Clips
Former Jacksonville prosecutor helped sentence blacks to far more time behind bars.
This story was a collaboration with the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. For this story, I put together a database of two years of drug convictions, tracking about 30 variables, so that we could identify what aggravated and mitigated racial disparities. We then profiled the prosecutor with the largest disparities. I interviewed about 30 prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys and people who grew up with her, which included traveling to her childhood home in Staten Island, to put the profile together with Josh Salman and Michael Braga of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
http://www.jacksonville.com/influence
https://s3.amazonaws.com/heraldtribune/influence/data-for-publication-6-8-18.xlsx
A man’s arrest for drunkenness led to tragedy in Jacksonville’s jail
Mark Baker was drunk when he was arrested about 100 yards away from the emergency room. He was suicidal, too, so police followed procedure by stripping and pairing him with an inmate. That inmate was Joseph Pye, who police said was violent and uncontrollable and had assaulted a minor. That night, and again the next morning, Pye raped Mark Baker. Eighteen months later, Baker drank himself to death.
I used detailed reporting of Baker’s story, along with data I put together from similar reports in jails across the state, to hold the Sheriff’s Office to account. In response to this story, which came out during an election, the top candidates for sheriff vowed to change jail policies.
Public Defender Matt Shirk paid political allies while his attorneys’ salaries languished
I have spent years writing about the illegal activities of Jacksonville’s former public defender. An earlier grand jury had already found he likely broke the law, and it recommended his removal from office, but the Florida governor refused to do so. In 2016, Matt Shirk was up for re-election, and I continued finding ways Shirk used the office to benefit himself. In this story, written after he lost re-election, I detailed how he used the office to prop up political allies even while his office had the lowest paid attorneys and one of the highest turnover rates.
Public Defender Matt Shirk’s top assistant has been found ineffective four times
For another story about Matt Shirk, after repeatedly hearing complaints about his chief assistant, I read dozens of appeals filed by his chief assistant’s past defendants. I found that on at least four occasions, the chief assistant, who led the office’s death-penalty unit, was found ineffective by courts. Technically, under the law, that meant he wouldn’t be qualified to defend anybody facing the death penalty.
For 11 years, Collins Cooper attracted criticism. Now that he’s running for judge, he’s unopposed.
Rarely do those who run for judicial office in Jacksonville get challenged. Collins Cooper was the son of two of Jacksonville’s most prominent attorneys and the grandson of the man who wrote the city’s charter, yet I heard from more than 20 attorneys who complained he wasn’t fit for the job. While none were willing to speak on the record for fear of retribution, I confirmed many of their complaints with State Attorney’s Office records that showed throughout his career his supervisors criticized his legal knowledge and his professionalism.
Reverse mortgages were supposed to help the elderly. For some, it destroyed their retirements.
A foreclosure is a boring legal move that lets a bank take a home. It’s also the collapse of Ms. Young’s dream; it’s Mamie Rose, 90 years old and proud, realizing she might lose her independence; it’s Jimmie Smith, a self-made man, finding all he owns on a street.
Early in my time at the Times-Union, I found myself writing frequently about foreclosures. Eventually, I found that in Jacksonville the fine print of reverse mortgages were putting older, mostly African-American residents out of their homes. In some cases, the banks were foreclosing even though the homeowners didn’t violate any part of their mortgage. After my stories, one couple was able to get their home back thanks to a court order.
Raines high school students hope football can save them from Jacksonville’s dangerous streets
William M. Raines High School has sat since 1965 on Moncrief Road, a corridor of poverty and crime in Northwest Jacksonville. Residents there were intentionally neglected and segregated; in the 1930s, the federal government labeled the neighborhood a “Negro concentration” unworthy of investment. And the neighborhood didn’t improve from there.
The Zip code 32209 has twice as many homicides as any other in the city.
But every week of every fall, the neighborhood takes a one-day reprieve from life’s stress to brag about their school’s football team. Yeah, I’m from Moncrief, they say, and did you see how many points those Raines boys put up against Jackson, against Wolfson, against Lee? At least 20 Raines players have made it to the NFL, and four played in Super Bowls. Any given Friday can make a future star.
Hurricane Matthew avoided landfall and massive devastation in Jacksonville, but Northeast Florida’s recovery is just beginning
“The storm of a century,” the mayor called Hurricane Matthew. The National Weather Service said no hurricane like this had hit the city since the 1800s. When the city was facing what looked to be the worst hurricane in the city’s history, I was tasked with the lead write-through of the breaking news story. I rode out the hurricane in a truck, driving throughout the city so that I could put this narrative together. We had to print out of state, and I filed this story just hours after the storm passed.
One of the data visualizations based on the data we gathered showed how racial disparities varied by prosecutor and judge.
I requested jail sexual assault reports from every Florida county to illustrate what an outlier Duval County was.
