Justice (courts/crime/law)
Investigative coverage of mafia at U.S. News
Dave Kaplan kicked off his new Bad Guys blog on USNews.com this week with two entries on what the Mafia’s been up to since 9/11. Part One reveals its involvement in a new “Pizza Connection” case that links up the Sicilian and American mobs. Part Two reports on how the Mafia remains active in a…
Read More“The Long Shadow of 9/11”
The Las Vegas Review-Journal is running a series entitled “The Long Shadow of 9/11” in which they’ve localized the big-picture security issues facing the nation. The stories include an examination of how local police have poured vast resources into anti-terrorism policing; how the FBI has sent national security letters to casino-hotels to access guest information;…
Read MoreSex offenders loosely monitored in Delaware
Andrew Tangel and Mike Chalmers of The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal found that sex offenders in the state of Delaware have been inadequately monitored. By mapping “the addresses of more than 1,200 moderate- and high-risk sex offenders, 1,900 child care centers and 350 public and private schools“, Tangel and Chalmers found hundreds of instances where…
Read MorePolice abuse power to extort sex
Nancy Phillips and Craig R. McCoy of The Philadelphia Inquirer report on the troubling trend of police officers in Philadelphia using their status to extort sex. “Most police departments do little to identify the offenders, and even less to stop them. Unlike other types of police misconduct, the abuse of police power to coerce sex…
Read MoreBehind the mask of the Mo. execution doctor
Jeremy Kohler, of the St. Lousi Post-Dispatch, uncovered the identity of the doctor responsible supervising Missouri’s lethal injection procedure. Banned from practicing in two hospitals in the state, charged with malpractice over 20 times and having received a public reprimand in 2003 by the state Board of Healing Arts, Alan R. Doerhoff has overseen lethal…
Read More“Conduct Unbecoming” Continues
Eric Nalder and Lewis Kamb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer uncover more police abuses in a continuation of the “Conduct Unbecoming” series. In their latest installment — focusing on a specialized King County Sheriff’s unit assigned to police the Metro regional transit system — Nalder and Kamb, with assists from P-I beat reporters, turned out a…
Read More“Teflon Don”
The Times Herald-Record’s Michael Levensohn conducted an exhaustive investigation painstakingly detailing how a local businessman, Donald Boehm, looted an estate of millions of dollars and has become the focus of a police investigation in the most notorious unsolved killing in the region. The reporting for this story began in April 2004 with the bankruptcy filings…
Read MoreDeath at Memorial Hospital
Following the announcement of murder charges against a New Orleans doctor and two nurses on duty in the wake Hurricane Katrina, CNN continues its Emmy-nominated investigative series, “Death at Memorial Hospital” with exclusive interviews with siblings of the accused Dr. Anna Pou, who maintains her innocence. “In October, CNN reported exclusively that after deteriorating conditions…
Read MoreMistaken identity questions raised in 1989 Texas execution
Maurice Possley and Steve Mills of the Chicago Tribune reviewed thousands of pages of court records and found that Texas may have executed an innocent man in 1989. “<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/broadband/chi-tx-htmlstory,1,781241.htmlstory?coll=chi-news-hed 16 years after Carlos De Luna died by lethal injection, "the Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that the acquaintance he named, Carlos Hernandez, was…
Read MoreMurders cost Tenn. more than $110 million annually
Melvin Claxton of The Tennessean has a three-part series on the price of murder in Tennessee, finding that “homicides cost state and local governments more than $110 million each year. The bill for Nashville alone, which has accounted for 17 percent of the state’s homicides over the past two decades, exceeds $18.7 million annually.” The…
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