Two of the best investigative journalists anywhere, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley of the Chicago Tribune, have a special report today on the legacy of wrongful convictions. The report finds that after a wrongful conviction is exposed, police and prosecutors cling to their original theories and seldom pursue new leads and suspects.

Since the death penalty's reinstatement in the mid-1970s, more than 100 people have been sentenced to be executed, only to be set free when they were legally absolved. The Tribune reviewed 88 cases in which 97 Death Row prisoners were set free, eliminating those cases with self-defense claims or pleas to lesser charges, to focus on those where a crime was left unsolved.

Each of those Death Row releases suggested the justice system had corrected itself. Instead, the legacy of those cases is a new set of troubling legal and ethical dilemmas that is largely lost amid the burst of public attention that accompanies a condemned inmate's unexpected freedom.

As a result, rarely is anyone brought to justice for crimes once considered worthy of society's most severe punishment, a failure that takes on greater significance when there is a possibility the real killer has been allowed to commit other crimes.