"Free to Flee"

Fugitives can flee and don't have to hide, an investigation by Joe Mahr of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch showed. Mahr's three-day series reported that hundreds of thousands of felony arrest warrants from across the nation are not entered into the FBI national fugitive database, including warrants for violent crimes such as homicide, rape and robbery. He found that while all states check a national database to see whether an applicant for a drivers license or state ID has a suspended license, only six states check to see whether an applicant is wanted on a felony warrant. Other stories showed that even when fugitives are found, they frequently are not extradited, and that in St. Louis, officials don't seek warrants in thousands of cases.

Karyn Spencer of the Omaha World-Herald discovered Nebraska has no state oversight and few standards to ensure quality death investigations by coroners or law enforcement. The lack of oversight and standards lead to murder cases remaining unsolved, coroners skipping autopsies to save money or guessing at the cause of death and bodies being exhumed to resolve questions from inadequate investigations.
Throughout a two-week series, Spencer examined 15 cases that illustrated weaknesses in the system, including an in-depth look into the murder of Tara Russell.

The San Antonio Express-News conducted a three-month study of the Tactical Response Unit of the San Antonio Police Department, a unit created to reduce violent crime. "The unit used force to subdue only three of almost 1,000 Anglo suspects it arrested. By comparison, officers struggled with nearly six times as many minorities per 1,000 arrests, a disparity that a police expert called concerning." Lomi Kriel and John Tedesco used a use-of-force database, arrest and court records, and material from numerous public records requests to tell the story.

Eric Nalder, Daniel Lathrop and Lewis Kamb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found in a three-part investigation that Seattle police's use of the "obstructing a public officer" charge leads to arrests of African Americans at a rate eight times higher than whites, and that nearly half of all obstruction cases are dropped before trial due to proof issues, no probable cause and other reasons. The investigation, a continuation of the Post-Intelligencer's ongoing "Strong Arm of the Law" series examining police misconduct and accountability, relied on more than six years of municipal court data, internal police use of force reports and other records.

Eric Longabardi of ERSNews.com is reporting that an Erin Finn, whose "resume runs the gamut from model to escort, house sitter, and Internet tech geek" is likely to be the lead witness for the federal wiretapping and racketeering case against Anthony Pellicano, a Hollywood private investigator. The Enterprise Report interviewed Finn over the last 18 months to detail how she went from relative anonymity to become the key witness in this federal case.

A yearlong investigation by Geoff Dutton and Mike Wagner of The Columbus Dispatch found that Ohio’s DNA testing program for inmates seeking to prove their innocence is so flawed that police and courts routinely discard evidence after trials. The five-day Dispatch series found that nearly a third of the denials examined by the newspaper failed to cite a specific reason as required by state law. Presented with the findings, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland called for an overhaul that would speed up the review process, open up testing to more inmates and establish statewide standards for preserving evidence.

Jason Riley of The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.) found that many inmates granted "shock probation" were being re-incarcerated in Jefferson County, Ky. The program releases offenders after only one to six months of their sentence and was developed for "first-time, nonviolent offenders who, after getting a taste of prison life, would be so 'shocked' by their experience that they would be deterred from future crimes." Riley's analysis showed that last year, more than 45 percent of felons in this program were rearrested for violent crimes including murder, rape and armed robbery.

A report by Christine Young of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, NY, in a special eight-page supplement and online multi-media presentation, suggests strongly that a New York City man who is borderline mentally retarded was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1989. Thanks to Young's reporting—and a bizarre set of circumstances that thrust her into the investigation 20 years ago— the Manhattan District Attorney's Office is re-opening the case and reviewing the conviction. Young's reporting raises questions about false confessions, sloppy police tactics and raises the prospect that police ignored evidence pointing to a serial killer of New York City prostitutes.

A six-part series by Kevin Craver of the Northwest Herald (Crystal Lake, Ill.) looks into lawsuits facing two chemical companies after a cluster of brain cancer patients were discovered in a small town. Craver studied documents going back 30 years to investigate the site's regulatory history, inspections, claims and counterclaims about pollutants and human exposure. The 22 plaintiffs in the case point to the disposal operations of Rohm and Haas and Modine Manufacturing Co. and whether the company's practices allowed carcinogens, such as vinyl choride, to leach into groundwater.

After a Texas man convicted of shooting an unarmed prostitute received probation, Brooks Egerton and Reese Dunklin of The Dallas Morning News decided to see whether his sentence was a fluke or representative of a larger trend. They analyzed thousands of government records, some of which came from confidential criminal files and interviewed more than 200 people, including police, attorneys, victims