WATERVILLE – Two Chicago Tribune reporters honored Wednesday by Colby College for their stories about prosecutorial misconduct and flawed death penalty cases said reforming the criminal justice system is not akin to being soft on crime.

Steve Mills and Maurice Possley received the college’s 51st Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, named for the Colby alumnus regarded as the nation’s first martyr to freedom of the press.

The Tribune’s examination of how bad lawyers, faulty evidence and forced confessions undermine the administration of justice led the Illinois governor to place a moratorium on all executions in the state.

Voters and legislators must realize that tinkering with the system to prevent wrongful convictions does not mean being soft on criminals, Possley said. Such reforms, he said, would prevent costly retrials and save tens of millions of dollars paid out in judgments and settlements to the wrongly convicted.

“The players in the criminal justice system – police and prosecutors, judges and defense lawyers – must step forward and admit that mistakes have been made and ethical lines have been crossed. They must acknowledge their responsibility to seek justice, to seek the truth,” Possley said.

Mills said he and Possley felt a kinship with Lovejoy, although they never shared the risks he was exposed to when he was murdered in 1837 while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Ill.

“Where Lovejoy exposed the absolute falsehood of slavery – the stain it left on a young nation and its ideals – we have worked to inform the debate over capital punishment,” Mills said.

“We have exposed myths in the criminal justice system – that all criminal defendants are served by competent attorneys, that they are brought to trial by only fair-minded police and prosecutors, and that their fates are weighed by only unbiased juries and judges,” he said.

Possley hailed the emergence of DNA evidence in exonerating more than 135 defendants in Illinois, but said DNA’s true value is what it says about the criminal justice system as a whole.

“DNA has proven positively – with an exactitude heretofore unknown in criminal justice – that eyewitnesses make mistakes or are steered by police to pick out the wrong assailants, that jailhouse snitches lie, that laboratory scientists are negligent or commit fraud, that police lie, and that men and women do confess to crimes they did not commit,” he said.

In recounting how several of their investigative stories developed, Mills and Possley cited the case of death row inmate Aaron Patterson, who claimed that a confession wrung out of him by police beatings led to his conviction for the murders of an elderly Chicago couple.

The Tribune’s stories led to a pardon for Patterson, who visited the Tribune within hours of his release, Mills recalled.

“He didn’t bother with a phone call or a letter. A man who had not drawn a free breath in 15 years decided that in the first hours off death row, he wanted to come into the newsroom and shake our hands. ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for saving my life.'”

“The power of that is unforgettable,” Mills said. “Aaron Patterson was supposed to die by a lethal injection. And here he was, holding a Starbucks coffee, no less, and standing in our newsroom.”