Four reporters from The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C.–Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes, and Natalie Caula Huff, were named winners this week of the George Polk Award for State Reporting for “Till Death Do Us Part,” a five-part series on the domestic abuse deaths of 300 women in the past decade. Last week, the reporters won the 2014-2015 Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting award for the best series on criminal justice from the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The newspaper reported on a culture of violence in South Carolina, where male abusers face a maximum of 30 days in jail for brutalizing a woman but up to five years in prison for cruelty to a dog.
Also last week, John Jay College awarded the criminal justice reporting award in the single-story category to Jennifer Gonnerman of The New Yorker for “Before the Law,” a chilling account of Kalief Browder, a Bronx teen-ager who was accused of stealing a backpack and spent more than a thousand days awaiting trial at the city’s Rikers Island jail before he was released with no charges. John Jay recognized Maria Hinojosa, one of the nation's foremost broadcast journalists and media entrepreneurs, as the 2015 “Justice Trailblazer.” Hinojosa is the anchor and executive producer of National Public Radio's only Latino news and culture show, “Latino USA,” and host and executive producer for the coming PBS show “America by the Numbers with Maria Hinojosa.”