As police violence and the failings of the U.S. justice system became front-page news across the country in 2020, Reuters reporters produced a series of data-driven investigative reports that included the first in-depth examination of qualified immunity; a revealing story on how police unions protect abusive officers; the first ever jail-by-jail accounting of inmate mortality in local lockups; and the first comprehensive, national accounting of judicial misconduct. This reporting led to increased awareness of the institutional failings of U.S. law enforcement, and was cited specifically in calls for reform of qualified immunity, and in cases against a corrupt judge and violent jail guards.
Restoring Health Care for Pacific Islanders After Decades of Unfilled Promises
Tens of thousands of Marshallese islanders fled their homes for the United States after extensive nuclear weapons testing in the 1940s and 50s washed their islands in dangerous radiation. Under an international agreement they were promised federal benefits, including Medicaid. But, in 1996 Congress stripped them of their Medicaid benefits, and the Marshallese – many of whom now work in factories and farms in America’s heartland – have been struggling to get healthcare ever since. Their community was ravaged by COVID-19, as POLITICO reporter Dan Diamond documented through first-hand visits and outdoor interviews. As a result of his reporting on the COVID-19 crisis and the decades of neglect that the Marshallese community had suffered at the hands of the federal government, Congress officially restored Marshallese islanders’ rights to Medicaid in December 2020.
Mississippi’s Dangerous and Dysfunctional Penal System
Mississippi has America’s most dangerous and antiquated penal system – The Marshall Project and Mississippi Today uncovered why. Severe understaffing has made prisons so dangerous that even guards aren’t safe. The state is paying millions of dollars to private prisons for workers who don’t show up. And Mississippi is the only state still running debtors prisons, where people with mostly low-level convictions are sentenced to prison-like facilities to work off fines, court fees, and restitution. Residents in these “restitution centers” often stay longer than necessary to pay off their debts. Lawmakers have called for defunding the centers and turning them into halfway houses, and the Mississippi State Auditor issued a scathing report, saying “the state must fix this, and now.” He also launched an investigation into the tax dollars paid for ghost workers.
Indianapolis Star reporters uncovered that government officials in Indiana took more than a billion dollars in federal funds earmarked for nursing home care and redirected it to hospital construction projects, while losing millions to fraud and padding the pockets of hospital executives. The state exploited loose rules and minimal oversight, and left Indiana with some of the worst nursing homes in America, just as the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Inadequate nursing home staffing across the state contributed to hundreds of deaths that likely could have been prevented with more resources. As a result of the IndyStar’s investigation, the state’s largest hospital system committed to a full review of its nursing home operations and the system’s longtime leader was forced to resign. At the state level, reforms have been proposed to increase nursing home funding, and tie Medicaid payments to quality of care.
The Afghanistan Papers/A Secret History of the War
The Washington Post obtained and reported on a confidential trove of interviews conducted by the federal government with more than 400 people who played a direct role in the war in Afghanistan. The more than 2,000 pages of documents, pried loose after a three-year public records battle, reveal that presidents, generals and diplomats have misled the public about the conflict for nearly two decades. After publication, the story drew major attention from world leaders, U.S. presidential candidates, the Pentagon, military veterans, and the media. Congress has held several hearings to review the Afghanistan Papers and question federal officials about their handling of the war, with some legislators calling for the U.S. to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan.
In October 2018, federal law enforcement agents in Oregon suspected the Saudi Arabian government had helped one of its citizens, a young college student studying in Portland, flee the United States weeks before his trial in the hit-and-run death of a teenage girl. Based on a tip about this case, a reporter for The Oregonian newspaper uncovered a pattern of similar cases around the country, some dating back decades. In response, Oregon’s senior Senator introduced a bill that forces U.S. intelligence officials to disclose what they know about the Saudi Arabian government’s suspected role in spiriting its citizens out of the United States to escape criminal prosecution. The bill was signed into law in December, 2019.
This NBC News investigation revealed that carbon monoxide detectors are not required in any of 4.6 million homes that receive federal rental subsidies from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, despite HUD’s legal mandate to ensure these properties are “decent, safe and sanitary.” The investigation uncovered that at least 13 HUD residents have died from CO poisoning since 2003. Less than two weeks after the investigation was published, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives introduced bills requiring CO detectors in public housing. In September 2019, the House passed a bill requiring detectors and $300 million in funding to install them, citing NBC News’ reporting. The bill is currently working its way through the Senate, with strong support from the Trump administration.
Kaiser Health News revealed that, for nearly 20 years, the FDA struck deals with medical device makers to keep millions of malfunction and injury reports out of a trusted public database relied upon by doctors, researchers, and patients for information about injuries, deaths or malfunctions linked to breast implants, surgical mesh, artificial knees and hundreds of other medical products. Instead, the FDA allowed companies to submit these reports to an internal database so obscure that it was unknown to safety experts, doctors, and even a recent FDA commissioner. As a result of this reporting, the FDA published its entire hidden database online in June 2019, revealing 5.7 million device-related injuries or malfunctions for the first time.
A first-of-its-kind investigation, by the Anchorage Daily News in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, uncovered major gaps in law enforcement that placed residents at risk. Their reporting found that one in three Alaska communities have no local police of any kind, the state of Alaska has failed to enforce police hiring requirements and some villages routinely hire criminals as cops, and state Troopers are patrolling suburban areas at the expense of hard-to-reach villages. As a result of this reporting, the Department of Justice declared a national emergency and has promised more than $52 million in federal funding for public safety in Alaska villages.
The winner of the 2020 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting was “Copy. Paste. Legislate” by the staffs of The Arizona Republic, USA TODAY, and the Center for Public Integrity. The collaborative reporting team conducted unprecedented computer analysis of legislation in all 50 states to reveal 10,000 bills that were copied nearly word-for-word from text written by industry groups, lobbyists and political activists, often to benefit big business at consumers’ expense. Two tools built as part of the project are helping citizens and local reporters track these copycat bills in their own communities.
