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The Washington Post reports that thousands of criminal cases at the state and local level may have relied on exaggerated testimony or false forensic evidence to convict defendants of murder, rape and other felonies, according to former FBI agents.
Read MoreThis past week, journalists on the NICAR Listserv began discussing the most outrageous price quotes they’d received for open records requests. Canadian journalist David Weisz started the thread as research for a presentation he was giving to the Information Resource Management Association of Canada on the state of data journalism. “Having filed ATI requests myself and hearing the horror…
Read More“A federal judge has issued three key rulings over a four-year period that favored companies in which he owned stock, a California Watch analysis has found.” “Measures are in place to prevent judges from violating federal conflict-of-interest laws. But Judge Manuel Real, a 46-year veteran of the bench appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, appears…
Read More“For the second time in only two years, teachers at a Manatee school run by Lamprecht say they are not getting paid. The Prep Academy has employed about a dozen teachers with an enrollment of about 50 students, the Bradenton Herald reports.”
Read More“Alex Cameron of the Oklahoma Impact Team at KWTV News 9 in Oklahoma City and KOTV News on 6 in Tulsa found that Oklahoma counties’ lax record-keeping could cost them millions of dollars in repaid disaster-assistance funds to FEMA. Twelve counties had serious issues with paperwork and couldn’t document how they spent money they received…
Read More“The average amount of time it takes to resolve pothole complaints is on the rise on the streets of Pittsburgh, according to a PublicSource analysis of 25,000 pothole complaints from Pittsburgh’s 311 center between 2006 and 2012.”
Read More“Data compiled by the consumer agency from death certificates and hospital emergency room visits from 2003 through May 2012 shows that 150 mostly older adults died after they became trapped in bed rails. Over nearly the same time period, 36,000 mostly older adults — about 4,000 a year — were treated in emergency rooms with…
Read More“But so far in New York City, the drive to apply prosecutorial discretion to the docket of deportation cases has yielded strikingly few results. Out of a backlog of 42,875 cases, only 583 have been closed due to prosecutorial discretion, according to immigration court statistics compiled by Syracuse University’s TRAC database. That’s a rate of…
Read More“The billions that the drug companies invest in such experiments help fund the world’s quest for cures. But their aim is not just public health. That money is also part of a high-risk quest for profits, and over the past decade corporate interference has repeatedly muddled the nation’s drug science, sometimes with potentially lethal consequences.”
Read More“A month after Texas voters approved a 10-year, $3 billion program to fight cancer, a Dallas businessman and several of his associates began to pour tens of thousands of dollars into the campaign funds of Gov. Rick Perry and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst. Millions from a new state agency would flow to two firms founded…
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