Rob Warden

Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, is an award-winning legal affairs journalist who, as editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer magazine during the 1980s exposed more than a score of wrongful convictions in Illinois, including the cases in which six innocent men had been sentenced to death. Before founding Chicago Lawyer, Warden had been an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor at the Chicago Daily News.

After selling Chicago Lawyer to the Law Bulletin Publishing Company in 1989, he 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. Warden is the author of co-author of hundreds of articles and five 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). Warden has won more than fifty 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.