Kris Hundley and Kendall Taggart, America’s Worst Charities. A collaboration between the Tampa Bay Times, The Center for Investigative Reporting and CNN. Four-part series beginning on 6 June 2013. “You’ve given them more than $1 billion. They’ve given almost nothing to the needy.”
May 19, 2013
Officer Serrano’s Hidden Camera: The stop-and-frisk trials of Pedro Serrano
Jennifer Gonnerman, Officer Serrano’s Hidden Camera: the stop-and-frisk trials of Pedro Serrano:NYPD rat, NYPD hero. New York Magazine, 19 May 2013. “Officer Pedro Serrano walked through the heavy wooden doors of the 40th Precinct in the South Bronx and headed upstairs to the locker room. For eight years he’d been working out of this 89-year-old station house, with its broken fax machines and crummy computers. “We work in a shithole,” the cops there would say, “but it’s our shithole.” Serrano, 43, had the day off—he’d stopped by only to pick up some papers—but when he got close to his locker, he noticed something strange. Someone had placed a dozen rat stickers on the door.” [Read more…]
December 17, 2012
The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Got Its Way in Mexico
David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Got Its Way in Mexico. The New York Times, 17 December 2012. (This is Part Two of a two-part series. Part One: Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle.) “Wal-Mart Abroad: A retail giant fueled growth with bribes. Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited…”
December 17, 2012
Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s
Raffi Khatchadourian, Operation Delirium. The New Yorker, 17 December 2012. “Military doctors who helped conduct the [psychochemical] experiments [during the 1950s and ’60s] have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” Companion piece to Operation Delirium: High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War by Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 16 December 2012. “For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation [torture] technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium”…documents the people who were involved and what they did.” Primary Sources : Operation Delirium, The New Yorker, 26 December 2012.
December 1, 2012
The Innocent Man, Part Two
Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, Part Two. Texas Monthly, December 2012. This is Part Two of a two-part story. Part One was published in November 2012. “During the 25 years that Michael Morton spent wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his wife, he kept three things in mind: someday he would prove his innocence to their son. Someday he would find out who had killed her. And someday he would understand how this had happened to him.”
November 28, 2012
The Cash Machine: Civil Asset Forfeiture in Philadelphia
Isaiah Thompson, The Cash Machine. Philadelphia City Paper, 28 November 2012. “An investigation by City Paper, assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, into the Philadelphia District Attorney’s civil asset forfeiture process reveals one of the largest American municipal-forfeiture programs for which City Paper has seen statistics, and one that operates with great efficiency largely by allowing questions of guilt, innocence or whether a crime has even been alleged to come last, if at all.
While the District Attorney’s Office files hundreds of cases each year seeking the forfeiture of real estate, this process is in many ways separate and distinct from the thousands of cases it files against seized currency or cash. It is the latter that brings in the bulk of forfeiture revenue — about $4.5 million — and City Paper focused primarily on currency forfeitures for this story.
CP analyzed records for thousands of forfeiture cases, spent weeks monitoring legal proceedings and spoke with many individuals caught up in the process of attempting to reclaim their property. The picture that emerged was a kind of “seize first, ask questions later” policy in forfeiting individuals’ money. You might think of it as a corollary to the better-known (and controversial) policy of “stop and frisk” that exists here and in other cities. Call it “stop and seize,” a legal dragnet that catches the innocent, guilty and unaccused alike.”
November 1, 2012
The Innocent Man, Part One
Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, Part One.Texas Monthly, November 2012. This is Part One of a two-part story. Part Two was published in December 2012. “On August 13, 1986, Michael Morton came home from work to discover that his wife had been brutally murdered in their bed. His nightmare had only begun.”
October 29, 2012
The Voter-Fraud Myth: The man [Hans von Spakovsky] who has stoked fear about imposters at the polls
Jane Mayer, The Voter-Fraud Myth. The New Yorker, 29 October 2012. From Jane Mayer’s Notes on Voter Fraud, The New Yorker, 1 November 2012: “[W]hat [Hans von Spakovsky] and other such fearmongers are stubbornly wrong about, and won’t acknowledge no matter how much evidence piles up, is that there is virtually no modern record of individual voters trying to steal elections by impersonating others at the polls. It is this phantom threat that has fuelled the push for voter-I.D. laws over the past few years…. [A] nationwide study of legal records undertaken by the reporting consortium News21 found a grand total of only seven convictions for this type of voter fraud since 2000.”
September 10, 2012
The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace
Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt. Published by Public Affairs on 10 September 2012. “In 1970, Newsweek magazine decided to do a cover story on the brand new Women’s Movement, but there was just one problem: they had no woman to write it. Only men were hired as writers on the magazine; women were hired as researchers and rarely, if ever, promoted to reporter or writer. The day Newsweek hit the stands with its cover called “WOMEN IN REVOLT,” 46 of us sued the magazine for sex discrimination. We were the first women in the media to sue and comprised the first female class action suit. Following us, women working at Time Inc., The Reader’s Digest, The New York Times, NBC and the Associated Press, among others, also sued their employers.”
September 3, 2012
The Throwaways: Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants
Sarah Stillman, The Throwaways. The New Yorker, 3 September 2012. “Police enlist young offenders as confidential informants. But the work is high-risk, largely unregulated, and sometimes fatal…. In exchange for leniency, untrained informants are sent out to perform dangerous police operations with few legal protections.”