A Promise of Justice: The Eighteen Year Fight to Save Four Innocent Men.

• Author: Lerner, Preston

In a nation where the fear of crime is more prevalent than crime itself, capital punishment is a growth industry. Nearly 3,400 Americans reside on death rows, and their numbers increase daily despite our declining murder rate. More than 400 inmates have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment a quarter-century ago. Last year alone, the death toll was 74--a modern record.

Although capital punishment may be justified in particularly heinous cases, even its strongest supporters can't help but worry about the possibility of executing an innocent person. And while mistakes are rare, no fewer than 75 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973. Add to this dozens of hapless victims--Sacco and Vanzetti, to name the most notorious example--whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A Promise of Justice, the latest entry in the subgenre of miscarriage-of-justice chronicles, documents a crime that horrified suburban Chicago in 1978: A white couple was abducted from a gas station and driven to the decaying black neighborhood of Ford Heights. There, the woman was raped, and she and her fiance were killed. Four black men with no history of violent crime were arrested after a perfunctory police investigation. All were convicted of murder, and two were sentenced to death, largely on the basis of testimony that was later recanted. In a supreme irony, the "eyewitness" who recanted was charged with perjury for telling the truth.

Written by David Protess, a professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, and former Chicago Lawyer editor/publisher Robert Warden, the book recounts the authors' 15-year struggle to free the so-called Ford Heights Four. Their doggedness in the face of repeated disappointment is inspirational. Stories in the muckraking Chicago Lawyer prompted new trials. After a second set of convictions, Protess enlisted the aid of his journalism students. In the end, this ragtag collection of amateur investigators not only proved the innocence of the Ford Heights Four but also wrangled confessions out of the real killers.

This is great stuff, and it ought to make for compelling reading. Unfortunately, the book falls short both as entertainment and prescription. While A Promise of Justice is a shining illustration of the power of an unfettered press, it also spotlights the failings of conventional, resolutely objective journalism in an age when celebrity is measured in minutes and...