The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston, S.C., won the annual Pulitzer Prize for public service on Monday for “Till Death Do Us Part,” which the judges described as “a riveting series that probed why South Carolina is among the deadliest states in the union for women and put the issue of what to do about it on the state's agenda.” The same series was named the winner of several other awards, including the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting this past February.
Glenn Smith, who accepted the John Jay/Guggenheim award on behalf of a team of four reporters at the newspaper, was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow at an annual criminal justice conference sponsored by John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice (CMCJ), the co-publisher of The Crime Report. Jennifer Gonnerman of The New Yorker magazine, who won the single-article criminal justice reporting award in the same John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim competition this year, was named a finalist Monday the Pulitzer Prize’s feature writing category for the same article, which the Pulitzer judges called “a taut, spare, devastating re-creation of the three-year imprisonment of a young man at Rikers Island, much of it spent in solitary confinement, after he was arrested for stealing a backpack.” The John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim awards recognized the best work published by U.S.-based print and online journalists between November 2013 and October 2014.