Wayne County has failed to pay out nearly $4 million in restitution payments

An investigation by the Detroit Free Press has found that Wayne County "has collected nearly $4 million in court-ordered restitution from convicted burglars, sex offenders and other criminals but failed to pay that money to thousands of their victims." While county officials have claimed that victims are difficult to locate, the investigation found that county officials have not even attempted to track them down.

An investigation into the child porn industry by Isaac Wolf of Scripps Howard News Service has led to hundreds of American convictions, and those running the ring are now in jails in Eastern Europe.  Wolf had unprecedented access to the backers of these porn sites.  The investigation identified 30,000 customers of these sites in over 132 countries.

USA Today’s Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy documented 201 criminal cases across the nation in which federal judges found that prosecutors broke laws and ethics rules. "They caught some prosecutors hiding evidence, found others lying to judges and juries, and said others had broken plea bargains."  The abuses resulted in both the wrongful incarceration of innocent people and for the guilty to go free.  An interactive map allows readers to examine the cases and types of problems identified in the investigation.

A loophole in state and federal laws has made it easy for some attorneys to take advantage of Illinois residents struggling to keep their homes, according to an investigation by the Chicago Tribune. In 2006, Illinois and other states passed legislation that banned charging upfront fees for loan modifications. But the law doesn't apply to attorneys. As a result, some mortgage rescue firms are circumventing the law by recruiting attorneys to collect upfront fees from consumers. Attorneys have also set up their own shops. They're all capitalizing on the huge number of people looking for help as nearly one in 10 Illinois home mortgage loans were delinquent last month. But instead of negotiating with a lender, some attorneys or the companies they work for just keep the cash and don't complete the job. Homeowners are often unaware until it's too late and their homes are in or near foreclosure. Lawyers are now linked to 30 percent of mortgage foreclosure companies that consumers have filed complaints about to the state attorney general's office, records show.

A violent Milwaukee youth who was a leader in a notorious street gang got breaks from the juvenile court system that kept him on the street were he committed new crimes, an investigation by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter John Diedrich revealed.  The newspaper reported in July that miscommunication between federal and state authorities later resulted in missing a chance to arrest Barragan in a courtroom before he fled to Mexico and became one of the U.S. Marshals Service's most wanted fugitives. In the new report, the newspaper found systematic problems earlier in the life of Armando Barragan. The juvenile court documents reviewed by the newspaper show Barragan could have — and probably should have — been behind bars in April 2003, when Kevin Hirschfield was shot to death outside the gas station. He was free because of breaks he received, first from a judge and later from police, according to court records and interviews.

An investigation by Laura Burke of the Texas Observer revealed that female employees account for most of the perpetrators of sexual abuse in Texas' juvenile facilities.  Relatively few investigations and convictions have been made, and some attribute this to the perception that sexual abuse perpetrated by women is  considered relatively harmless, and often consensual.  As a result, juvenile inmates are left vulnerable to continuing abuse.

An investigation by The Palm Beach Post found that operators of nightclubs linked to sex trafficking by the FBI not only still are in business in Palm Beach County  — they are expanding. The Post also found one of the clubs was issued a Florida liquor license only because regulators failed to identify its operator as a felon with a history of shady dealings in the nightclub industry.

From a violent patient allowed to roam free to a pregnancy case that violated policy at every turn and nurses who falsified documents to cover their mistakes, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation exposed a raft of problems at the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, home to the county's most vulnerable residents. Reporters Meg Kissinger and Steve Schultze found lax oversight at the complex allowed a patient with a history of violence, including sexual assault, to repeatedly find new victims, including one who became pregnant and another he is charged with sexually assaulting. Staffers repeatedly allowed the patient to leave the secure ward, including overnight visits to a group home, at times signing charts to say he was being checked every 15 minutes.

Lee Davidson reported how Thai workers recruited to work on Utah pig and chicken farms were victims of human trafficking. Read "A Story of Modern Slavery in Utah."

A 4-part series by The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)  reveals deep trouble at the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. The series finds an agency in line with prosecutors wishes, agents and analysts who ignore or twist the truth, and reliance on junk science. The director of the SBI was removed from her post just prior to publication, and one unit of the agency has been suspended pending investigation.