In summary
The American Society of Magazine Editors named CalMatters’ investigation, “The Man Who Unsolved a Murder” as a finalist in the public interest category. Winners will be announced in May.
CalMatters is a finalist in the National Magazine Awards, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, for investigative reporter Anat Rubin’s story, “The Man Who Unsolved a Murder.”
The National Magazine Awards honor magazines and websites for editorial and visual excellence as demonstrated by the superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design.
CalMatters is nominated in the public interest category, along with The Atlantic, Bloomberg Businessweek, ProPublica, WIRED, Bloomberg News and ESPN Digital. CalMatters is one of the few local journalism organizations recognized in the 61st National Magazine Awards. Award winners will be announced and honored May 19 in New York City.
Investigating California’s public defense system
Rubin’s investigation found that, across the country, poor people accused of crimes were being convicted without anyone looking into their side of the story. Yet the lack of public defense investigators was entirely absent from the national conversation around criminal justice reform. That dialogue focused on police and prosecutorial misconduct, but rarely on why there was no one there to catch it on the other side.
Rubin’s story changed that.
She found that defense investigators, who review police reports, visit crime scenes, chase down video surveillance footage and interview witnesses, are the single greatest protection against wrongful convictions, but they are largely missing from public defender offices in California and across the nation.
Her story shone a light on this failing with a compelling, elegantly woven narrative about a man who had been charged with a heinous kidnapping and murder.
While local law enforcement celebrated solving a decades-old crime, a lone defense investigator on a shoestring budget unraveled the case. Rubin followed along as he made one discovery after another — an old photograph that proved a key witness was lying, lost recordings that contradicted the prosecutor’s narrative of the crime — to demonstrate how important defense investigators are, even as she presented data showing that most people accused of crimes would not have access to them.
Rubin spoke with more than 45 people to report the story. She reviewed interrogation footage, law enforcement reports and interview transcripts spanning more than three decades. To understand the scope of the problem, she analyzed staffing data, incarceration rates and caseloads for California’s 58 counties.
At once a page-turning mystery about a 6-year-old boy’s disappearance from a remote Northern California logging town in 1976, and a methodical, data-and-document-based investigation into modern systemic failures, Rubin’s story set a new baseline for how we talk about public defense.
In addition to her compelling, narrative investigation, Rubin also published seven key takeaways from her story, “California is failing to provide a vital safeguard against wrongful convictions.”
Rubin’s investigation was cited by researchers and legislators, including by the state public defender, on the California Public Defenders Association website and on the American Bar Association’s public defense news archive.
It is now the first reference in an analysis of a California bill (AB 690) that would significantly increase defense investigations and create minimum standards statewide.
Six months later, Rubin published the second part of her series examining the lack of key safeguards against wrongful conviction in California, “The WalMart of public defense: How justice gets sold to the lowest bidder in rural California.”
That investigation found that nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and that most of them do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case. As Rubin details in her story, these arrangements so clearly disincentivize investigating and litigating cases that they’ve been banned in other parts of the country. But they have flourished in California.
She focused the story on one firm with several such contracts throughout the state — a firm that’s become known as the “WalMart of public defense” for its ubiquity and tactics.