The Chicago Tribune nearly won a Pulitzer for a two-part series published in 2000, “State of Execution: The Death Penalty in Texas.” The principal reporters, finalists for the prize, were Ken Armstrong and Steve Mills.
Criner got lucky. He was eventually pardoned by Governor George W. Bush.
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The article, which also quotes admirers who praised her ethics and judicial temperament, was written because the judge is in big trouble. Back on September 25, 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it had accepted a Kentucky case challenging the constitutionality of execution by lethal injection. As it happened, Texas was planning to put a condemned man to death by lethal injection that very evening. When lawyers for that man, Michael Richard, who’d confessed to rape and murder, found out what the Supreme Court had done, they immediately began preparing an appeal that asked Texas to postpone the execution until the court ruled. But computer difficulties slowed their work, and when they saw that they wouldn’t be able to hand-deliver their appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals by the time the office closed at 5 PM, they called ahead and asked for an extra 20 minutes. A court official passed on the request to Judge Keller, who’d already gone home. “We close at 5,” she replied. Richard was executed that night.
Unless the Chicago Tribune‘s online archives are misleading, its editorial page had nothing to say in 2007 about the execution of Michael Richard. The time had apparently passed when it was so preoccupied by prosecutorial and judicial misconduct that its coverage—primarily by Armstrong, Mills, and Maurice Possley—gained it the enmity of prosecutors across America. In 2000 prosecutors went so far as to lobby the Pulitzer board to keep the Tribune from winning journalism’s highest honor. That year a 1999 series by Armstrong and Possley, “Trial & Error—How Prosecutors Sacrifice Justice to Win,” and a 1999 series by Armstrong and Mills, “Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois,” were entered together and named a finalist in the public service category. A year later, “State of Execution” was a finalist in national reporting. In 2003 the Tribune broke through—Cornelia Grumman won a Pulitzer for her editorials on death penalty reform.
He went on: “What a defamation case is about is, as Mr. Knight said, deterring people from doing things. I wrote down what he said. I wrote it in red. ‘I want you to award punitive damages,’ he said, ‘so that the Chicago Tribune doesn’t do this again.’ And God help us if the Chicago Tribune doesn’t do this again. Because our society needs newspapers studying our problems. Prosecutors are immune. The government is powerful. It’s the media and the newspapers that keep a check on government excesses, and that’s exactly what they were doing here.
Does this mean that as newspapers shrink their staffs, the AP is expanding its own to compensate? ‘Fraid not. Last November the AP announced that it was cutting its global work force of 4,100 by 10 percent and moving 91 editor jobs from New York City and several state bureaus to four new regional editing centers—in Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Phoenix. The central region, based here, will consist of Illinois and 13 other states. The jobs advertised on the AP’s “career” Web site include regional editor, broadcast editor, and enterprise editor for the central region.
Those two northwest-side neighborhoods “were communities we could never get a toehold in,” vice president Andy Johnston told me, “little boutiques that don’t advertise and little restaurants that don’t advertise.”
