Welcome to our weekly review of the events at crimestory.com.
This was a light publishing week for us, as we worked to adjust our editorial calendar and plan around the new realities created by the coronavirus crisis. More about those plans a bit later in this newsletter.
Early in the week I was invited to be a guest on Seema Iyer’s Court TV program. Seema and I discussed the Robert Durst trial, and specifically focused on the stunning testimony offered by Durst’s brother Thomas. You can watch that clip here.
We began the week by presenting a Podcast special – CRIME STORY Contributors Read: The Prosecutor’s Cinematic Opening in The People vs. Robert Durst. This was an article we published at the beginning of Durst trial, and we offered the podcast as an opportunity for our subscribers to hear the voices of each contributor to that story.
We followed that with Molly Miller’s second piece exploring how police use the leeway afforded them by the U.S. Supreme Court Case of Frazier v. Cupp. In Cops and the Art of Lying 2: The Polygraph Tactic, Molly continues to explore a case where police interrogators persuade an 18 year old murder suspect to take a lie detector test – which is inadmissible in court – and use the psychological environment created by the test to elicit a confession from the young man.
As I mentioned above, we have been rethinking our plans for the coming weeks at crimestory.com, and we are making the following adjustments:
We will continue to cover the Robert Durst trial, including reports on the defense’s opening statement, and stories about some of the witnesses who testified before the trial was suspended due to the public health concerns. We will also use the vast archive of admitted evidence and testimony that was filed over three years of preliminary hearings to explore the narratives that both sides will present.
We will cover the way that the coronavirus crisis is impacting people caught up in the criminal legal process in Los Angeles and around the country. (Hannah Teich’s recent work on the Crime Story Daily aggregator list has been particularly stellar in offering many perspectives on this subject.)
We have commissioned Amanda Knox and Christopher Robinson to contribute pieces on a more frequent basis in the coming weeks.
We will hear from more storytellers in the world of crime and justice including my old friend Vince DiPersio, one of the filmmakers behind the upcoming Oxygen special Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project.
We will also offer a serialized account of a fascinating and troubling case that was recently tried in the Los Angeles criminal courts.
So we hope you will continue to explore our stories at crimestory.com as we move through this global pandemic crisis.
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.
Again, Hannah’s work on the Crime Story Daily aggregated list of crime and justice stories is a tremendous resource for information about how the pandemic is impacting the people caught up in our justice system.
Click here to go to Hannah’s weekly essay.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Kary Antholis
Publisher/Editor, Crime Story
