Police departments across America send newsrooms a constant stream of news releases and mug shots of people busted on child pornography charges. In North Carolina, law enforcement and prosecutors are stepping up efforts to arrest and charge sex offenders. The WTVD investigative team wanted to find out what happens to people charged with child pornography offenses. We faced several reporting hurdles, but ultimately discovered very few people face punishment for their crime. We decided to track exactly what kind of punishment convicted child pornographers received in North Carolina. County prosecutors and the state Attorney General told us off-camera that the ...

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When The New York Times decided to examine the qualifications of town and village justices, the CAR conundrum was more organizational than analytical. The state Office of Court Administration provided roughly 2,500 scanned PDF questionnaires that the justices had filled out, revealing their names, addresses, telephone numbers, courts, whether they served as a full- or part-time justice, any other occupation, justice salary, level of education and, in some instances, the number and type of cases handled in a year. The PDF forms spanned 40 years, the format had changed over time, many had been filled out by hand, some ... Read more ...

Last year, The Seattle Times published a series of devastating stories revealing secrets kept in our courts - secrets hidden away in files that should never have been sealed. The stories exposed misconduct or negligence by schools, hospitals, lawyers, state agencies, businesses and police. The series showed how judges had cavalierly — and improperly — granted wholesale secrecy that protected the powerful from embarrassment and deprived the public of vital information. Over the years, Times reporters often had encountered such secrecy in lawsuits that had key parts, usually the most telling or illuminating documents, hidden from the public. The series "Your Courts, Their ...

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In February 2007, Milwaukee Magazine published an investigation of financial conflicts of interest by Milwaukee County circuit judges. In a three-year period, four local judges heard more than 200 cases involving companies in which they owned stock, and the state watchdogs never monitored the conflicts. The story ran nearly 10 months after I first called editor Bruce Murphy to pitch a simpler idea: Let’s look through 424 private civil cases overseen by the five local federal district judges during the 2006 fiscal year. But, Murphy was on assignment steroids that day, and he wanted to know how many state ...

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