An investigation of the Louisiana State Police and an exposé of the juvenile justice court in a Tennessee county that routinely locked up children as young as eight years old are the winners of this year’s John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting.
Jim Mustian and Jake Bleiberg of the Associated Press earned the top honor for revealing a pattern of violence and cover-ups at the Louisiana State Police, identifying at least a dozen cases in which senior troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings of mostly Black motorists.
They will share the awards with Meribah Knight of Nashville Public Radio and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica, whose combined multimedia report on the juvenile justice system of Rutherford County revealed a pattern of abuse of authority and misconduct and has prompted calls for federal and state investigations.
The prestigious prizes, the only national awards that specifically honor crime journalism, are administered by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. They recognize the previous year’s best reporting in a U.S.-based media outlet between November 2020 and October 2021. Winning entries in each of two categories (series and single story) receive a cash award of $2,000. Runners-up (see below) are awarded Honorable Mention.
“The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation congratulates the winners of the 17th annual journalism awards,” said Foundation President Daniel F. Wilhelm.
“This impressive work illustrates the ongoing important role that journalism can play in identifying and addressing challenges related to crime and justice, not only in the United States as a whole but at the state and local level, where such illumination is necessary and increasingly endangered.”
“Journalists have a crucial role to play in holding government accountable, particularly when individuals or their communities are vulnerable to injustice,” said Karol V. Mason, John Jay College President.
“As a college that educates fierce advocates for justice, we are proud to partner with the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to honor journalists that shine a light on abuses in the criminal justice system and call attention to the need for reform.”
The awards will be presented at a Webinar event on March 4, 2022, held in conjunction with the 17th annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America, organized by the CMCJ at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The event is open to the public. Information on how to register for the Symposium and the Prize Event is available here.
“This year’s winners underline the critical role journalists play as watchdogs in our criminal justice system,” said Stephen Handelman, director of the CMCJ. “In a year when the quality of the reporting submitted to our prize judges was already awesome, they stood out for their hard work and unyielding commitment to finding the truth.”
The 2022 winners:
Series:
Jim Mustian and Jake Bleiberg of The Associated Press share the 2022 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award (Series Category) for revealing at least a dozen cases in which Louisiana State Police troopers or their bosses ignored or covered up evidence of physical violence and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. That included the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, which troopers blamed on a car crash before the AP published long-withheld body-camera video showing white troopers stunning, punching and dragging the Black motorist by his ankle shackles.
Their series, “Beatings, Buried Videos and Cover-Ups at the Louisiana State Police,” used videos, text messages and interviews with dozens of current and former troopers to document how such violence was fostered by a culture of impunity, nepotism and in some cases outright racism. Mustian and Bleiberg found that by the state police’s own count 67% of its uses of force between 2017 and 2019 were against Black people.
“AP’s scoops reignited a sprawling federal civil rights investigation that has led to the indictment of one trooper so far, with more expected,” said James Martinez, AP’s Breaking News Investigations Editor, in his letter nominating the series for the award.
“And it’s added to calls for a U.S. Justice Department ‘pattern and practice’ probe into possible racial profiling.”
Single Story:
Meribah Knight of Nashville Public Radio (WPLN 90.3) and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica shared the 2022 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award (Single Story Category) for “Black Children Jailed for a Crime that Doesn’t Exist,” a searing behind-the-scenes look at the juvenile justice system in Tennessee’s Rutherford County.
Knight and Armstrong, working as partners in ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, uncovered what they called an “ugly and unsettling culture” that sent children behind bars on often-spurious charges. In one case that triggered their probe they found a group of girls as young as eight who were arrested and handcuffed on school grounds for failing to stop a fight between other kids. Although juvenile justice records are confidential, the reporters used Freedom of Information requests, data searches, and an examination of hundreds of hours of audio and video records to uncover a pattern of official behavior that “flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children,” the report said.
As a direct result of their reporting, 11 members of Congress called on the Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation, and Tennessee’s governor called for a review of the county juvenile court judge. “To report this story, we had to get inside what is essentially a black box,” wrote Charles Ornstein, Managing Editor, Local for ProPublica. “Rules about confidentiality envelop the juvenile justice system. This secrecy is supposed to protect kids…but the beneficiaries of that secrecy too often become adults who misuse their authority.”
The 2022 Runners-up:
KQED, a National Public Radio (NPR) member station in San Francisco was named Runner-Up in the Series category for a series of seven podcast episodes, entitled “On Our Watch,” investigating police misconduct and excessive use of force across the state. Host lead reporter Sukey Lewis and reporter and producer Sandhya Dirks will receive the award on behalf of their team of producers and editorial staff from KQED and NPR.
Using records of internal investigations unsealed by California’s 2019 Transparency Law and obtained by a coalition of more than 40 California news organizations formed under the leadership of KQED called the California Reporting Project, the team found that police were rarely held accountable for allegations of misconduct. “The show fueled new momentum to dismantle some officer protections and exposed how law enforcement violence, corruption and accountability have been handled from the inside, when the investigations were never expected to be public,” said Nicole Beemsterboer, supervising senior editor for NPR.
Simone Weichselbaum and Sachi McClendon of The Marshall Project, and Uriel Garcia of the Arizona Republic share the Runner-Up award in the Single-Story category for their investigation of the U.S. Marshals Service. Using a database they compiled from news articles, police reports and court cases, Weichselbaum and McClendon found that U.S. Marshals were being used in task forces to supplement the strained resources of local police departments, with lethal results. The database revealed at least 177 people who were shot by a task-force participant between 2015 and 2020 (including 124 fatalities)―more shootings per year than major police departments like Houston and Philadelphia. At the time of publication, “no marshal ha[d] ever been prosecuted for a shooting,” the reporters wrote.
Their story, “U.S. Marshals Act Like Local Police With More Violence and Less Accountability, published jointly by USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic, provided a rare glimpse of a federal agency that has received little public scrutiny. “Thanks to the attention on the shootings involving marshals and officers assigned to work with them, the looser rules marshals operate under are changing,” wrote Susan Chira, Editor-in-Chief of The Marshall Project, in her nominating letter, citing a June 7 announcement by the Justice Department that it would require federal officers to wear body cameras when executing search warrants.
Jurors for the 2022 awards were:
Alexa Capeloto, Associate Professor, John Jay College; Joe Domanick, Associate Director, Center on Media, Crime and Justice; Ted Gest, President, Criminal Justice Journalists; Ann Charlotte Givens of The Trace; Katti Gray, contributing editor, The Crime Report; Mark Obbie, a freelance journalist focusing on criminal justice narratives and the former executive editor of The American Lawyer; Eric Umansky of ProPublica, leader of the reporting team that won the 2021 John Jay Journalism Prize in the Series category; and Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today, co-winner of the 2021 John Jay Journalism Prize in the Single Story category. Wren Longno served as Administrator of this year’s awards.
ABOUT JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE
An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York is a Hispanic Serving Institution and Minority Serving Institution offering a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. John Jay is home to faculty and research centers at the forefront of advancing criminal and social justice reform. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College engages the theme of justice and explores fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu and follow us on Twitter @JohnJayCollege.
THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is a global leader in creating and disseminating knowledge on the nature, consequences, and reduction of violence in its many forms, including war, crime, and human aggression. For more information, visit HFG.org.