American professor and advocate for the wrongly-convicted. He first became interested in the death penalty back in 1953, when he was just seven years old, when he heard about the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Years later, while teaching political science at the University of Chicago, Watergate got him interested in investigative reporting. After he got his doctorate in public policy, he worked as a contributing editor for a magazine called "Chicago Lawyer" and joined the faculty of Northwestern University as a journalism professor.

Protess wrote about wrongful convictions in "Chicago Lawyer" and was able to help clear a suburban couple accused of strangling their daughter in the late-1980s. Soon, his office was inundated with mail from convicts claiming they were innocent, so he enlisted his journalism students' help in investigating the claims.

Protess and his class' first big success came when they helped clear the "Ford Heights Four", a group of black men convicted of a 1978 rape and murder with testimony from only one mentally unstable witness, no physical evidence, and heavy media and political pressure. Protess' class discovered old police notes indicating that an eyewitness had identified four different men who had been seen selling merchandise stolen from the gas station where the victims were abducted. The students used the lead to track down some of the other suspects, who confessed to the murders. The "Ford Heights Four" were released from prison in 1996.

The class' next big success was Anthony Porter, convicted of a double murder and sentenced to death. He was, again, convicted on testimony from one less-than-reliable source. After visiting the crime scene and re-enacting the murders, the students in the class realized that the eyewitness had been standing too far away, looking through a chain-link fence after midnight. The ex-wife of another suspect told the students that she had watched her ex kill the victims, and the man soon confessed to the crime, allowing Porter to walk out of prison.

More recently, Protess and his class helped reverse the rape and murder conviction of Ronald Jones, making Jones the twelfth death row inmate in Illinois to be cleared on DNA evidence and prompting Illinois governor George Ryan to suspend his state's death penalty.

Protess is vehemently despised by most prosecutors, who claim that he starts out with the intent to manufacture proof of innocence, but Protess' methods involve simply reviewing the facts of the case and looking for what prosecutors and police might have overlooked--and Protess notes that he and his class usually determine that the conviction was justified. Prosecutorial complaints about Protess' work usually boil down to "He's makin' us look bad!"