Anthony Porter — two days from execution, freed by journalism students

In Chicago in August 1982, Anthony Porter was convicted of the double murder of Marilyn Green and Jerry Hillard, shot to death in Washington Park on the city’s South Side, and was sentenced to death; he was exonerated in 1999 after a Northwestern University investigation and the recantation of the sole eyewitness against him established that the case could not stand. Porter, who is Black and who tested with an IQ of 51, spent roughly sixteen years on Illinois’s death row for a crime the state ultimately conceded it could not prove he committed.

The outcome is settled, and so is the detail that defines the case: Porter came within roughly two days — about fifty hours — of being executed. In September 1998 the Illinois Supreme Court stayed his execution, not on the question of his guilt but on whether his cognitive disability left him competent to be put to death. That stay bought time. During it, journalism professor David Protess, his Northwestern students, and private investigator Paul Ciolino reinvestigated the case, found that the prosecution’s only eyewitness could not have seen what he claimed, and obtained that witness’s recantation. On February 5, 1999, Porter walked out of Cook County Jail; the charges were formally dismissed the following month.

No physical evidence had ever tied Porter to the killings. The conviction rested on the testimony of William Taylor, who told police he saw Porter shoot the victims — an account Taylor later swore had been pressured out of him, and that the investigation showed was physically impossible. The case is now studied as the clearest illustration of how thin a capital conviction can be.

This dossier centers Anthony Porter as the wronged party. The mechanism of the wrong was a coerced eyewitness, a near-total absence of physical proof, and a capital process that came within hours of making the error permanent. The case’s later complications — including a separate man’s confession that was itself contested and eventually set aside in 2014 — are recorded soberly below; none of them restored Porter’s conviction, which the courts had erased.