With support from the Fund, the Racine County Eye (a local news outlet in Wisconsin) is investigating the case of a man who died in the county jail – and looking more broadly at conditions in the jail and rising costs to operate it. In 2021, Malcolm James died while experiencing a mental health crisis inside the Racine County Jail. ...
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, with support from the Fund, documented how Vans, The North Face and Timberland continued sourcing materials from a Fulgent Sun Group factory in Vietnam while Fulgent Sun’s China subsidiary was tied to Xinjiang labor transfers. Using geotagged social videos, state-media records and trade data, TBIJ showed Uyghur and other minorities working at the company well ...
In the latest story in an ongoing investigation into the Milwaukee County district attorney’s list of law enforcement officers with credibility issues, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Ashley Luthern spotlighted a police officer who kept his job after landing on the county’s Brady list due to domestic violence allegations. He later lied under oath and kept his job for two more ...
As part of a broader investigation of conviction integrity units supported by the Fund, New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations examined the New York Attorney General’s conviction review bureau, which was launched in 2012 to review innocence claims from across the state. But the program has fallen short, the investigation found. The bureau does not operate as an independent ...
In a yearlong series on evictions from public housing, the Bangor Daily News, in partnership with ProPublica, uncovered practices around back rent repayment agreements that Maine’s housing leaders didn’t even know were happening. With support from the Fund, reporter Sawyer Loftus showed that people in public housing who paid their back rent have evictions on their permanent records – even ...
When companies want to build new facilities, they’re required to assess the impact of pollution on the community’s air quality – but more than 90% of the time, corporations and regulators in Michigan did not use proper methods to determine whether new facilities would violate federal pollution limits, according to reporting by Tom Perkins for The Guardian. With support from ...
Sarah Cavanaugh was a soft-spoken social worker living with her wife in Rhode Island. But in her double life – one made possible by committing extensive fraud at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs – she played the role of a wounded Marine dying of cancer. Cavanaugh defrauded several charities and many individuals of more than $280,000. With support from ...
In the first story in an ongoing series by Hell Gate and New York Focus on the systemic sexual assault of incarcerated people by employees in New York prisons, Jessy Edwards reported on the case of Sierra Johnson, a Native American woman who filed a lawsuit claiming she was sexually assaulted by three corrections officers and a doctor in New ...
In 1996, 36-year-old Susan Walsh reportedly left her house in Nutley, New Jersey, and was never seen again. The freelance writer, mother and sex worker is presumed dead, but her body has never been found. Her disappearances made headlines worldwide. In 2020, the mysterious case – and the misogyny in the original reporting about it and sexist remarks from the ...
With a seed grant from the Fund, Elyse Hauser obtained government records about deep-sea mining for minerals that can be used to make batteries, ballistics and other items. The records show that under President Joe Biden, some U.S. officials were supportive of deep-sea mining – and that support has expanded with an executive order signed by President Donal Trump, encouraging ...