Welcome to our summary of the week’s events at CrimeStory.com and The Crime Story Podcast.

This week, we presented our trailer for renewed coverage of a big L.A. criminal trial and we continued our serialization of Judge Katherine Mader’s memoir.


On Tuesday, we premiered the trailer for Season Two of our Crime Story podcast, Jury Duty: The Trial of Robert Durst. The season premiere is on Wednesday, May 12. Listen to the new trailer here.

And then subscribe to Season 2 for all of the breaking news and drama of this national media trial via your preferred platform below.

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Also this week, we continued our Crime Story series excerpting Inside the Robe: A Judge’s Candid Tale of Criminal Justice in America, by Judge Katherine Mader (Ret.) which best selling author Michael Connelly called “a perfect book: engrossing and telling at the same time.”

In Part 41 of Inside the Robe, Judge Mader uses an incident of a police officers flagrant misconduct in a gang murder case to reflect on how such corruption is facilitated by a culture of permissiveness. Mader also explores the limitations on a judge’s ability to root out such behavior. 

In Part 42, the Judge offers an anecdote that illustrates the insidious phenomenon of prosecutors appearing to use their power to play politics.  


Below we present Hannah Teich’s condensed curation of the week’s more interesting stories from Crime Story Daily. (Read Hannah’s full essay including links to the mentioned articles.)

On the criminal justice policy front: Pieces from the New York Times and the Marshall Project tackle the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on life sentences for youth, while Mic interviews Tahanie Aboushi, progressive candidate for Manhattan DA.

In muckraker/watchdog reporting: A piece from Slate centers on the fatal police shooting of Andrew Brown Jr. in North Carolina last week. Pieces from NBC News and the Washington Post highlight obstacles to police reform, while a piece from the New Yorker explores the challenges of “bridging the divide between the police and the policed.” And a piece from the New Republic examines “the laws giving people the right to crash cars into demonstrators.”

In complex crime storytelling: A piece from the New York Times Magazine centers on the life and tragic death of British fashion model Harry Uzoka. GQ goes behind the bars of a maximum-security French prison with master criminal Rédoine Faïd, “the world’s greatest jailbreak artist.” And a piece from Outside Magazine tackles the mystery of Paul Fugate, the “ranger who was lost and never found.”

In culture/true crime: The New York Times highlights a slate of new crime fiction, while i-D reviews The Sons of Sam: A Descent Into Darkness, a new true-crime series from Netflix. And The Nation interviews acclaimed novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman, “one of the greatest living Black writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.”

Again, you can read Hannah’s full weekly essay and find links to each of the mentioned articles.

And finally, here is your opportunity to catch up on previous Crime Story Newsletters.

Thanks again for reading and listening.

Kary Antholis

Publisher/Editor, Crime Story

editor@crimestory.com

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