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SPRINGFIELD — Larry Golden said getting John Hanlon to come over to the Illinois Innocence Project in 2011 was "incredibly fortuitous." The project, based at the University of Illinois Springfield, was able to entice Hanlon after landing a major federal grant, said Golden, the project's founding member. Hanlon had been the assistant deputy defender for the Office of the Illinois Appellate Defender's Capital Litigation Unit since 2000. But in 2011, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn abolished the death penalty after a decadelong moratorium, meaning Hanlon would have to move to another OSAD office or...

John Hanlon, executive director of the Illinois Innocence Project since 2011, is retiring on June 30.

Since it was founded in 2001, the Illinois Innocence Project has helped exonerate or release 18 clients who were wrongfully convicted of crimes.

The client from Chicago was wrongfully accused of two crimes in the 1990s.

Adobe Stock Photo Gov. J.B. Pritzker has pardoned a man 30 years after the first of two wrongful convictions, the Illinois Innocence Project at the University of Illinois Springfield announced Friday. Norman Propst had been convicted of a robbery in 1990 based on a “notoriously unreliable eyewitness identification” and then convicted of workplace theft in 1997, though his managers said no crime occurred and one even resigned in support of Propst, the Innocence Project said in a statement. In the first instance, Propst took a plea deal and served several months in prison because his mother...