Maurice Possley and Steve Mills, two of our favorite investigative journalists writing for the Chicago Tribune --often on plight of the the wrongly convicted--today examine the effect of wrongful convictions on the jurors who voted to convict in cases in which DNA exonerated the defendants after trials.

More than 25 years after Michael Evans and Paul Terry were sentenced to 200 to 400 years in prison, some jurors are struggling with DNA tests that suggest they may have wrongly convicted the teenagers of the murder and sexual assault of a 9-year-old girl.

"This has devastated me," said one former juror, a college professor who asked to remain anonymous. "It is crushing--25 years in prison for something they did not do? I would rather be dead."

With nearly 125 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the last two decades in the nation, the anguish expressed by jurors in the Evans and Terry case is becoming a more frequent phenomenon as more cases long considered solved are re-examined and more guilty verdicts are set aside.

The Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law, a non-profit legal clinic created by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld in 1992, reports that 123 people have been exonerated by post-conviction DNA.

"The jurors who have the toughest time with exonerations are the ones who in their hearts suspected the defendants were innocent or that they were not given all the information about the case," Scheck said.

What justification can Orrin Hatch have for opposing the Innocence Protection Act that allows inmates to obtain DNA testing that was not available at their trials? We hope you will all write Congress and tell them to pass this bill. It's been languishing in Congress too long, held up by Hatch and a few of his cronies.