Low-income residents less likely to appear for jury duty

Hurst Laviana of The Wichita Eagle used local court records to show that "less than half of the Sedgwick County residents summoned report to the courthouse in any given week. And low-income residents — many of them minorities — are far less likely to report for jury duty than residents of white middle-class neighborhoods." Poor address-keeping is a major cause for why some potential jurors either never get their notices or get them too late. The paper combined the juror information with Census data using mapping software.

Tony Saavedra, Monica Rhor and Aldrin Brown of The Orange County Register analyzed eight statistical categories for Orange County's police agencies and found wide disparities in way police prevent and solve crime. The categories analyzed included response times on emergency calls, the success rates for solving homicides and other violent crimes, officer-to-resident ratios and the overall direction of crime rates for each of the county's 34 cities. A main finding: The 12 cities patrolled on a contract basis by the Orange County Sheriff's Department have fewer officers and much slower response times than the county average. Those cities pay a total of $76.7 million for the department's services, representing 13 percent of the department's total budget. The project includes a map of response times and an explanation of how the criteria were weighted.

Joe Mahr and Mitch Weiss of The (Toledo) Blade reviewed thousands of documents and interviewed dozens to find that Toledo-area police helped the local Catholic diocese hide cases of sexual abuse by priests. "Beyond past revelations that the diocese quietly moved pedophile priests from parish to parish, The Blade investigation shows that at least once a decade - and often more - priests suspected of rape and molestation have been allowed by local authorities to escape the law." Some alleged abusers were never investigated, while officials prevented the release of case files for other investigations. "The cover-up has been confirmed by former police officers and the diocese's former spokesman, Jim Richards, who said church leaders 'knew who to call in the police department' to keep cases quiet."

Pamela Hamilton of the Associated Press used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain records showing that "one in five educators sanctioned by the state for bad behavior in South Carolina in the past three years had been accused of sexual misconduct such as molesting or having sex with students or other children." Nearly 300 teachers have been disciplined during that time span.

Brad Branan of the Tucson Citizen used databases from two courts to analyze about 33,000 drunken-driving cases filed from 1999 to last year. He found that "thousands of motorists are charged with drunken driving each year in metro Tucson, giving the area one of the highest DUI arrest rates in the country. But nearly half of those accused escape conviction in the courts that handle most DUI cases." More than 60 percent of the drunken-driving cases that don't end in conviction in Tucson City Court and Pima County Justice Court are dismissed.

Lee Davidson of The Deseret Morning News used the federal Freedom of Information Act to obtain data on weapon seizures at airports, finding that "daily for the past three years, passengers at U.S. airports surrendered an average of 14,000 potential weapons. That is enough to arm every passenger on 33 filled-to-capacity Boeing 747 jumbo jets - every day." Smaller airports have a higher rate of weapons being turned over, even though most prohibited items are collected at larger facilities. The haul includes nearly 5 million knives and more than 1,000 guns.

Susan K. Livio and Mary Jo Patterson of The (Newark) Star-Ledger investigated the background of Corey Davis, who got nearly $700,000 in state contracts to provide child counseling services despite the fact that "the budding entrepreneur had a felony drug conviction and owed thousands of dollars in child support to two women. Some of the people he employed also had criminal backgrounds. But the state blindly nurtured Davis until learning one of his mentors had cracked up a car last summer, injuring a 6-year-old boy." The state launched a criminal investigation after the paper began asking about Davis.

Eric Nalder and Lewis Kamb of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer report in a three-part series on how a disgraced sheriff's deputy beat the system. The report details the allegations made against the deputy, including drug use, theft, attempted stalking, conspiracy to promote prostitution and official misconduct. "For 14 years, the detective worked on his own, rarely checking in, partying with prostitutes, making deals with escort-service operators, driving the county executive's car and traveling to Mexico, Thailand and Canada." In a short period of time the deputy went from "from facing a felony trial and a firing recommendation to a prosperous retirement."

Liz Chandler, Ames Alexander and Danica Coto of The Charlotte Observer used driving records from several states to show that "an illegal Mexican immigrant in North Carolina was charged with drunken driving at least five times before a July 16 wreck that killed a Gaston County teacher." North Carolina authorities were unaware of Ramiro Gallegos' out-of-state convictions, which should have resulted in deportation or a two-year jail sentence.

Kevin Corcoran of The Indianapolis Star investigates a child welfare case involving a surrogate mothers program. The program granted an adoption to a 58-year-old, single, schoolteacher who was approved, despite "the absence of a legally required study of [Stephen F.] Melinger's New Jersey home or a period of preadoption supervision by an Indiana-licensed agency, court records show." The investigation includes sidebars further investigating the surrogate mother in the case, the adopted father, and a sidebar about the judge from Indianapolis who tightened the rules to disallow the adoptive father from taking the infants to New Jersey.