In EXPOSÉ's "In a Small Town," a court clerk and an anonymous source lead reporter Peter Zuckerman to sealed court cases documenting past sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts of America.
Other papers have examined court records and discovered instances of potentially improper sealing. For example, the LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL found sealed cases involving powerful people, dangerous products, the sexual abuse of minors, sometimes even the judges' own friends and relatives. Journalists need to access those files to find out the facts that allow them to report responsibly. Some, including Poynter.org's Al Tompkins, argue that sealing cases violates the public's right to know, and that "open courts are a bedrock principle worth defending."
Like most Boy Scouts, Adam and Ben Steed wanted to earn merit badges and go on camping trips. But the brothers’ camp experience would soon become a nightmare . . .
In this episode of EXPOSÉ, reporters at the Idaho Falls POST REGISTER uncover a terrible secret kept hidden from the public: a pedophile was working as a camp leader within the local Boy Scouts. Reporter Peter Zuckerman and EXPOSÉ retrace the steps that lead to the incredible discovery, starting with the anonymous source that tipped him off to lawsuits documenting multiple cases of sexual abuse by a Boy Scout leader. The court records were kept hidden by powerful lawyers representing the Boy Scouts, but Zuckerman was not deterred and continued to press for the truth.
>> Read Zuckerman's original series, "Scouts' Honor," in the POST REGISTER.
And coming soon: A small-town reporter unearths a long-buried secret within the local Boy Scouts, and reveals a pedophile scandal that rocks a community.
>> Watch the trailer for "In a Small Town."
Filmmaker Lee Wang documents living and working conditions on Iraq bases
While EXPOSÉ's "Blame Somebody Else" reveals the illicit human pipeline of foreign workers that keeps American military bases staffed and running, documentary filmmaker Lee Wang takes viewers behind-the-scenes to capture workers' living and working conditions in her film "Someone Else's War." The documentary is told through the eyes of three Filipino service workers on an American military base in Iraq. With interviews and footage smuggled out of the country by Halliburton employees, filmmaker Lee Wang reveals the "invisible army" made up of more than 30,000 low-wage base workers from South and Southeast Asia. CHICAGO TRIBUNE reporter Cam Simpson served as a consultant on the film, and some of the footage of workers can be seen in “Blame Somebody Else.”
After Cam Simpson's investigative report on the trafficking of low-wage foreign workers to U.S. military bases was published in October 2005, the U.S. government promptly responded with base inspections. The inspections found that, indeed, there were deceptive hiring procedures, excessive fees charged by job brokers, substandard living conditions for laborers, violations of Iraqi immigration laws, and a lack of human trafficking "awareness training" on U.S. bases. In April 2006, General George Casey ordered reforms, including a requirement that contractors immediately return passports that had been illegally seized.
But a year later, the same problems have resurfaced. This past July two civilian contractors testified before Congress that foreign workers were brought to Baghdad to work on the new $600 million U.S. embassy there without their consent and that they were abused.
A Kuwaiti firm called First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Co. was awarded the contract to build the embassy after no American company would meet the terms. The Justice Department is investigating First Kuwaiti's labor practices because of trafficking in persons allegations.Rory Mayberry, initially hired by First Kuwaiti as a medical technician, claimed that he had witnessed Filipino workers being “kidnapped” by the company. Mayberry testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that workers put on a plane with him in Kuwait were given boarding passes for Dubai, with no idea they were bound for Iraq, and that passports were confiscated. In addition,First Kuwaiti construction foreman John Owens testified that he found living and working conditions for foreign laborers on the construction site "deplorable," that they were “verbally and physically abused,” and that they worked long hours everyday for very little pay.
The State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard testified he was aware of allegations of trafficking and other abuses but found nothing to support them after two visits himself. Although no one from First Kuwaiti testified before Congress, the company provided a written response and, according to the Post, has called the allegations "ludicrous."
In May of 2005, CHICAGO TRIBUNE reporter Cam Simpson and photographer José Moré set off for Nepal and Jordan to piece together the story of how 12 Nepalese men were killed en route to their new jobs in Iraq. According to producer Jon Shenk, it was Moré’s photos that allowed EXPOSÉ to recapture the pair’s journey for viewers in “Blame Somebody Else,” even though a crew could not be sent overseas. So moving and vivid were the Moré still photos used in the program that the producer’s sister-in-law assumed Shenk had traveled to Nepal and shot footage there. Shenk gives Moré full credit:
. . .any sense the viewer feels of being in the room with Bishnu Hari’s mother as she describes the loss of her son or the outrage of seeing mattresses stacked outside the illegal crash pad of human traffickers in Amman, Jordan is there because of José’s great eye and passion to tell this story.
Here, José Moré shares more of his photographs from that trip.
Are U.S. tax dollars fueling an illicit human pipeline that exploits and endangers foreign workers? Reporter Cam Simpson of the CHICAGO TRIBUNE began investigating when he saw a news report about a dozen impoverished men from Nepal who were kidnapped and killed while being transported to Iraq for jobs that supported U.S troops. Simpson retraced their steps back to the subcontractor who originally hired the workers, and uncovered a web of deceit and coercion.
Aired last year, this program has already received a CINE Golden Eagle and has been nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy (winners will be announced September 24).
>> Watch this updated version of EXPOSÉ's award-winning episode about Simpson's reporting: "Blame Somebody Else"
>> Read Cam Simpson's original series "Pipeline to Peril" in the CHICAGO TRIBUNE.
The Dallas Morning News and the Newspapers of the Future
Like most newspapers today, The Dallas Morning News faces critical questions about how it will adapt to the new media reality of declining subscriptions and loss of print advertising revenues. Investigative units can be fairly costly to keep, and even the best of them are finding it hard to translate award-wining journalism into profits (see a recent Fortune Magazine article with the rather gloomy headline, “Can the Washington Post Survive?”). The Dallas Morning News is no exception to the trend, and in the past three years, it has faced some rather aggressive downsizing of its staff.
Faced with the pressures of the decline of their medium, few papers have resisted going online – they are still not seeing the revenue stream, but they’re banking that it is the way of the future. Newspaper sites are using the web to go beyond their print reporting, provide more transparency to readers about where the reporting is coming from, and reach out to their constituencies in different ways – or they are stuck seeing their sites as archives for their still predominantly print enterprise. After about ten years of online newspapering, some sites are clearly doing it better than others.
Although not necessarily an indication of quality, DallasNews.com ranked among the top 30 Web newspapers in terms of traffic in recent Nielsen/Net ratings. For The Dallas Morning News’ “Road Hazards” series, the website is the place for additional reporting not included in the print edition (an online article about the TXI Transportation Co., a north Texas rock hauler with a questionable safety), a video with advice from Sgt. Chris Smith of the Dallas County’s Sheriff Department about sharing the road with big trucks, and documents ranging from court transcripts to compliance reviews of individual companies to fuel receipts. Readers’ ability to respond to the series was limited to less than a dozen posted comments and a now unavailable chat.
The investigative team at The Dallas Morning News relied heavily on the data analysis skills of reporter Jennifer LaFleur. LaFleur has also led computer-assisted-reporting projects at the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She has taught journalism at the University of Missouri and American University and is co-author of a book on computer-assisted reporting. (Read LaFleur’s tips for using data for investigative reporting here.)
But data mining skills are not just for journalists. Check out LaFleur’s tips for mining data in her column, Citizen Watchdog, which tells readers how to apply investigative reporting techniques in their own lives -- including how to background check daycare providers, where to learn about recalls of dangerous household products, and how to find out what information the government is collecting about you.
EXPOSÉ’s “Eyes on the Road” has its broadcast premiere tonight. Check local listings. Check back here Monday for the full episode online.
When an 18-wheel truck and a family van collided on a Texas highway, ten people were killed in the crash. Reporters from The Dallas Morning News began investigating the incident and found that more than 5,000 Americans die each year in accidents involving commercial trucks. After a 14-month investigation, the reporters found the deregulation of interstate shipping in the 1980s had lead to a number of concerns: a proliferation of companies moving in and out of the industry, the use of felons and drivers whose backgrounds were not thoroughly checked, and a shortage of inspectors to enforce standards and take unsafe carriers of the road.
Nuestra Familia/Our Family is a documentary that investigates California’s prison gangs, their effects on Latino families, and law enforcement efforts to stop their spread. For the project, producer/director Oriana Zill de Granados of the Center for Investigative Reporting worked with The Monterey County Herald reporters Julia Reynolds and George Sanchez. Reynolds started this investigation into Latino gangs while she was covering crime issues for CIR; her initial reporting resulted in stories for the San Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, MotherJones.com and the Mexico City daily La Jornada.
Oriana Zill de Granados talked to the Blog about filming outside her comfort zone:
Filming requires numerous people, lot of equipment and a lot of technical knowledge, and it generally requires, basically, a lot of things to go right. And in a situation where, with gang members, where a lot of the situations we were filming were actually quite dangerous, for both us and them… we had to take a lot of precautions, and we had to change the way I normally work. And I couldn’t actually stay in town for very long because of fear that there would be some reprisal for what we were doing. So we had to kind of parachute in and parachute out a lot for the Nuestra Familia film, really different process. Many of the subjects interviewed eventually dropped out of the film for fear that there would be some kind of problem. . . [It] took a lot of time and energy to basically get people to trust us and to allow people to make their own decisions about whether they wanted to cooperate with the film, which many people eventually did, which is what makes it so good. And I really, in all my projects, I am in awe of my subjects, but in this project particularly, I was in awe of many of my subjects who I thought were very brave and honorable people.
EXPOSÉ’s “Death Is Different” has its broadcast premiere tonight. Check local listings.
“Death Is Different” producer Oriana Zill de Granados is no stranger to criminal justice issues. Her recent work includes two Frontline documentaries -- a 3-year investigation about the war on drugs, where she focused on both federal and local prosecutions and whether they had been effective, and last year’s “The Enemy Within” about whether federal prosecutors were prosecuting the war on terror “in a just and adequate fashion.” Yet even Zill de Granados admitted a certain surprise at the how unequal the process of determining a death sentence is across the nation.
Zill de Granados, who also serves as the productions director at the Center for Investigative Reporting, talked to the Blog about the national importance of Stephen Henderson’s reporting and why it was selected for EXPOSÉ:
[The] piece highlights how difficult it is for death penalty defense in some states around the country, and how death penalty defense is really not being funded equally in various states -- which means that if you’re on death row in Texas, you’re probably going to get a state-funded lawyer who’s going to run your case, where if you’re on death row in Mississippi, you’re going to get a county lawyer/public defender who doesn’t really have the resources that are necessary to do an adequate defense according to the standards that have been laid out by the Supreme Court.
In three of the four states McClatchy reporter Stephen Henderson examined “poor legal representation is a result of official policy,” a> he concluded. “The states pay no more than a pittance to help lawyers defend their clients, and none requires that well-trained attorneys handle death cases.” Low pay for attorneys, little money for needed investigations into their clients’ backgrounds, and few funds for additional medical/psychiatric evaluations hampered many defense cases. (Capital defense is expensive, so expensive in fact that a recent article in The Economist suggests that an argument that was once used for the death penalty – that taxpayers should not be required to pay for the life incarceration of a murderer – is now one of the arguments against it: “It is now far more expensive to execute someone than to jail him for life; in North Carolina, for instance, each capital case costs $2m more. Ordinary inmates need only to be fed and guarded. Those on death row must have lawyers arguing expensively about their fate, sometimes for a decade or more.”)
One bright spot that Henderson found in his reporting was Georgia. Although previously as bad as the others -- Georgia’s former county-based capital defense system was found woefully inadequate -- a publicly funded, statewide capital defenders office started in 2005 had apparently been having results and, as of January 2007, none of its 46 clients had been sentenced to death. Zill de Granados traveled with some of the lawyers from the Georgia Capital Defenders office and filmed them for “Death is Different.” She was impressed with their 24-hour-a-day work ethic. “I had never really seen such devotion and passion in young people in recent years,” Zill de Granados told the Blog. “They really impressed me, I was blown away.”
Even before his series “No Defense: Shortcut to Death Row,” Stephen Henderson was known as the kind of journalist who wanted to write stories that mattered. He had covered the inner city in Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore. His editor at McClatchy, Jim Asher, knew “He had a passion for trying to bring stories to the front of everybody’s consciousness that matter to the country and to democracy, and he’s made a habit of doing those.” That kind of dedication was certainly something that struck producer Oriana Zill de Granados who described Henderson’s work as “public service journalism – really trying to educate people about the problems in our society and what can be done to fix them.”
In April 2007, Henderson began a new calling as the deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit Free Press. After seven years working for newspapers in Chicago and Baltimore and covering the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. for the last four, Henderson returned to the place he started, and the city he called home. He told his readers, “I've learned to love the great things about this place, hate the rest, but own it all as part of where I'm from and who I am.” He returned to Detroit, despite dire pronostications about the death of the city, because it was his “responsibility,” and he was fulfilling his “obligation to come back, to give back, to help out.”
In an EXPOSÉ interview, Stephen Henderson talks more about what effects he hopes his journalism will have; his trip to Valdosta, Georgia, where his material grandfather is from; and why he decided to go back to Detroit.
In 2003, Stephen Henderson was a Supreme Court beat reporter for the McClatchy News Service. New to the job, he carried a small leather-bound copy of the Constitution with him wherever he went. Henderson wasn’t looking to write a typical death penalty story. He wasn’t looking for convictions overturned by DNA evidence, stories of exonerations or last-minute stays from the governor. Instead he was interested in how defense attorneys handled the penalty phase of capital cases - the part of the case that could spare their client's life. And he knew he was treading on a “taboo type subject”: after all, these people were, as Henderson states: “killers, vicious killers.” One man stabbed an ex-girlfriend to death, another slashed an insurance agent’s throat when she refused to give him money. Often there was little doubt of guilt, conviction was assumed.
In 1972, when the Supreme Court placed a defacto ban on the death penalty in the United States, it claimed in Furman v. Georgia* that its arbitrariness in application constituted an act of “cruel and unusual punishment” that violated the Eighth amendment of the Constitution. But in its 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling, the Supreme Court once again allowed for the death penalty: it admitted that “the penalty of death is different in kind from any other punishment,” but affirmed that Georgia’s bifurcated system in trial and sentencing provided for “specific jury findings as to the circumstances of the crime or the character of the defendant” and gave some guarantees of fairness in application.
While the judges had ruled that the Eighth Amendment did allow for the death penalty, it also saw that the Sixth Amendment, the right to counsel, as a means to ensure fairness. As Stephen Henderson began to understand, death penalty defendants needed “more than just a warm body” in the chair next to them in court, particularly during the sentencing phase. Henderson found that the Supreme Court had ruled, and ruled frequently since 1976 -- Strickland v. Washington (1984); Williams v. Taylor (2000); Wiggins v. Smith (2003); Rompilla v. Beard (2005) -- on that very issue: defense attorneys are required to argue vigorously for their clients’ lives, which includes looking into childhood abuse or evidence of a low IQ – anything that might lead the jury to impose a lesser sentence than death.
But when Henderson looked at 4 states with the death penalty – Alabama, Georgia (the state of Furman and Gregg), Mississippi and Virginia – he found a troubling common denominator: defendants in capital cases were not getting a proper defense. Instead, poorly funded justice systems were making it impossible for public defenders to apply Supreme Court standards.
*While many sites provide the complete text (written opinions, transcripts of oral arguments, etc.) of Supreme Court proceedings – including www.supremecourtus.gov -- Oyez.org links are provided here. Oyez is a multimedia archive which includes audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955. Oyez podcasts of Supreme Court proceedings are available via iTunes.
Blog content provided this week by the EXPOSÉ production team
Whistleblowers who've reported corporate or government fraud and misconduct
-- such as Jim Legg of ConocoPhillips in "A Sea of Trouble" -- have likely
saved thousands of lives. But those who choose to blow the whistle on their
employer face a treacherous path that often results in financial and
emotional ruin. Investigative reporter James Sandler writes about
his own experience working with a company whistleblower during a NEW YORK
TIMES investigation, and offers a few words of advice for those thinking
about making the leap.
Funders for Exposé: America's Investigative Reports include: Anderson Family Charitable Fund, The Jacob Burns Foundation, The Betsy & Jesse Fink Foundation, Philip Harper, Park Foundation, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund, Bernard & Irene Schwartz, and Tracy & Eric Semler.
