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Legal News

: Lawbeat

Dreaming of "the enlightened newsroom"

By Mark Obbie

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Steve Weinberg has just published a major contribution to the literature of criminal justice journalism. Writing in Miller-McCune magazine, Weinberg -- a freelancer and veteran University of Missouri journalism professor -- turns the tables on the usual tales of heroic investigative reporters freeing innocent prisoners. The real question, Weinberg writes, is why so many reporters are "enablers" of a system that all too often condemns innocent people to prison or lethal injection on flimsy evidence. "They should all know the warning signs of wrongful prosecution by now," Weinberg writes, "yet their coverage (and absence of coverage) suggests little learning from experience." He starts the piece with a St. Louis wrongful-conviction case -- that of Ellen Reasonover, who came far too close to execution, and spent too many years imprisoned on such shockingly weak evidence that reporters covering the case had to have harbored doubts. He writes:

Why had the journalists who knew about the Reasonover case failed to question a police investigation, a prosecution and a conviction so obviously flawed? Why hadn’t somebody written an exposé before the guards hustled Reasonover to the waiting prison van?

The article is partly a catalog of research and arguments about wrongful convictions -- and of the journalism that has occasionally documented them -- and partly a prescription for change. Some of Weinberg's advice strikes me as so ambitious that it's unworkable, namely his call for newsrooms to track all felony arrests through guilty plea, dismissal, or trial, so that reporters are more aware of each case's strengths and weaknesses. What he describes might only work in a mid-sized or small city (where media resources are thinnest). He gains traction in his call for ad hoc improvements focused on getting reporters into the legal and law enforcement communities to know their beats more intimately:

Some of those efforts would lead to feature stories that entertain and educate news consumers about important, interesting people within the criminal justice system. While preparing those stories, though, the reporters could also be looking for the police crime laboratory technician distrusted by defense lawyers because of an obvious prosecution bias; the sex crimes detective who’s racist; the defense lawyer who misses appellate deadlines, closing legal doors for possibly innocent defendants; and the prosecutor who refuses to institute an open-files policy for defense lawyers, leaving decisions about evidence that might point to innocence entirely in the state’s hands.

Weinberg's work in this field spans decades and carries great weight. I plan to make his story, and some of those he links to, required reading in our courses devoted to improving legal journalism. And I hope, despite the relative obscurity of where this was published, his words ripple out into newsrooms and journalism schools. (Multi-dimensional disclosure: I recently wrote for Miller-McCune and have another assignment pending. Weinberg was my mentor at the Missouri School of Journalism, he remains a friend, and I edited his first article on the Reasonover case for The American Lawyer.)

Full post as published by Lawbeat on September 23, 2008 (boomark / email).