The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "criminal court" ...
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Wilmington's Street Wars
Wilmington, Del., has become one of the most violent cities of its size in America. Nothing dramatized that fact more than several spectacular shootings in 2012, including one day in June when three people were shot to death in separate incidents, and a shootout a few weeks later at a soccer tournament that killed three people -- including a teenager waiting to play the game he loved. To document and study the violence he and other News Journal colleagues were covering, senior reporter Cris Barrish gathered information for a database detailing the 158 shootings, including 42 homicides, over a 20-month period. He learned that police made arrests in only one-third of the cases, many of which collapsed in court. His research into why police could not solve cases led to the revelation that both shooting suspects and victims had been arrested an average of about two dozen times, with many qualifying as habitual criminals -- a phenomenon that some authorities call "thugicide.'' His stories also explored the “don’t snitch’’ code of the streets that cripples prosecution of these cases, not only by the men on both sides of the gun barrel, but also by residents who are terrified of the gunmen and distrustful of law enforcement.
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Bad to the Bone
When four executives of a medical-device company called Synthes went to jail for illegally marketing a bone cement—five patients had died after it was injected into their spines—Mina Kimes knew there had to be a compelling saga behind a case that had generated little coverage beyond local news articles. So she began digging, first with FOIA requests for never-before-published government documents, and then assembling hundreds of pages of court transcripts and internal company e-mails and reports. She used that foundation to begin the harder challenge: persuading Synthes employees, many of them terrified by the criminal case and the company’s intimidating chairman, to talk to her. With six months of grueling, old-fashioned reporting, Kimes succeeded, and “Bad to the Bone” is the masterful result. Not only did she persuade more than 20 current and former company employees to speak, but she also revealed a story whose disturbing breadth far exceeded the case presented in court. Her tour de force reporting raises profound new questions about the culpability of a key figure who wasn’t charged: Hansjörg Wyss, the reclusive and controlling Swiss founder and chairman—one of the richest people in the world—who made crucial decisions about how to sell the bone cement. This is a classic tale of corporate malfeasance: Warned by the government not to sell its bone cement for use in the spine, Synthes ignored the admonition despite clear evidence of lethal danger—a pig had died within seconds when the cement was tested on it—and encouraged surgeons to use the cement on people, five of whom died soon afterward. But “Bad to the Bone” isn’t just an exposé. It opens a window into a broader issue: how the medical system actually runs. Readers see how salespeople with no medical training advise surgeons—inside the OR during operations—on how to use their devices. They experience the tale of one surgeon who continues using the cement even after two of his patients died. Oh, and what sort of justice does Synthes itself receive? Wyss sells it, for $20 billion, to health care giant Johnson & Johnson, which praises Synthes’s “culture” and “values.” Corporate crime. Death on the operating room table. Secret e-mails. Surgeons on the edge. An imperious multibillionaire CEO. It’s a mesmerizing article, and Kimes’s reporting takes readers on a deeply unsettling journey that ensures they’ll never look at the medical system the same way again.
Tags: Medical devices; bone cement; Synthes
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Broken Justice in Phillips County
A five-part series preceded by an initial investigation into dysfunction in the criminal justice system in an Arkansas Delta county known for corruption and poverty. The year-long investigation uncovered errors and archaic practices in the handling of fugitive warrants and speedy trials that allowed felony suspects to remain free for years without fear of answering to the charges against them. As a result, prosecutors had to drop hundreds of cases for failure to take them to trial in a timely manner. Since publication, the Phillips County sheriff has made changes in how his office handles failure-to-appear warrants, and court officials have reduced case backlogs. Nevertheless, problems persist.
Tags: Criminal justice system; corruption; poverty; fugitive warrants
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Detroit Free Press: Free to Kill
“Free to Kill,” a seven-month Detroit Free Press investigation, found the Michigan Department of Corrections failed to properly supervise some of the most violent of the state’s roughly 70,000 offenders under its watch. A total of 88 parolees and probationers were suspected, arrested or convicted in 95 murders between Jan. 1, 2010, and Aug. 31, 2011. The number nearly doubled from 2010 to 2011 -- from 21 to 38. The series also revealed that dozens of offenders weren't outfitted with court-ordered electronic tethers, and others weren't sent back to prison for new crimes or failed drug tests.
Tags: Department of Corrections; violence; criminals; drug tests
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Justice in the Shadows
Although immigration is one of America’s most divisive, visceral, and hotly debated issues, the public rarely gets a close look at the vast law enforcement network that every year detains more than 400,000 suspected illegal immigrants. Courts often operate inside prisons, far from view. Immigration officials play by rules that would not be permitted for the police or the FBI. Here is a system heavily shielded from public scrutiny. Reporting even routine activities is a challenge. Boston Globe reporters Maria Sacchetti and Milton J. Valencia, however, penetrated the wall of secrecy. Their three-part series, “Justice in the Shadows,” revealed a dysfunctional and largely unaccountable system that locks up people who pose little threat while releasing dangerous criminals back to US streets because their home countries won’t take them back. The results, Sacchetti and Valencia showed, at times can be deadly for Americans and foreigners alike. The reporting was anything but quick or easy. Sacchetti and Valencia filed more than 20 Freedom of Information Act requests to federal agencies that comprise the immigration system. Nearly all of them were partially or wholly denied, purportedly to protect the privacy of the immigrants. With the federal government blocking the way, Sacchetti and Valencia found other avenues to document what was happening inside this Byzantine system, investing a year to do so. The effort to shed light on the immigration system continues: The Globe has filed a federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to force the agency to reveal the names of more than 8,000 criminal foreigners released in the US because they couldn’t be deported.
Tags: security; Department of Homeland Security; illegal immigrants; FBI
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Baumgartner
At the start of 2011, the best known and probably most respected judge in Knoxville, Tenn., was Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner, founder of Knox County's successful Drug Court and the judge who recently had presided over trials involving the most shocking crime in local memory, the carjacking, torture and murder of a young couple named Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom. The trials of four suspects led to a death sentence, two life sentences and one very long prison term. But soon after the new year began, Baumgartner took an abrupt leave of absence, ostensible for health reasons.
Tags: judge; Knoxville; trials; criminal court
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Dangerous and Free
The reporter reveals how criminals in Wisconsin eluded justice because of breaks from judges, communication breakdowns and miscalculations by law enforcement.
Tags: criminals; lax; courts; judges; communication
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Untested Justice
WREG uncovered that sexual assault victims in Memphis weren't being properly handled within the system. A failure to process rape kits made it more difficult to bring the victims' attackers to justice. Their investigation found as few at 6% of the rape kits were being processed. Since the story ran, sweeping changes were announced by the City of Memphis and over 2000 backlogged rape kits have been processed as a result.
Tags: sexual assault; criminal justice system; rape; rape kits; sexual abuse; police; courts; crime; sex offenders
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Cracked
Fetlz's investigation "exposes how junk science has allowed Texas to keep mentally retarded inmates on death row - and execute several of them - despite a 2002 Supreme Court decision, Atkins v. Virginia, that bans such punishment for these defendants.
Tags: capital punishment; criminal justice; mental retardation; death row; execution; Texas; Atkins v. Virginia
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"Deaths at the State Hospital"
This ongoing investigation reveals major misconduct by the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, the largest public psychiatric hospital in the state. The investigative team exposed and detailed the deaths of four patients that resulted from the "mistakes, lack of training, incompetence and possible criminal neglect" carried out by hospital employees. The series also reveals the attempt of state human services officials to cover up the mistakes.
Tags: mental health; patients; grand jury; DA; Pueblo; Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment; database; Pueblo State Hospital; Nexis-Lexis; 441.com; CoCourts.com; Colorado Bureau of Investigation