Team Crime Story: Welcome to our round up of the week's events at crimestory.com. The week began with RightWay Youth: Lafawn’s Story, the third in our series of youth stories from our partnership with The RightWay Foundation (which you can read more about here). Lafawn Taylor (writing with Leland Hall) relates his experience growing up never knowing his parents and churning through four foster homes and around 30 group homes. Lafawn recounts how he faced the prospect of addiction, homelessness and possible incarceration. He then relates that the practical life coaching that he receives...

I am delighted to announce that Paul Butler is joining CRIME STORY as Consulting Editor. Paul has been an advisor to CRIME STORY since the early development of the company. He has already joined me for two Podcast interviews, which you can find here and here. And today, he publishes and reads his first Op-Ed for CRIME STORY. "Trump, Jussie Smollett and "Embarrassment to Our Nation" which you can find here. Paul and I met through my involvement in the alumni of Georgetown Law, where he is a professor, and one of the nation’s...

Team Crime Story:Welcome to our round up of the week's events at crimestory.com.The week began with my essay about Chip Lewis, Robert Durst’s Warrior in Court. This article is part of a series of pieces exploring how the Durst trial is educational in its contrasts with the ordinary realities of the criminal legal process in Los Angeles.The middle of the week was populated by our release of two sets of podcast interviews. The first was our conversation with Pam Veasey, Showrunner of “CSI: NY” and “CSI: Cyber”. During our conversation, we explored Pam's storytelling origins and how she took custody of the CSI vision, and how...

Today’s podcast is part two of a two-part conversation with Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, the makers of the breakout, true crime series Making a Murderer. (To find the podcast and transcript of Part 1, click here.) During this part of our conversation, we discuss Moira’s and Laura’s making a deal with Netflix to broadcast Making a Murderer as their first documentary series, the experience of watching the series become a cultural phenomenon, the process of making season two of the series, and where things stand in the cases of Steven Avery and...

Today’s podcast is part 1 of a 2-Part conversation with Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, the makers of the breakout True Crime series Making a Murderer. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host an artist for a discussion that would help us better understand their values and aims as storytellers in the world of crime and justice. During part one of our conversation, we discussed Moira’s and Laura’s...

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Pam Veasey, Showrunner of two of the four series in the CSI franchise: CSI: New York and CSI: CYBER. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host an artist for a discussion that would help us better understand their values and aims as storytellers in the world of crime and justice. During our conversation we discussed Pam’s path into storytelling,...

This is the fifth in a series of articles about the hearings before the murder trial of Robert Durst. You may click on the hyperlinked titles to read Two Hearings: Robert Durst and Armon Nelson, While Robert Durst Flips Through Photos, Robert Durst Fades Away, and Robert Durst and the Inequity of Judicial Time. Robert Durst admitted that he cut up his neighbor’s body and threw it in Galveston Bay. And yet a Texas jury acquitted him of murder. Durst has a habit of ignoring his attorneys’ guidance and engaging with people who...

Welcome to our roundup of the week’s events at crimestory.com. It should be clear to anyone who has been paying attention to Crime Story over our first 10 weeks that Molly Miller has emerged as a star storyteller. Molly bookended this week with two of the most powerful and trenchant pieces that we have run on the site.On Monday, in Facing Your Rapist in a Courtroom, she explored the history and implications of the Victim’s Impact Statement as a part of the criminal legal process, in the context of her own experience as a rape survivor.On Friday,...

Joining me today on the podcast is Georgetown Law Professor, Paul Butler. As you may recall, Paul joined me on the day we launched Crime Story to offer his perspective on my interview with Attorney General William Barr. Professor Butler is the author of the widely lauded books “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” and “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.” Paul is also one of the nation’s most frequently consulted scholars on issues of race and criminal justice. Prior to becoming a professor, Butler served as...

Team Crime Story,Welcome to our roundup of the week’s events at crimestory.com.We begin 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 on the link below to go to Hannah’s weekly essay. CRIME STORY DAILY - The Week’s Highlights This week in our original content created for the...

Hank Steinberg and I discuss his path into storytelling, culminating in how he came to create Without a Trace as a relative novice to the television business, how he developed the chops to run that show and build it into a top 10 television juggernaut. And we discuss the creative satisfaction and limitations of creating a successful network television crime procedural franchise. You can find a transcript of the interview here.

Welcome to our roundup of the week’s events at crimestory.com. We begin by introducing a new Crime Story feature. Hannah Teich, the editor of our Crime Story Daily aggregation section, offers a curated selection of some of the more interesting stories from Crime Story Daily over the past week. In planning this feature, we identified four broad topic areas that help us organize and choose the stories for the Crime Story Daily. Those topic areas are: criminal justice policy reporting; muckraking/watchdog reporting; complex crime storytelling; and stories that examine the impact of criminal...

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Tom Fontana, ground zero in the explosion of this golden age of television. Tom served as executive producer of St. Elsewhere, Executive Producer and Showrunner of Homicide: Life on the Streets, and Creator and Executive Producer of the first prestige drama of the cable television era, Oz. Tom is currently the Executive Producer and Showrunner of the Showtime crime drama City on a Hill. In this conversation, Tom and I discussed the people and forces that shaped his creative thinking, and we zeroed in...

We’ve noticed something. The more time we spend in the criminal courts building, the more familiar faces have taken on meaning. The elegant “swan woman” is Karen, the Spanish translator. The friendly security guard on the ninth floor is Carlito who writes children’s books. The bespectacled blonde with a massive bag is Terri, the meticulous reporter from City News. And then there are the judges. The bench officers weren’t originally the subjects of particularly intense interest to us. They are the proverbial referees of the courtroom, and we’ve been reporting on...

This week on Crime Story began with David Simon, the creator and executive producer of The Wire, referring his 250,000 Twitter followers to my interview with him.On Monday we published RightWay Youth: Leo’s Story by Leo Jimenez with Molly Miller, the first in our series of youth stories from our partnership with The RightWay Foundation (which you can read more about here).  Leo relates his experience of growing up gay in “21 foster homes, three psych wards, and one group home,” and recounts how the therapy services offered by RightWay has offered him a path to healing. “Sometimes the pain from my...

Following on my four-part interview with the Creator of The Wire, David Simon (which you can find links to here), today’s podcast is a conversation with his frequent collaborator, George Pelecanos. George is one of the great detective novelists of his generation and the executive producer several HBO dramas including The Wire and The Deuce the latter of which he co-created with David Simon.  The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host...

In case you missed it, David Simon, the creator and executive producer of The Wire, referred his Twitter followers to my interview with him, writing: “Even I can’t stand to hear myself this long, but Kary Antholis — the singular spark to my work at HBO who has now launched the new Crimestory venture — has delivered a comprehensive, exhaustive, four-part interview on a Baltimore scribbler’s origin story. I’m exhausted, anyway.” As David said, we present my interview with him in four parts: In part one we discuss David’s formative years...

This week at Crime Story, we began with Chris Tarricone’s Police Force Expert — Taser Certified, which offered a snap-shot perspective on a prosecutor and a witness in the trial of Andrea Moorer (also the subject of Molly Miller’s Strong Female Lead). On Tuesday we published Sean Smith’s Your Honor? I’m Here to Give Myself Up, in which Sean captures two ordinary (for the court) and yet extraordinary (for the defendants) moments of pleas for mercy in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Mader. On Thursday, Molly Miller’s The Truths of Louie Cordero explores the complex motivations and...

Today’s podcast is the final part of our four-part interview with David Simon. (You can find part one of the interview here, part two here, and part three here.)   In part four, we discuss David’s creation of The Wire and some of the key themes explored in that series. You can find a complete transcript of this interview here.

Today’s podcast is the third part of our four-part interview with David Simon. (You can find part one of the interview here and part two here.) In part three, we discuss David’s reporting for the book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood and his experience producing the multiple Emmy Award-winning miniseries based on that book. You can find a complete transcript of this interview here.

This podcast is the second part of a four-part interview with David Simon. (You can find part one of the interview here.) In part two we discuss David’s work as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun, his writing the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and his transition to writing for television. You can find a complete transcript of this interview here.

Today’s podcast is a conversation with David Simon.  David and I met when he came in to HBO to pitch The Corner as a television series. The Corner is a book that he wrote with Ed Burns about the year that they spent in an inner-city Baltimore neighborhood ravaged by drug abuse and distribution. Together with his book Homicide, The Corner was the foundation for David’s series The Wire, which has been widely acclaimed as one of the great television series of all time. My aim in sitting down with...

Team Crime Story:This week’s Crime Story activity actually began last Friday, with Ken White’s piece for us about The College Bribery Scandal called Felicity Huffman’s Smarter Choices.  That article got considerable traffic throughout the weekend and into the middle of last week as it coincided with the announcement of Huffman’s sentence of 14 days in jail and a $30,000 fine. We followed that with my story story about the implications of President Trump’s unhinged Twitter tirade against John Legend and Chrissy Teigen for the future of his administration’s approach to criminal justice reform.  On...

Jared Harris, nominated for an Emmy this year for his performance as Valery Legasov in the miniseries Chernobyl, reads excerpts from the idiosyncratic Closing Statement of attorney Vincent Oliver in the rape trial of his client Wyaunte Cousin. This article was first published on August 21, 2019. As I walk into Department 109 of the Criminal Courts Building, I hear the following words and my ears prick up: IT WASN'T UNTIL THE REIGN OF RICHARD THE FIRST, WHO YOU PROBABLY KNOW AS RICHARD THE LIONHEARTED,...

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Jonathan Tropper. Jonathan and I met when he pitched me an idea for a Cinemax show called Banshee. We worked together on that series and on his most recent Cinemax series Warrior. I asked Jonathan to join me for this conversation for two reasons: First, Banshee explores ideas of crime and justice in ways that are very unique in the television landscape. It is a violent and pulpy show that also examines the existential toll taken by deceit and betrayal. Second, Banshee is the show that connected...

Today’s podcast is a conversation with Steve Zaillian. Steve won an Oscar for writing the screenplay for Schindler’s List and won a Directors Guild Award for his miniseries The Night Of. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host an artist for a discussion that would help us better understand the values and aims of storytellers in the world of crime and justice. I got to know Steve working as...

Does President Trump’s Twitter tirade taunting Chrissy Teigen (and her husband, musician and activist John Legend) suggest a shift in his administration’s narrative regarding criminal justice reform? Trump’s four tweet lament (pleading that he gets no credit for the reform legislation that passed last year, while undeserving others take that credit) reeked of resentment, jealousy, and recrimination, and it may be the latest in a series of signals that — as we move into an election year — he is abandoning the “Reform” mantle in favor of a punitive, retributive...

Team Crime Story,This week on Crime Story we began and ended with examinations of national media stories, and -- in the middle of the week -- explored three dark and troubling LA stories, and a case in a new location for us, the Alhambra Courthouse. We started the week with my piece entitled Robert Durst Fades Away, in which I observe how, as Durst recedes into a shell of infirmity, the man who is prosecuting him is flourishing with theatrical bluster. In Molly Miller’s The Matter of the Intersex Shooting, she presents a...

This is the third in a series of articles about the hearings before the murder trial of Robert Durst. You may click on the hyperlinked titles to read Two Hearings: Robert Durst and Armon Nelson and While Robert Durst Flips Through Photos. Robert Durst seems to be fading away. In the first hearing in his trial for the murder of Susan Berman observed by our Crime Story reporters, Robert Durst yells about the wardrobe brought for him. In the second, he sits, virtually mute, and only becomes engaged by a series...

Hello friends, We brought our first month to close with a set of articles and podcasts that our readers clearly found engaging, as we surpassed our previous week in traffic and engagement. We began and ended the week with pieces by Owen Smith. Owen's An Appeal for Commutation explored the Sisyphean struggle of Delon Broussard to persuade Judge Curtis Rappe to commute his murder conviction based on a 2018 California Law.  His story Special Docket explores the efforts of Community Collaborative Courts to address the special needs of certain special defendants. Tuesday,...

In Part Two of the interview with Ed Bernero we zero in on two of the show’s episodes to discuss how the details of their creation offer us broader insights into the creative process that Ed established on the show. We also hear Ed’s answers to questions posed by USC students. You may find a transcript of this Podcast here.

Hi Crime Story Friends, In our third week we enjoyed intense reader interest and growth in traffic to the site. We truly appreciate your readership, support and willingness to subscribe to our communications. Early in the week, there was a lot of activity and engagement around a few stories that we published at the end of the prior week including Molly Miller’s A Chair and a Killing, my piece Wait, What? A Closing Statement, and Leland Hall’s Off the Path of Self-Destruction - our second of three pieces about our writers’ experiences at a Defy...

Part One of a conversation with the co-creator of Third Watch and Executive Producer and founding showrunner of Criminal Minds, Edward Allen Bernero. Ed is a charming, funny, passionate storyteller. We hear about his unusual path into storytelling, and we learn how he came to run the show and how he built the story mythology that has allowed Criminal Minds to achieve global financial success. Here is a link to the transcript of Part One.

Today’s podcast is part two of a two part conversation with Vince Gilligan, the creator and showrunner of one of the great series in television history, Breaking Bad and one of his key collaborators on that series, director/executive producer Michelle MacLaren. In this episode, we talk about the actors and zero in on two of the show’s episodes to discuss how the details of their creation offer us broader insights into the unique creative process behind this television masterpiece. Part One of the podcast is available...

Greetings Team Crime Story, Week 2 represented another step forward in realizing the unique opportunities that Crime Story offers in exploring the many facets of Crime narrative. We began a feature on our Crime Story Podcast where we present recordings of our writers reading their articles. Molly Miller read The Bullet and the Door, the first of Crime Story’s articles about the trial of David Martinez. This coincided with publication of our second Martinez article, my piece called Anatomy of Doubt about the emotionally wrenching and ultimately multi-layered testimony of LASD Deputy Jim Moss.

Today’s podcast is part one of a two part conversation with Vince Gilligan, the creator and showrunner of one of the great series in television history, Breaking Bad and one of his key collaborators on that series, director/executive producer Michelle MacLaren. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host an artist for a discussion that would help us better understand their values and aims as storytellers in the world...

Subscribe to the Crime Story Podcast on your favorite podcast platform, and you will receive an alert on Thursday when we go live with our latest episode. Thursday’s podcast is part one of a two part conversation with Vince Gilligan, the creator and showrunner of one of the great series in television history, Breaking Bad and one of his key collaborators on that series, director/producer Michelle MacLaren. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of...

I would like to call your attention to some of the stories that are in our Crime Story LA section. These stories exemplify the tone and approach of our reporting here at Crime Story. We want our pieces to be both accessible and illuminating; thoughtful and emotional; unexpected and satisfying. Sean Smith’s Slouching towards Babel introduces to the world of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles, and his Two Hearings piece juxtaposes the massive defense posse representing multi-millionaire Robert Durst in a pretrial hearing with the valiant efforts of an Alternate Public Defender representing a young indigent man in...

Jim Moss’s job is to save lives. A 29-year veteran of the LA County Sheriff’s Department, Moss has spent 14 of those years serving as a rescue paramedic for the Special Weapons (SWAT) Team. His primary duty, he says, “is to provide advanced life support on SWAT operations.” But on May 23, 2019, Moss has a different job. His duty today is to testify for the People of the State of California in their prosecution of David Martinez for the murder of SWAT officer Shaun Diamond. Moss takes the stand wearing the LASD uniform...

Yesterday morning at a little after 11 AM, a Los Angeles jury returned verdict of guilty on two counts of homicide with special circumstances and one count of attempted homicide against Michael Gargiulo.  The trial which, has lasted several months, now moves to “the sanity phase“ during which Gargiulo‘s lawyers will argue that he suffers from dissociative personality disorder, and presumably that he should be sent to a psychiatric facility rather than to state prison. Crime Story reporter Chris Tarricone has been observing the trial, and has written these two pieces here and here about the...

Today’s podcast is a conversation with longtime members of the team at This American Life and co-creators of the podcast series Serial - Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder. The conversation was recorded as part of a series of classes that I taught at The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Each week I would host an artist for a discussion that would help us better understand their values and aims as storytellers in the world of crime and justice. In addition to discussing the works and artists who shaped their creative thinking,...

I am at the Criminal Court Building to watch arraignments and pretrial hearings. As Sean Smith wrote in Slouching to Babel, these hearings can offer a good deal of drama and detail about the dynamics of the LA justice system in a relatively short period of time. But on this day, the pace in arraignments is slow, so I wander up to the legendary ninth floor. This area requires additional security clearance to enter, as it is home to the most serious and high profile criminal trials. OJ Simpson was tried on this same floor. So was Richard...

I would like to call your attention to some of the stories that are in our Crime Story LA section. These stories exemplify the tone and approach of our reporting here at Crime Story. We want our pieces to be both accessible and illuminating; thoughtful and emotional; unexpected and satisfying. Sean Smith's Slouching towards Babel introduces the world of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles, and his Two Hearings piece juxtaposes the massive defense posse representing multi-millionaire Robert Durst in a pretrial hearing with the valiant efforts of an Alternate...

Hello everyone,Thank you again for subscribing to Crime Story.As you know, on Thursday we launched crimestory.com with two separate interviews in two simultaneously-released podcasts. The first is an exclusive interview with United States Attorney General William Barr where we discuss the legacy of the push for increased incarceration, criminal justice reform and the justice narrative in certain film and television programs. The second is a conversation with Georgetown law professor and former US Justice Department prosecutor Paul Butler, where we discuss my interview with Attorney General Barr. Here’s a recap of the response to our launch over...

To me justice is the right outcome... I believe a sense of justice is hardwired into human beings. Don't ask me why, but it is there… There's that scene in Dirty Harry where… Dirty Harry asks, "Where is she?" And the… guy smirks at him and he shoots him in the leg or something and the guy tells him where it is. I say, now was that an unjust or morally repellent act? Is the reason the audience applauds when that happens because the audience is morally bankrupt? Or is there something else going on there? United States Attorney...

In the days following the 2016 election I had an epiphany of sorts.  The immediate cause of this epiphany was not the unexpected election results, but a November 9 event hosted by Georgetown University Law Center, on whose Board of Visitors I serve. The Dean of Georgetown Law, Dean Treanor, brought together screenwriters Steve Zaillian and Richard Price and a group of legal scholars from the Law School. The panelists focused their discussion on the thematic insights that an HBO miniseries (that I oversaw) called The Night Of offered into our criminal justice system. 

As you may have seen in this piece on Deadline, today we launched crimestory.com.  You can read about the genesis of this endeavor here, and you can read more about me and my background here. Our aim at Crime Story, simply put, is to appeal to those who are engaged by a well-told crime story, to those who want to know more about how and why stories of crime and justice are told AND to those who care about the fairness and humanity of our justice system.   As a key part of...

The Many Faces of Crime Stories: Making a Murderer, Robert Durst and CSI (Week 12) Rising Above Emotion and Primitive Desires (Week 11) Mercy, Frustration and Grace (Week 10) Grafitti, Judges, Fontana, Durst and RightWay Youth (Week 9 with a... More of “The Wire,” Healing, Mercy and Senselessness (Week 8) David Simon, Truths and Unintended Cosequences (Week 7) Jared Harris Reads, Trump Tweets, Podcasts and the RightWay (Week 6) Robert Durst, Felicity Huffman and More Hollywood...