Wednesday, April 06, 2011 01:30
Crime Reporting Case Study Scripps Howard News Service "Murder Mysteries: Investigating America's Unsolved Homicides" (An Online Investigation)
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By Debora Halpern Wenger
Monday, February 07, 2011 03:27
A team of five reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer has been documenting serious problems in Philadelphia’s court system for more than two years for their groundbreaking series, "Justice: Delayed, Dismissed, Denied." Their investigation found that the city had the highest violent crime rate among America's 10 largest cities and among the lowest conviction rates for big cities. Nearly two-thirds of all defendants accused of violent crimes in Philadelphia have been allowed to walk free.
University of Missouri journalism professor Debora Halpern Wenger interviewed the reporting team about their investigative techniques.
Read the case study.
Read the NICAR tip sheet the Philadelphia Inquirer team put together.
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Tuesday, July 20, 2010 04:22
South Florida is not only a hub of the national medicare fraud problem; it is a business “incubator” for similar fraud elsewhere.
Read full entry »Friday, February 05, 2010 02:51
In a series called “True Crime,” published between September 27 and December 18, 2009, the paper sought to depict the truth about crime in their city through an innovative mapping project.
Read the case study. Click here and the document will download to your desktop.
Learn how to create your own crime database. Click here and the document will download to your desktop.
Contact reporters, editors and computer reporters for additional information. Click here and the document will download to your desktop.
Watch the video
Read full entry »Wednesday, October 21, 2009 04:51
In 2008, there was no dominant event in crime and justice for the news media to cover, according to a report prepared by Criminal Justice Journalists on Media Crime Coverage in the United States.
Due to the lack of a sensational case, such as O.J. Simpson or Laci Petersen, blanketing news coverage, the study explores some of the major crime and justice issues that made the news in 2008 and assess how well or poorly the news media covered them.
Access a copy of the study here.
Read full entry »Wednesday, October 14, 2009 03:51
A project of the Center on Media, Crime & Justice
and Criminal Justice Journalists
Debora Wenger
University of Mississippi
Kendra Gentry
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Crime Reporting Case Study: Probation and Parole
Deb Halpern Wenger, University of Mississippi
“Criminals free on probation or parole kill, rob and rape all too often in a state where repeat offenders routinely are released into a system that is too under-manned and ill-equipped to maintain control.”
Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith
The Post and Courier
It’s estimated that two-thirds of America’s criminals under correctional supervision are living in the community, not in prisons. According to research by the Pew Center on the States, one in 45 American adults is on probation or parole.
More than a year before the Pew Center’s study was released; investigative reporters Doug Pardue and Glenn Smith of The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina began looking into why their state seemed to have so many cases of violent crimes being committed by people who had been paroled or placed on probation.
Pardue, who also edited the five-part series, “Law and Disorder,” said the first thing to overcome in tackling this story was the “it’s not new” bias. Stories on individual crimes often note that the accused person was on probation or parole, but journalists rarely take a systemic look at how the justice system decides who should be in custody and for how long.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started to look at something and a reporter says, ‘We’ve already done that.’ Lots of people touch on lots of issues, but often there’s not a thorough look. We saw very few cases where journalists took on all the contributing institutions to really investigate the issue,” Pardue said.
Pardue and Smith spent more than six months trying to determine what was at the heart of what appeared to be a serious breakdown in South Carolina’s system for handling people on probation and parole. They found those tasked with supervising inmates in the community to be dealing with overwhelmingly large caseloads and a lack of sometimes basic resources, judges struggling to balance the need to alleviate the strain on overcrowded prisons and a desire to protect citizens, and story after story of victims who paid the price for the system’s failures.
Too many to monitor
Probation and parole agents are on the front lines of the battle to control those inmates whom the state has returned to the community under supervision. In South Carolina, the newspaper reported that each agent has an average caseload of more than 109 offenders – that’s 34 more than the recommended national average. In one instance, the reporters found two agents who each must keep track of about 181 people – 106 more than the national standard.
“These poor officers; in most cases, they don’t get to help people break the cycle of crime – the reason why they got into the business in the first place,” Smith said.
Through multiple interviews with agents, Smith found that the social worker function of the position – the opportunity to connect offenders with jobs and services that might help them avoid a life of crime – is largely a thing of the past. Agent Kescia Holmes told the paper she took the job hoping to make a difference, but her heavy caseload has offered a brutal reality check.
“I know I can’t save 150 people,” Holmes, 36, said. “I used to be real hard on myself, more than anything. But then I just came to the realization that there’s no way a person comes in and sits with me for a period of, at the most, 15 or 20 minutes and all of a sudden I can change their world. I can’t do that.”
Smith said the state’s top probation and parole officials were reluctant to cooperate on the project, so the rank and file agents were invaluable in fully reporting the story. Smith says their anecdotes made the series.
Judgment day
The Post and Courier’s stories placed little blame on police and probation agents for the role they play in trying to handle problem criminals, but the reporting was somewhat less sympathetic to the judiciary.
The paper reported that “between 2003 and 2007, less than half of the 64,970 criminals arrested for violating the terms of their releases had their probation revoked by a judge.”
At the same time, Pardue and Smith made it clear that the sheer volume of cases makes it difficult for judges to be thoughtful and thorough. The paper noted that often, “in just minutes, [judges] must decide who gets another shot at probation and who should be shipped off to prison.”
Factor in the very real obstacles presented by the state’s overcrowded prisons and the annual cost of incarceration versus probation (in 2007, $14,093 per inmate in prison vs. $1,080 per offender on regular probation), and it’s not difficult to see why judges often err on the side of giving offenders another chance.
It may also be that the judges are just playing the odds. According to the paper, “state officials boast an overall 65 percent success rate for people completing their supervised release time without repeat criminal activity, but that leaves 35 percent who might continue to prey on their communities.”
“I live in fear all the time of not putting someone in jail who should be put in jail and then having them go out and commit one of these horrible crimes,” Circuit Judge Thomas Hughston said.
Victims’ stories
Throughout the series, the system’s inability to protect the public adequately was made apparent through the stories of more than a dozen victims. One of the most compelling was that of Julianne Blakeley. The 63-year-old woman was found dead, raped and murdered by a man who had been released on parole two months earlier. It was the third time in five years that the suspect had been freed on probation or parole, and each time he went on to commit more and more serious crimes.
“It was very easy to see early on there are great human stories to tell,” Pardue said.
Impact
The series strove to go beyond simply outlining the problems and tried to offer potential solutions as well. For example, the reporters looked at states that had abolished parole in an attempt to tackle the problems inherent in the system. They talked with Professor Ronald Wright at Wake Forest University, who says approximately 20 states have abolished parole. Most have also adopted sentencing reform to prompt judges to impose shorter and more equitable sentences. Without that, Wright says prisons would all too quickly become even more overcrowded.
In addition, the reporters spoke with South Carolina’s attorney general, who advocates allowing most non-violent criminals to go free under the control of a judge who could lock them up at any time for violating the conditions of release. They talked with others who simply recommended more funding for the probation and parole agency.
Pardue says the series had immediate statewide impact. In the aftermath of their reporting, the state’s two top legislative officials--the leaders of both the senate and the house--said that the stories provided a roadmap for what needed to be done to solve the system’s problems. Pardue says they promised they would push through bills to correct the situation.
But the economy took a nosedive soon after the series was published in August 2008.
“The budget crisis killed the desire to make changes. Probation and parole are in worse shape now than when we reported the series,” Pardue said.
How they did it
Smith and Pardue worked together on the project, in and around other stories. After about 30 years of investigative reporting and editing, Pardue says he finds team reporting is generally the best approach. For example, Smith is a veteran crime reporter.
“It’s often good to have a beat expert plus a pure investigative reporter, and that way the two can work together from their strengths,” Pardue said. He also points out the added benefit of having someone to keep your spirits up during a sometimes tedious investigative process.
Though the series was fairly data rich, both Smith and Pardue commented on the difficulty of finding sources for statistics on this topic.
“We mined what we could out of federal sources, (such as) the Bureau of Justice Statistics, but there doesn’t seem to be a central clearinghouse for information,” Smith said.
At the state level, Smith found some of the key data were online. For example, the probation and parole board provided information on the inmates under its supervision, as did the corrections department, but Pardue was frustrated by not being able to say exactly how many people on probation commit more major crimes. In the end, that forced the two reporters to focus the series on people vs. statistics.
“What I liked best about the series is that it really took you out to the front lines to the people doing the work and the people affected by the work,” Smith said.
That desire to show and tell led Smith to produce a video story which detailed a new strategy probation and parole officers were using to crack down on violators. The approach involved pairing police with agents on warrant sweeps and home visits. The video was published on the paper’s Web site and promoted in the paper along with a map showing where all the inmates under supervision in the city were located.
“It’s always helpful to hear from a few people in their own voices, helpful to see people in action trying to do their jobs,” said Pardue.
More stories
Pardue says the paper’s investigative team has a commitment to continue reporting on this topic. “Follow up is the most critical thing to make sure you accomplish what you set out to do. Investigative reporting is trying to fix things,” Pardue said.
Pardue also believes this story can and should be done in other markets. He suggests starting with a search through your newsroom archives for stories that indicate a criminal got out of prison and victimized someone innocent. “You have to shock yourself first, make yourself realize this really is a problem. Not a bureaucratic problem of how many officers per inmate, you have to start seeing it in the eyes of innocent victims.”
A day in court
Smith believes a strong story could be done by simply spending a day or two in court watching how probation violations are handled. The paper’s series included an anecdote about a police officer who sat through 43 probation hearings one day to see what happened. All but three violators remained on probation or were set free with no additional reporting requirements.
Criminal backgrounds
Another idea comes from one of the prosecutors interviewed for the series. Seventh Circuit Solicitor Trey Gowdy said, “You would be hard-pressed to find a serious violent crime in your jurisdiction or my jurisdiction where you can’t find the point on the suspect’s rap sheet where he or she should have been in prison and not on the street to commit a crime.” It would be easy enough to take five or six high-profile crimes in your area and do just that to help illustrate the impact of a faulty system.
Scrutinizing second chances
Smith says one thing he would have liked to do for the series they produced is to track over time some of those on probation or parole. “The idea is to look at someone who gets a second chance, follow them for several months to see what happens,” Smith suggests.
That idea dovetails with something Pardue wants the investigative unit to pursue – a deeper look at the corrections system as a whole. For example, Smith will be exploring what impact the corrections department has on inmates – what are they like when they’re released from prison, what kind of rehabilitation actually occurs inside and how hard is it to make a life when you have to deal with issues such as carrying an ID that says “released prisoner?” In addition, reporters might check on how states and localities use aid under a new federal law called the Second Chance Act, which supports programs that help former inmates re-enter society successfully.
Smith says reporters who tell these stories are doing important work.
“Why tell the story? People’s lives depend on it. As state budgets shrink, there’s more pressure to take people out of prison and put them on the street. If the state can’t handle them effectively, people are going to get hurt,” Smith said.
Crime Reporting Case Study: Resource Guide for Reporting on Prisoner Reentry, Probation and Parole
Kendra Gentry, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
JOURNAL ARTICLES:
Alexander, M., & VanBenschoten, S. (2008). Evolution of supervision in the federal probation system. Federal Probation, 72(2), 15-21.
Petersilia, Joan (2004). What Works in Prisoner Reentry? Reviewing and Questioning the Evidence. Federal Probation, 68(2), 4-9.
Taxman, F.S., Young, D. & Byrne, J. (2004). Transforming offender reentry into public safety: Lessons from OJP’s Reentry Partnership Initiative. Justice Policy and Research, 5(2),101-128.
NATIONAL REPORTS:
The Pew Center on the States (2009). One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections. http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org/report_detail.aspx?id=49382
Travis, J. (2000). But They All Come Back: Rethinking Prisoners Reentry. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice.
www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/181413.pdf
Lynch, J., and Sabol, W. (2001). Crime Policy Report: Prisoner Reentry in Perspective. The Urban Institute. http://www.urban.org/pdfs/410213_reentry.pdf
Solomon, A. L., Kachnowski, V., & Bhati, A.(2005). Does Parole Work? Analyzing the Impact of Postprison Supervision on Rearrest Outcomes.
http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/311156_Does_Parole_Work.pdf
OTHER RESOURCES:
American Correctional Association
American Probation and Parole Association
Association of Paroling Authorities International
National Institute of Corrections
New York State Parole Project – Vera Institute
www.vera.org/project/new-york-state-parole-project
Reentry – U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs
Serious and Violent Offender Re-Entry Initiative
United States Parole Commission
OTHER RESOURCES (cont.)
Urban Institute
Prisoner Reentry Institute, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
www.jjay.cuny.edu/centersandinstitutes/pri/1921.php
MORE COVERAGE:
“Oakland Police Shootings Stoke Criticism of Parole Oversight”
Los Angeles Times
March 24, 2009
by Andrew Blankstein and Maria L. LaGanga
“Allegations of Impropriety Surround Parole Commission”
Washington Post
May 26, 2009
by Joe Stephens
“Abolish Parole”
New York Times Op-Ed
October 28, 2007
by Jeffrey A. Meyer and Linda Ross Meyer
Quinnipiac University School of Law professors
CONTACTS:
Joan Petersilia, Ph.D.
Professor, Criminology, Law & Society
University of California, Irvine
Co-Director, UCI Center on Evidence-Based Corrections
University of California, Irvine
949-824-6438
949-824-7372 (assistant)
James M. Byrne, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology
University of Massachusetts - Lowell
978-934-3992
A copy of the study can be accessed here.
Read full entry »Wednesday, October 14, 2009 02:42
Crime Reporting Case Study: Mortgage Fraud
Deborah Potter, NewsLab
“This was happening all over and everybody was in on the scheme.”
--Patrick Scott, business editor, The Charlotte Observer
For years, it seemed the sky was the limit for real estate in Charlotte, N.C. The second largest U.S. banking center after New York City was one of the nation’s fastest growing areas in the early 2000s. But the boom in home sales was driven in part by subprime loans that resulted in a wave of foreclosures.
In 2007, a year-long investigation by The Charlotte Observer found the surge in foreclosures “had as much to do with the builder as it did the borrower,” said business editor Patrick Scott.
The builder was Atlanta-based Beazer Homes USA, at the time one of the ten largest home builders in the country. The newspaper found it had aggressively sold starter homes in the Charlotte area to low income buyers in ways that made a high rate of foreclosures inevitable. A Beazer subsidiary arranged larger loans than many buyers could afford and sold homes for more than they were worth. The paper uncovered falsified mortgage documents and apparent violations of federal law, as well as federal and state lending rules.
The sales strategy was a financial success for the home builder, the paper reported, but the new neighborhoods fell apart. At the time the series ran, almost one in five buyers in Beazer’s Southern Chase subdivision had lost their homes to foreclosure, more than six times the national rate.
That neighborhood was not an exception. The paper’s investigation found that in dozens of newly-built developments of low-priced homes around Charlotte, foreclosure rates were 20 percent or higher.
“Prices fell. Renters moved in. Crime sometimes rose,” the paper reported. “But as the foreclosures piled up, authorities were unaware.” The investigation revealed that no one was tracking foreclosures at that time—not the city, the county, the state or the federal government.
“Nobody ever had shown the public officials that there’s an issue here that needs to be recognized, and a problem in the growth of Charlotte, which has been pretty lax in any sort of regulation,” said Scott.
“We knew immediately that we had written something profoundly powerful,” said lead reporter Binyamin Appelbaum. “What was less clear for a while was what difference it was going to make.”
Faces of foreclosure
The newspaper’s four-part series, Sold a Nightmare, put a human face on the subprime meltdown as it pinpointed who was to blame. Beazer marketed its homes at apartment complexes, taking people like 20-year-old maintenance worker Chris Wood on tours of its new developments.
“I went in thinking, ‘I don’t make enough money. I’m making $9 an hour,’ ” Wood recalled.
He was startled when a Beazer employee told him he could afford a home. He borrowed $500 from his grandmother to make the deposit.
As it turned out, he didn’t make enough money. Wood’s final loan application misstated his income and debts. Without the misstatements, he did not appear to meet FHA’s requirements for the loan he needed.
He was suddenly spending 45 percent of his income on debt payments each month. He was in trouble almost instantly.
While the paper repeatedly noted that buyers like Wood share responsibility for loans they accept, the series “explored how the bad actors operate,” said database editor Ted Mellnik, who developed an interactive online map of the neighborhood that vividly illustrated the scope of the problem. The map highlighted every foreclosed home in the Southern Chase neighborhood and linked to background information and a photograph.
“What I liked about that map was it really let people visualize this neighborhood and see what kind of houses they are, and kind of in a way see what kind of people they are,” Mellnik said. “People could see this isn’t a crummy slum somewhere and this should be sort of a normal neighborhood.”
The online package also included video profiles of two couples who owned homes at Southern Chase. “They were really critical to hearing the stories of the homeowners and seeing…how these people really were bright, average, ordinary people,” said business editor Patrick Scott, “It’s not like [Rick Santelli of CNBC] on the floor of the stock exchange talking about loser homeowners who took on the bad loans knowing that they shouldn’t have. This wasn’t the case.”
Impact
The series provoked an immediate outcry from local and state officials. “There was a tremendous amount of outrage about the facts we were reporting,” Appelbaum said. During the reporting process, however, “the FBI had made it very clear to us they were not interested in mortgage fraud, they were busy preventing terrorism,” he said; the US attorney for the Western District of North Carolina[Preferred1] was equally uninterested. After the stories ran, federal and state agencies announced investigations.
“The FBI basically told us that they were investigating this because they couldn’t ignore it,” Appelbaum said. “We had detailed a case that was so blunt and clear in its particulars and massive in its implications that they had to deal with it.”
North Carolina wound up passing legislation “ensuring that lenders can’t make loans without understanding whether the people have the ability to pay them,” said Scott.
Beazer eventually admitted that some employees had violated federal lending rules and got out of the mortgage lending business. The company fired its chief accounting officer for attempting to destroy documents.[i] It remains under investigation by the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for possible criminal violations. The North Carolina Real Estate Commission is also investigating the company's lending practices.
“It’s always extremely gratifying when you can do a project that is a public service that has a wide reach and a broad scope and you did before almost every other newspaper in the nation,” Mellnik said.
“We surprised some people,” said reporter Lisa Hammersly, who also worked on the series. “It woke some people up. I don’t think enough change came out of it, but it may yet. It’s not over.”
How they did it
“Sold a Nightmare” was the third major housing investigation The Charlotte Observer had published in less than three years. In 2005, the paper discovered that minorities were more likely than whites to get risky, high-priced loans. The next year, the paper looked at the result: a pattern of foreclosures never seen before, concentrated in brand new suburban neighborhoods built for lower-income buyers. The unanswered question was, why?
“We knew there was something smelly going on,” said Mellnik. “It was just a question of whether it could be nailed down.”
Appelbaum, one of the Observer’s banking reporters, worked alone on the project for months while also reporting other stories. He knew he was onto something criminal very early on, after seeing that one Southern Chase homeowner’s income had been inflated on his final loan application. “That was mortgage fraud plain and clear,” Appelbaum said. “Who was guilty was a different question.
“My concern was to build up a pattern of evidence that would show that this had happened broadly and systematically and that people had been taken advantage of.”
Eventually, Appelbaum was assigned to the project full time, with help from Mellnik and Hammersly. To nail down the numbers, they examined county property records, building permits, court bankruptcy records and Federal Housing Administration data. Mellnik created a map of Southern Chase by “scraping” data from county government Web sites, including photos of each house, parcel maps and an ArcView shapefile. Appelbaum and Hammersly also spent countless hours in Southern Chase.
“Much of the information you need is not in public records at all, either print or electronic,” Appelbaum said. “You had to knock on enough doors and convince enough people to trust you with their personal, confidential financial records and you had to know what you were looking for when you got those records, and you had to believe it was worth doing that 200, 400, 600 times before you were sure you saw a pattern.”
Just seeing a pattern wasn’t enough, Hammersly said. “When you can gather the documents, then what you need is sound experts who can walk you through it, look at the documents and say, ‘Here’s a problem,” Hammersly said. “It took some looking to find people willing to do it.”
The reporters consulted forensic appraisal experts as well as the state banking commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. “You have to look at who the regulators are [and talk to them],” said Hammersly. “The banks did not want to talk about what it was like to be left on the hook.”
Getting through to Beazer was even more difficult. The company insisted Southern Chase was just an aberration, so the paper collected data showing that half the builder’s other neighborhoods around Charlotte had even higher foreclosure rates. “They stopped talking to us after that,” said Scott.
By the time the series was ready for publication, the Observer team had grown to 20, including researchers, photographers and designers. The project included eight stories, which ran over four days, along with buyer profiles and “how to” information that Appelbaum described as “a guide to the perplexed, a set of instructions for helping yourself.”
Using graphics and break-out boxes, the paper explained in simple terms how no-money-down loans and teaser rates can hurt buyers, and how foreclosures damage people and neighborhoods. “We used the pages inside to do explanatory journalism on a really confusing thing,” said Scott, “trying to break this down into components that were clear and meaningful.”
Next steps
Foreclosures in many other areas have been well documented by journalists since the Observer’s series ran. But[Preferred2] the Charlotte journalists believe there is still fertile ground to be explored.
FHA lending
Low-down-payment mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration account for nearly a third of all mortgage loans now being made, according to an investigation by The Washington Post, which found signs that the program is being seriously abused.[ii]
“That agency is really ill equipped to be providing or backing and overseeing loans,” said Scott.
The toll of foreclosures
When a community is riddled with foreclosures, “the pain is just extraordinary,” said Hammersly. She urged reporters to examine the issues on an extremely local level. “The closest look in your own neighborhood can be more telling that all the ‘suits’ holding news conferences across the country.”
For Appelbaum, the important question is what happens next to communities like Southern Chase all over the country, and to the people who live there[Preferred3] . “Those are now our new slums, our new forgotten places,” he said. “There’s a real chance the solution to this crisis is just to walk away from too many of those people and it’s a topic that deserves more coverage than it’s gotten.”
Access a resource guide on mortgage foreclosures
Wednesday, October 14, 2009 01:37
"Dangerous Trends, Innovative Responses 2007-2008" is a special report by Women's eNews regarding domestic violence. Despite increasing awareness and responses towards domestic violence through legislation and policy, homicide rates of intimate partners based on gender have not been equal, the study found.
Statistics provided by the U.S. Justice Department show that the number of female homicide victims have not decreased as much as the number of male homicides victims. The editors of Women's eNews explore different factors that account for the disparity of homicide rates based on gender.
Access the report here.
Read full entry »Wednesday, October 14, 2009 01:30
Crime Reporting Case Study: Mistaken Identities
A project of the Center on Media, Crime & Justice
and Criminal Justice Journalists
Debora Halpern Wenger
University of Mississippi
Kendra Gentry
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Kristine Trever
Virginia Commonwealth University
Presented at the 4th Annual Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America
February 2-3, 2009
Crime Reporting Case Study: Mistaken Identity
Deb Halpern Wenger, University of Mississippi
“Eyewitness testimony is the crack cocaine of the criminal justice system.”
-Steve McGonigle and Jennifer Emily
“Mistaken Identities” – The Dallas Morning News
Reporters Steve McGonigle and Jennifer Emily of the Dallas Morning News spent eight months in 2008 investigating local law enforcement’s apparent addiction to the use and misuse of eyewitnesses in prosecuting criminal suspects.
The Dallas market was particularly fertile ground for the story. According to the Innocence Project, a non-profit group dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people, analysis of DNA evidence from old crimes has resulted in 227 exonerations of convicts nationwide. Dallas County has led the country in DNA exonerations since 2001. Of the 19 exonerations studied by McGonigle and Emily, all but one of the cases was built on eyewitness accounts. But McGonigle and Emily pushed themselves to go beyond the typical DNA exoneration story.
“We wanted to know to what we could apply to cases being tried today,” McGonigle said. “Otherwise we’re on an archeological dig, and we didn’t want the current [justice system authorities] to be off the hook. They really hadn’t changed anything in the system, so we had to show these sorts of flaws existed today.”
What they found was “a criminal justice system that ignored safeguards to protect the innocent.” The reporters convinced the Dallas county district attorney, Craig Watkins, to open up never before seen prosecution files, and what they found was an overwhelmingly common use of photo lineups – lineups police showed to witnesses in the hopes they would identify a suspect. Despite the fact that it takes real expertise to conduct lineups properly, the reporters’ investigation also found that “most [Dallas-area] police agencies do not have written policies on identification techniques and police officers receive little formal training” in how to conduct them. The agencies seldom, if ever, used the sequential blind method recommended by social scientists, in which the photos are shown one at a time, instead of all at once, by an officer not involved in the case.
“Showups” common
Even more interesting to McGonigle was police reliance on what’s called a “showup.” The second part of the paper’s three part series focused on this form of eyewitness identification. Part two opened with the following powerful paragraphs:
“Billy Wayne Miller was asleep in a back bedroom of his father’s modest Oak Cliff home when three Dallas police officers burst through the front door around 3 a.m., guns in hand, yelling another man’s name.
Still groggy and clad only in his underwear, Mr. Miller was taken to the front porch. There he spotted a woman in a squad car glance at him and nod to an officer seated beside her before the car drove away.
That split-second, one-man lineup cost Mr. Miller 22 years of his life on a rape conviction that DNA evidence later invalidated.”
McGonigle and Emily began looking for more cases involving showups. In the end, they both reviewed more than 20 years worth of state appellate court opinions. “The more I looked, the more I saw,” said McGonigle. “We documented over one hundred, but we found the cops always minimize their use; showups are really below the radar screen.”
Showups are also called “drive-by” identification because witnesses are often driven in a squad car past a suspect. Critics say that witnesses can be eager to please the police or may believe that the police already have a good reason to suspect the person being shown to them. As in the case of the photo lineups, officers routinely conduct them without benefit of training or departmental policies to follow.
Showups continue despite the fact that they have long been considered problematic. A U.S. Justice Department publication recommended limits on their use, the U.S, Supreme Court deemed them “dangerously suggestive” more than 40 years ago and showups were cited as a critical flaw in at least 20 percent of DNA exonerations across the country, according to the Innocence Project Web site.
Robberies and wrongful convictions
Though exoneration stories are certainly dramatic, Emily and McGonigle set out to show that eyewitness testimony plays an even greater role in cases where there is no DNA available. In part three of the series, the two looked at robbery trials in Dallas County from 2006 and 2007. They found that “law enforcement still relies heavily on eyewitness testimony, even if corroborating evidence is weak and despite decades of research showing its shortcomings.”
So why do prosecutors and police continue to rely so heavily on eyewitness testimony? Emily says there’s one very important reason - eyewitness testimony works. “You have a victim up there who says, ‘That’s the man who raped me; I’ll never forget him,’ and jurors are going to believe it,” said Emily. She quickly adds that in many instances, eyewitness testimony may very well be reliable, but it has also been proved to be spectacularly wrong, as in the case of the DNA exonerations. “The people who want reforms don’t want to do away with eyewitness testimony; they just want to make it better.”
Reporting impact
The Dallas Morning News series has had a significant impact. In the weeks before the series ran, McGonigle and Emily went to the district attorney to show him what they had found, and his office began doing a review of all its death penalty cases. “The D.A. is planning to train prosecutors in how to better analyze the quality of and to deal more effectively with eyewitness testimony,” said McGonigle.
Immediately following the series publication, the Dallas police started making changes. “The department did a review to find out how many officers were using showups; they found more than they thought they would,” Emily said. “They found that half were unnecessary, and they’re now in the process of changing their policies and training officers in how to properly handle them.” The chief of police also provided reprints of the series for all his officers, and in January of 2009, the department adopted the sequential blind method for photo lineups.
In addition, Texas state senator Rodney Ellis has called for a ban on the use of showups, and he is sponsoring legislation to put more restrictions on the way in which eyewitness testimony is handled statewide.
How they did it
Tackling this project involved a major time and resource commitment from the Dallas Morning News. McGonigle is on the paper’s project staff, but Emily is the county courthouse reporter, so the paper had someone take over her beat during the eight-month investigation.
Both reporters felt that having a partner was essential to the project’s success. “We had thousands of records we had to look at, so it was good to have two sets of eyes, someone else who can help you remember the details and someone to bounce ideas off of,” Emily said.
The two relied heavily on open records for the series - trial transcripts from appellate courts and police reports, as well as standard research tools such as Lexis-Nexis. Though the police don’t track showups specifically, McGonigle and Emily tediously compiled a list of cases involving showups to look at what they revealed.
The reporting team also relied on outside experts from the Innocence Project and the Justice Project, non-profit groups that pursue alleged wrongful convictions, as well as academics who study eyewitness testimony, including psychologist Gary Wells of Iowa State.
Emily and McGonigle met with their editors about once a week throughout the project. As the story progressed, they began to talk about the shape it would take both in print and online.
“As we got our arms around the story, we started talking about a way to draw people in.” McGonigle said. They decided that video of those who had been wrongfully convicted talking about their experiences would be a compelling online component. “It’s different hearing people talk. The printed word does not have the impact of watching someone say, ‘They took my life away from me.’”
When the reporting was complete, the project included seven stories, which ran over three days, an online chat with the reporters and online profiles of the 19 people wrongfully convicted and exonerated through DNA testing.
Maud Beelman is a deputy managing editor for the paper. She says the management staff continues to be committed to this type of investigative reporting.
“I like to call it creating new realities. You become so immersed in a topic, you become an expert on the information to a point where you know more about the subject matter than actually the people who are involved in it,” Beelman said. “In this case we ended up knowing more about police practices than the police department; we knew more about how the prosecutor’s office conducts cases than the current district attorney.”
More stories to do
Both McGonigle and Emily say this subject and others like it can and should be pursued by reporters in other markets – even those with fewer resources and less time. They shared some suggested topics and ideas on how to go after them.
Law Enforcement Policies
Emily suggests asking all the police departments in your coverage area to share their policies on how they obtain eyewitness testimony. Unless your market is highly unusual, just a small percentage will have any policy at all.
“Another thing to look at is the district or state’s attorney’s office: How are prosecutors trained regarding the acceptance of eyewitness testimony, what questions are they asking, do they know how this person ended up in a line up?” said Emily.
Wrongful Convictions
If you want to see how your state stacks up when it comes to wrongful convictions, Emily suggests starting with the Innocence Project, either at the national level or in one of the many states that have their own. One word of caution: the Innocence Project tracks DNA exonerations only, and some states don’t preserve DNA evidence in the aftermath of a conviction. You can often find non-DNA exonerations in your area by searching with Lexis-Nexis or a newspaper library.
In the case of a wrongful conviction, McGonigle says no one ever really gets called to task. “The prosecutors have the ability to say this ain’t enough to go to trial, yet they don’t pay any price when they’ve corrupted the system,” McGonigle said.
DNA Testing
“This keeps me up at night worrying about it. All of these DNA exonerations depend on the quality of the lab work. If the labs are bad, the DNA results are not worth anything, and there are many notable problems with crime labs not doing the tests correctly,” McGonigle said.
Emily says another issue is the question of when DNA testing is used and when it is not. In many of the cases they reviewed, the prosecutor denied DNA testing for the defendant.
McGonigle says the justice system is like a balloon, and stories like the one he and Emily reported can apply pressure that changes the system, but only temporarily. “The problem is, unless you keep pushing, the balloon goes back to the same shape,” said McGonigle.
Crime Reporting Case Study: Mistaken Identity
Video Notebook
Produced by Debora Halpern Wenger & Kristine Trever, Virginia Commonwealth University
Video content may be found at the following URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/CrimeCaseStudies
Eyewitness Testimony: Expert Sources
Prepared by Kendra Gentry, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Gary L. Wells – Distinguished Professor, Psychology
Iowa State University
515-294-6033
glwells@iastate.edu
Gary L. Wells is an internationally recognized scholar in scientific psychology and his studies of eyewitness memory are widely known and cited. Wells has authored over 170 articles and chapters and two books. Most of this work has been focused on the reliability of eyewitness identification. His research on eyewitness identification is funded by the National Science Foundation and his findings have been incorporated into standard textbooks in psychology and law. His research-based proposals on lineup procedures, such as the use of double-blind techniques, are being increasingly accepted in law enforcement practices across the U.S.
Jennifer Dysart – Associate Professor, Psychology
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
212-484-1160
jdysart@jjay.cuny.edu
Jennifer Dysart conducts research on eyewitness accuracy, the use of show-ups and mug shot searching on identification accuracy, false confessions, interrogator suggestibility, double-blind administration, and cross-race identification. Her research focuses on how specific eyewitness identification procedures can lead to an increased rate of false identification of innocent suspects and safeguards that may be implemented to reduce identification errors. Dysart has published in peer-reviewed journals in the field and has written several book chapters on eyewitness identification accuracy. As an experimental forensic psychologist, Dysart also consults on criminal cases and gives lectures to law enforcement and public defenders.
Liz Webster – Publications Manager
Innocence Project
212-364-5965
ewebster@innocenceproject.org
Webster educates the public about wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project’s work through print materials. She also organizes and secures speaking engagements nationwide and manages the exoneree speaker’s bureau.
Eyewitness Testimony: Resource List
Prepared by Kendra Gentry, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
Published studies and articles:
Charman, S. D., & Wells, G. L. (2008). Can eyewitnesses correct for external influences on
their lineup identifications? The actual/counterfactual assessment paradigm. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 14, No. 1, 5–20.
Dysart, J. E., Lindsay, R. C. L., & Dupuis, P. R. (2006). Show-ups: The critical issue of
clothing bias. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 20, 1009-1023.
Dysart, J. E., Lindsay, R. C. L., MacDonald, T. K., & Wicke, C. (2002). The intoxicated
witness: Effects of alcohol on identification accuracy. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 170-175.
Garrett, B. L., Judging Innocence, 108 Columbia Law Review, 55 (2008).
Kassin, S.M., Tubb, V.A., Hosch, H.M.& Memon, A. (2001). On the “general acceptance” of eyewitness testimony research. American Psychologist, 5, 405-416
Semmler, C., Brewer, N., & Wells, G. L. (2004). Effects of postidentification feedback on eyewitness identification and nonidentification. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89,
334-346.
Wells, Memon & Penrod (2006). Eyewitness evidence: Improving its probative value. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 7, 54-75
National Institute of Justice Reports
Eyewitness Evidence: A Trainer's Manual for Law Enforcement (2003)
Postconviction DNA Testing: Recommendations for Handling Requests (1999)
Convicted by Juries, Exonerated by Science: Case Studies in the Use of DNA Evidence to
Establish Innocence After Trial (1996)
Web Links
Innocence Project
State-by-State Innocence Projects
www.innocenceproject.org/about/Other-Projects.php
Center on Wrongful Convictions
www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions
Death Penalty Information Center
Eyewitness Testimony: Resource List (continued)
Prepared by Kendra Gentry, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The Justice Project
Justice Denied magazine
Truth In Justice
Wrongful Conviction and Innocence Resources
www.llrx.com/features/wrongfulconviction.htm
Eyewitness Testimony: Previous Reporting
Prepared by Kendra Gentry, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
(This list is by no means exhaustive; it highlights a number of news outlets that have tackled the subject of wrongful convictions.)
The Columbus Dispatch
Test of Convictions – Wrongful Convictions and DNA Testing
Texas Monthly
Men who were falsely imprisoned share their stories of trying to move forward in a world that has largely left them behind
www.texasmonthly.com/2008-11-01/multimedia6.php
ABC News – Primetime “What would you do?”
Wrongfully Convicted by an Inaccurate Eyewitness
http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/WhatWouldYouDo/Story?id=4521253&page=1
Washington Post
Exonerations Change How Justice System Builds a Prosecution
www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/05/02/AR2007050202304_pf.html
Sacramento Bee
Justice for K.C. Balbuena
www.sacbee.com/995/story/921161.html
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Monday, October 05, 2009 04:51
Homicides involving female victims received more media coverage in cases where the perpetrator had fled after killing their partner, according to "The Power of the Media: How the press covers violence against women."
The study discusses media coverage of domestic violence against women in Massachusetts. The studies, which came about after formation of Public Health Advisory in 2008, showed an uneven number of news coverage in regards the number of female homicides related to domestic violence.
Read the study here.
Access the power point presentation here.
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