Shop

In Forrest County, the county's justice system had all but ceased to function. The Hattiesburg American began research on the crumbling justice system in 2002. Reporters spent four months entering court records into computers from dusty ledger books and found that: the county's district attorney was "too busy" to look into instances pointed out by the newspaper where prisoners had been released in violation of the law, the district attorney's office lost case files and that a lack of working computers hindered anyone from knowing what a case's status was. In all, more than 70 articles were published on the topic throughout the year.