warden has worked as a political issues consultant, executive officer of the Cook County State’s Attorney's Office, and consultant to various law firms and the litigation department of General Electric Medical Systems.

Mr. Warden is the author or co-author of hundreds of articles and six previous books, including two books about wrongful convictions written in collaboration with Northwestern University Journalism Professor David Protess - A Promise of Justice - (Hyperion, 1998) and Gone in the Night (Delacorte, 1993).

Mr. Warden has won more than 50 journalism awards, including the Medill School of Journalism’s John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism, two American Civil Liberties Union James McGuire Awards, five Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Norval Morris Award from the Illinois Academy of Criminology.

Steve Drizin is the legal director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Mr. Drizin is also a clinical professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law, assistant director of its Bluhm Legal Clinic, and a leading authority on police interrogations, coerced confessions and the juvenile death penalty.

A 1986 graduate of the Northwestern law school, Drizin joined the clinical faculty in 1991 and two years later became a supervising attorney the its Children and Family Justice Center, where he represented children in delinquency and criminal cases in trial and appellate courts, school disciplinary proceedings, parole and clemency hearings, and political asylum proceedings. In that capacity, he became widely recognized for his efforts to secure greater protections for children, including mandatory videotaping of police interrogations, parental presence, and the right to counsel for youth.

Drizin's national leadership on police interrogations and false confessions led to collaboration with attorneys at the Center on Wrongful Conviction on related cases and on legal reform initiatives. In his efforts to get the juvenile death penalty abolished in the United States, he recently has been working with a number of organizations, including the American Bar Association, the Juvenile Law Center and Amnesty International.

Photos: Center on Wrongful Convictions