For the Maine Monitor, Samantha Hogan found that the state’s 16 judges who manage probate cases, including those that establish guardianships for people unable to care for themselves, operate with few methods to ensure safe outcomes. With support from the Fund, Hogan found that few probate courts run criminal background or bankruptcy checks on potential guardians for aging adults, people ...
Domestic violence often leads to homelessness, especially when the accused abuser controls the money. Compounding the challenges, survivors of domestic violence in Washington State often can’t secure court-ordered protection that could help keep them safe, despite recent reforms by Washington State lawmakers. In an investigation of conditions that domestic violence survivors confront in Washington, reporter Kelsey Turner, writing in InvestigateWest ...
Oscar Lopez and Frank Main, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, conducted a months-long investigation on the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel and its operation in Chicago, unraveling how heroin trafficking on commercial buses was an integral part of one of the most horrific crimes in modern Mexican history: The disappearance and presumed massacre of 43 students in 2014 in Iguala. The ...
Earlier this year, WLRN, the NPR member station in South Florida, uncovered a pattern of real estate sales by Miami Dade’s guardianship program to companies owned by close relatives of the City Attorney. The program is able to sell the assets of incapacitated people in its care, and then use those funds to cover the costs of their care. WLRN ...
Reporter Anna Massoglia, writing for Open Secrets with one of the Fund’s grants for stories on threats to democracy in the U.S., investigated the opaque network of groups spreading election disinformation, as well as groups that sponsored a rally shortly before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. OpenSecrets zeroed in on Publix supermarkets heiress Julie Fancelli’s role, revealing that ...
With more than 100 interviews and scores of documents, New Hampshire Public Radio created a seven-part podcast that looks at why it’s so difficult to hold people accountable for sexual misconduct in the addiction treatment industry. With support from the Fund, Lauren Chooljian and her colleagues investigated claims that the founder of New Hampshire’s largest privately-run addiction treatment network was ...
In 2022, the Idaho Legislature passed a new law requiring schools to write detailed election-ballot language to tell voters how they plan to spend property tax levies. With support from the Fund, Idaho Education News conducted a comprehensive investigation on how school districts were complying with the new law – and found that some school districts are providing the detailed ...
Randolph County, Georgia, had the highest death rate of any rural county in the nation at the start of the COVID pandemic in April 2020. But later that year, the local hospital in Cuthbert, the county seat, closed. That forced residents in need of emergency services to travel more than an hour. It was the third emergency room closure in ...
Carolina Public Press has launched a multi-part series examining “charge stacking” in North Carolina and its role in plea bargaining and disparities in sentencing. This is the practice prosecutors use to bring multiple charges against defendants to pressure them to plead guilty to some charges. With support from the Fund, Jacob Biba reported on the experience of Terence Smith, a ...
The federal Indian Child Welfare Act has enjoyed bipartisan support and is widely seen as the gold standard for U.S. child welfare systems. But it came under fire from a little-known network of attorneys, corporate law firms and conservative political organizations. Murat Oztaskin, with support from the Fund, examined these connections for the New York Review of Books, exposing ties ...