Additional Characters

Anthony Amsterdam
Anthony Amsterdam clerked for Justice Felix Frankfurter and then served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia. In 1962, he took his first teaching position at the University of Pennsylvania, moving to Stanford in 1969, where he later was named the Montgomery Professor of Clinical Legal Education. Throughout his career, Amsterdam has engaged in an extensive pro bono practice. Serving a wide variety of civil rights organizations, legal aid organizations, and public defender organizations, he has appeared in courtrooms, as well as (several times) in the Supreme Court of the United States with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In Furman v. Georgia, he persuaded the Court, which later reversed itself, that the death penalty was unconstitutional. Currently he is a Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.

Stephen B. Bright
Steven Bright is the Director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a public interest legal project that provides representation to persons facing the death penalty and to prisoners in challenging the cruel and unusual conditions of confinement in eleven southern states. He teaches at Yale University and previously taught at Harvard University, Emory and Georgetown. Bright has represented capital defendants since 1979.

Donald Cabana
Donald Cabana was recently appointed the Superintendent of Mississippi State Penitentiary (Parchman Prison), where he was a warden in the mid-1980’s. He taught criminal justice at Southern Mississippi University and was a prison administrator at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Bridgewater, the Alachua County Department of Corrections in Gainesville, Florida and the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. Cabana was featured in the BBC documentary Fourteen Days in May and wrote a book on his experiences as a warden and executioner, Death at Midnight,.

Gary Gauger
Gary Gauger was convicted of killing his parents in April 1993. In March 1996, the U.S. District Court overturned his conviction, ruling that there had been no probable cause for his arrest or for the 21 hours of intensive questioning to which he had been subjected. The Center on Wrongful Convictions took on his case, and he was released in October 1996 by the same judge who had sentenced him to die by lethal injection. The prosecution did not challenge his release. After his release, Gauger returned to farming in McHenry County, Illinois. Gauger is one of the main characters portrayed in the Off-Broadway play, The Exonerated.

Cornelia Grumman
Cornelia Grumman is an editorial writer for The Chicago Tribune. She won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her editorials on the death-penalty system in Illinois and elsewhere in the United States. Her focus has been social policy issues, the death penalty, education, child welfare, and juvenile justice.

Elaine Jones
Elaine Jones is the former President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the nation's oldest law firm fighting for equal rights and justice for people of color, women, and the poor. When Jones took the helm of the Legal Defense Fund in 1993, she became the first woman to head the organization. In 1970, she was counsel of record in Furman v. Georgia.

Lawrence C. Marshall
Legal Director of The Center on Wrongful Convictions in Chicago, Lawrence C. Marshall is professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law. Through the Center and Northwestern's Bluhm Legal Clinic, he has represented many wrongfully convicted defendants, including former Illinois death row prisoners Gary Gauger and Anthony Porter. He also represented Willie Rainge, one of the innocent men convicted in what has become known as the Ford Heights Four case. Marshall has been credited with having played a major role in persuading Illinois Governor George Ryan to commute the sentences of all inmates on Illinois' death row.  During the 2004-05 academic year, Marshall is serving as Visiting Professor of Law and Interim Director of Clinical Education at Stanford University Law School.

Steve Mills
Steve Mills has worked at The Chicago Tribune since 1994, and for the past five years he has focused on the death penalty, miscarriages of justice, and other problems in the criminal justice system. He is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

Maurice Possley
Maurice Possley has been a reporter for 31 years, the last 20 of them at The Chicago Tribune. His focus has been the criminal justice system, and he has written about prosecutorial misconduct, false and coerced confessions, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions. A graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, Possley is the T. Anthony Pollner Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Montana. He is the author of two crime books.

Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama and Professor of Clinical Law at New York University School of Law, has won national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and people of color in the criminal justice system. Since graduating from Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government, he has assisted in securing relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, advocated for poor people, and developed community-based reform litigation aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice.

Scott Turow
Author and lawyer Scott Turow is a partner in the national law firm of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, and has published five novels, most recently Reversible Errors. Turow served on the commission formed by Governor George Ryan in Illinois in 2000 to evaluate the death penalty, and he was also asked to serve on boards devoted to the hiring of state police and the appointment of federal judges. Turow’s pro bono work with death row inmates led to the exoneration of Alejandro Hernandez after 11 years in jail.