Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore, For their own good: a St. Petersburg Times special report on child abuse at the Florida School for Boys, Part 1. Tampa Bay Times, 17 April 2009. “The men remember the same things: blood on the walls, bits of lip or tongue on the pillow, the smell of urine and whiskey, the way the bed springs sang with each blow. The way they cried out for Jesus or mama. The grinding of the old fan that muffled their cries. The one-armed man who swung the strap. They remember walking into the dark little building on the campus of the Florida School for Boys, in bare feet and white pajamas, afraid they’d never walk out…. This story is based on more than 100 hours of interviews with 27 men who were sent to the Florida School for Boys in the 1950s and ’60s, and with current and former officials with the state, the school and the Department of Juvenile Justice. The interviews were supplemented with newspaper clippings, congressional and court testimony, archival photographs and other documents. Over five months, the reporters traveled to Marianna four times. Since launching its investigation, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has sealed access to the school, now called the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys.” Part 2: Ben Montgomery and Waveney Ann Moore, “For Their Own Good. Florida juvenile justice: 100 years of hell at the Dozier School for Boys.” Tampa Bay Times, 9 October 2009.
For their own good: a St. Petersburg Times special report on child abuse at the Florida School for Boys
Lives of the Saints: the Mormon Church is struggling with a troubled legacy
Lawrence Wright, Lives of the Saints. The New Yorker, 21 January 2002. “At a time when Mormonism is booming, the Church is struggling with a troubled legacy.”
Chicago Tribune Watchdog Investigation: Cops and Confessions. Chicago police substitute interrogation for thorough investigation
Ken Armstrong, Steve Mills and Maurice Possley, Tribune Watchdog Investigation: Cops and Confessions. Chicago Tribune, 16 December 2001. 6-Part Series, December 2001-January 2002. Part 1: Coercive and illegal tactics torpedo scores of Cook County murder cases. “Substituting interrogation for thorough investigation, police in Chicago and Cook County have repeatedly closed murder cases with dubious confessions that imprison the innocent while killers go free.” Part 2: Veteran detective’s murder cases unravel. “Some statements cop has extracted stand out for way they fall through.” Part 3: Officers ignore laws set up to guard kids. “Detectives grill minors without juvenile officers or parents present.” Part 4: When jail is no alibi in murders. “Just as [Daniel Taylor] was going to be formally charged with two counts of murder [to which he had previously confessed], Taylor protested to detectives that he could not have committed the crimes because he had been in police custody when they occurred.” Part 5: DNA voids murder confession. By Kirsten Scharnberg and Steve Mills. “In the first case of a videotaped murder confession unraveling in Cook County, a man who was recorded saying he stabbed his mother was freed on Friday after DNA tests linked another man to the crime.” Part 6: Cops urged to tape their interrogations. By Steve Mills and Michael Higgins. “Chicago videotapes only confessions.”
Winner of the 2001 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Journalism.
Torn From the Land: Black Americans’ Farmland Taken Through Cheating, Intimidation, Even Murder
Todd Lewan and Dolores Barclay, Torn From the Land: Black Americans’ Farmland Taken Through Cheating, Intimidation, even Murder. The Associated Press, 2 December 2001. A three-part series. “In an 18-month investigation, The Associated Press documented a pattern in which black Americans were cheated out of their land or driven from it through intimidation, violence and even murder. In some cases, government officials approved the land takings; in others, they took part in them. The earliest occurred before the Civil War; others are being litigated today.”
Justice Derailed: Capital Punishment in Illinois
Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills, Justice Derailed. Chicago Tribune, 14 November 1999. 5-Part Series in November 1999. Part 1: Death Row justice derailed. “Capital punishment in Illinois is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken, a Tribune investigation has found.” Part 2: Inept defenses cloud verdict. “Since Illinois reinstated capital punishment in 1977, 26 Death Row inmates…have received a new trial or sentencing because their attorneys’ incompetence rendered the verdict or sentence unfair, court records show.” Part 3: The jailhouse informant. “Even prosecutors acknowledge that jailhouse informants are among the least reliable of witnesses. Yet in Illinois, at least 46 inmates have been sent to Death Row in cases where prosecutors used a jailhouse informant, according to a Tribune investigation that examined the 285 death-penalty cases since capital punishment was reinstated in 1977.” Part 4: A tortured path to Death Row. ” For police and prosecutors, few pieces of evidence close a case better than a confession. After all, juries place a remarkable degree of faith in confessions; few people can imagine suspects would admit guilt if they were innocent. But, in Illinois, confessions have proved faulty.” Part 5: Convicted by a hair. “[O]ver the last decade or so, hair-comparison evidence has been exposed as notoriously untrustworthy.”
Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Cocaine Explosion in the US
Gary Webb, Dark Alliance. San Jose Mercury News (online at Narco News), 18, 19 and 20 August 1996 and 16 September 1996. Part One, 18 August 1996: “America’s ‘crack’ plague has roots in Nicaragua war. Colombia-SanFrancisco Bay Area drug pipeline helped finance CIA-backed Contras. Backers of CIA-led Nicaraguan rebels brought cocaine to poor L.A. neighborhoods in early ’80s to help finance war–and a plague was born.” Part Two, 19 August 1996: “How a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager created the cocaine pipeline, and how crack was ‘born’ in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974. [In the] shadowy origins of ‘crack’ epidemic, [the] role of CIA-linked agents [was] a well-protected secret until now [August 1996]. Part Three, 20 August 1996: [The] war on drugs has [an] unequal impact on black Americans. [The] Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces life.”
Town Without Pity: Police torture in Chicago: The courts know about it, the media know about it, and chances are you know about it. So why aren’t we doing anything about it?
John Conroy, Town Without Pity: Police torture in Chicago. Chicago Reader, 11 January 1996. “Police torture [in Chicago]: The courts know about it, the media know about it, and chances are you know about it. So why aren’t we doing anything about it?”
Human Guinea Pigs Used To Study Syphilis: Patients Died Untreated
Jean Heller, Human Guinea Pigs Used To Study Syphilis. Associated Press, 24 July 1972. “For 40 years the U.S. Health Service has conducted a study in which human guinea pigs, denied proper medical treatment, have died of syphilis and its side effects. The study was conducted to determine from autopsies what the disease does to the human body.”