Notable Journalism

Criminal Justice Journalists posts summaries of major print and broadcast stories on crime and justice subjects, along with appropriate links, on its daily news digest, Crime and Justice News. See http://cjj.mn-8.net for an archive of more than 3,000 stories beginning in April 2003.

We will continue to list major series on this site. Suggestions for additions should be sent to Ted Gest, tgest@sas.upenn.edu

Those seeking online access to stories without active links should visit a news organization's archives.

Louisville Courier-Journal: Justice Delayed, Justice Denied

http://www.courier-journal.com/cjextra/2003projects/justice/index.html

Among the newspaper's findings:

- More than 650 cases were dismissed for lack of prosecution in Franklin
County, Ky., since 1995.
- More than 2,000 cases in Kentucky have been pending for three or more
years. Some for more than a decade.
- Hundreds of cases in Eastern Kentucky were never presented to a grand jury,
in spite of being waived or bound over to the grand jury by a lower court.
- Dozens of defendants pled guilty, agreed to plead guily or admitted their
guilt but their cases were allowed to languish unresolved.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Police downgrade rape cases
October 1999/December 1999
http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/crime

For years, Philadelphia police have had a culture of minimizing or dismissing complaints from crime victims. This practice kept crime statistics low, improving the department's image. Among police, it is called 'going down with crime.'.......

Akron Beacon Journal, Aggressive prosecution of weak cases
May 1999

Prosecutors have been aggressively pursuing weaker felony cases in recent years, according to an analysis of computerized court data, leading some critics to wonder if the not guilty - or the not guilty of much - are being handled more like hardened criminals.

Charlotte Observer, Crime without punishment
March 2000

It was an open secret: Criminals in Charlotte were getting away with robbery, rape, Assault, and sometimes even murder. Those who committed violent crimes in Charlotte were only half as likely to go to prison as were criminals in the rest of North Carolina. The findings were published in a series headlined 'Doing the Crime but not the Time'.