Welcome to our weekly review of the events at crimestory.com.

Before we dive into our posts for this week, I would like to direct your attention to this piece which appeared on the Nieman Lab site. It’s a comprehensive interview that I did with Hanaa’ Tameez, and covers in substantial detail the provenance, aims and ambitions of Crime Story.

Also, I appeared on the Josh Marshall Podcast this week. We discussed impeachment, the 25th anniversary of the OJ trial, jury nullification and William Barr’s interest in retributive justice storytelling. You can to listen to that here.

On Tuesday we presented a new episode of our podcast series Jury Duty which is intended be a fun, lively, up-to-the-moment and free-ranging forum for the discussion of crime and justice storytelling, news and narrative analysis. Episode 5 is entitled Prosecutors and Public Defenders and features a discussion between Crime Story Reporter Molly Miller and me about the Molly’s coverage of the Los Angeles District Attorney Debate and her recent interview with a veteran LA public defender.

On Wednesday, we published Molly Miller’s piece on CalGang, which explores California’s database monitoring individuals who are suspected of involvement in gang activity. As Molly vividly illustrates, the criteria for someone’s inclusion are dangerously broad, making it nearly impossible for people who live in certain neighborhoods to escape gang affiliation in the eyes of the law, particularly if that individual is a person of color.

On Thursday we published and released the podcast of the third installment of a three-part series on The First Los Angeles District Attorney Debate by Molly Miller. 

As we previously reported, only two candidates appeared at the event: Former San Francisco DA George Gascón, and former federal and county Public Defender and former US Senate aide, Rachel Rossi. Current District Attorney, Jackie Lacey did not appear.

In this part, Molly presents the candidates responses to questions about police accountability, the death penalty and homelessness.

On Friday, we published the second in an on-going series of stories about my 28 year dialogue with John Orr, a former arson investigator who is serving a life sentence as a convicted arsonist. One of the most unusual aspects of Orr’s story is that he wrote a novel about a fireman/arsonist and that novel was used to convict him.

A core part of the mission at Crime Story is to explore how and why stories of crime and justice are told; that exploration lies at the heart of the series of pieces that continues with A Convicted Fireman-Arsonist and Me: The Facts As I Knew Them.

For those of you wondering how you can catch up on previous Crime Story newsletters, just click here and your question shall be answered.

We close this week, as is our habit, with Hannah Teich’s curated selection of some of the more interesting stories from Crime Story Daily over the past week.

Hannah, who edits this Daily section, groups the aggregation into four general topic areas: criminal justice policy reporting; muckraking/watchdog reporting; complex crime storytelling; and stories that examine the impact of criminal justice and true-crime in the culture.

Click here to go to Hannah’s weekly essay.

Thanks for reading and listening.

Kary Antholis

Publisher/Editor, Crime Story

editor@crimestory.com

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