Investigative Roundup Editor Brian Harrod's Team Highlights The Best In Investigative Reporting, As well As, Provide News Analysis And Detailed Reports
“The report analyzed all states’ responses to the pandemic in jails and prisons. Nine states received D grades. The rest, except for Illinois, which was not graded because of pending litigation, received F grades,” Emily Hamer reports for the Wisconsin State Journal.
The report comes despite criminal justice reform advocates’ calls for Gov. Tony Evers to cut populations at overcrowded prisons to protect vulnerable inmates.
But as Wisconsin Watch reported in May, Evers refuses to wield his power to release inmates despite campaigning on a promise to cut prison populations by 50%. Inmates say overcrowding leaves them regularly too close to their peers and staff at a time when experts call distance a top tool for slowing the spread of COVID-19.
A 2018 study by Hiscox Ltd., an international provider of business insurance, found that a majority of embezzlement cases last at least two years before they’re discovered. That same survey found that less than half of embezzlement cases result in criminal charges, and only 58% of those charges ended in conviction.
The former financial director of Habitat for Humanity of North Idaho has been jailed since December on suspicion she stole money from a Georgia food bank, and investigators believe she may also be responsible for bilking the Hayden-based nonprofit of more than $50,000 before that.
Julie Anne Nutter, 54, has been in custody in the Bibb County Jail since Dec. 6, facing 11 counts of felony theft, according to court records.
The Macon Telegraph newspaper reported last week that the charges stem from suspicions Nutter used the credit card of the Middle Georgia Community Food Bank to make fraudulent purchases at businesses that included a body waxing studio, a spa, a tire store and “an Idaho flower shop.”
Nutter took the job in Georgia after a nearly three-year stint with the Habitat for Humanity of North Idaho, which she left in June 2017.
Investigative reports filed by the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office indicate that officials in Hayden raised concerns in December 2017 about potential thefts totaling $57,045.
Nutter, who served as the nonprofit’s chief financial officer, was suspected as the only employee who could have stolen the cash.
Investigators believe she deposited money into her own accounts rather than those belonging to Habitat for Humanity after examining the nonprofit’s books and bank accounts belonging to Nutter.
The investigation took nearly two years. A Kootenai County warrant was issued for Nutter’s arrest in November. By then, she had left the Georgia food bank.
The Kootenai County district court case against Nutter was placed under seal, according to the clerk’s office.
James Casper, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of North Idaho, declined in an email to comment on the “ongoing legal issues” surrounding Nutter, citing the advice of legal counsel.
Casper also said that once Habitat for Humanity alerted the sheriff’s office to the fraud, it was asked by law enforcement not to make any public statements so as not to interrupt an ongoing criminal investigation.
The food bank based in Macon, Georgia, where Nutter previously worked, issued a statement indicating a background check conducted before she started her employ there raised no red flags and that insurance would likely cover the losses.
Investigative documents in Georgia did not say how much money is believed to have been stolen from the food bank….
The release Friday comes after a transparency group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and BuzzFeed News pushed for the re-release of the report in court. The federal judge overseeing the case has called Barr’s spin of the findings a “calculated attempt” to help Trump politically.. Federal Prosecutors have also said Roger Stone had lied to the Republican-led House of Representatives in 2017 about a backchannel he attempted to establish with WikiLeaks
Special counsel Robert Mueller examined whether President Donald Trump lied to him in written answers during the Russia investigation, a possibility House Democrats have said they continue to look into even after Trump’s impeachment.
With fresh detail, the special counsel’s investigation also documented how several Trump campaign officials heard from the then-candidate about WikiLeaks releases that ultimately helped his campaign, a new version of the Mueller report said on Friday.
The revelations come from sections of Mueller’s final investigative report, on Russian interference in the 2016 election, re-released on Friday with fewer redactions.
The new disclosures largely relate to the 2016 election efforts of convicted former Trump adviser Roger Stone and his interactions with his long-time friend Trump.There’s no proof that Trump’s campaign illegally conspired with suspected Russian hackers who leaked stolen Democratic files to WikiLeaks, and no Americans were charged with such a crime.
Yet Mueller documented many instances where Trump campaign officials welcomed the Russians and WikiLeaks’ mischief in 2016, including when it related to Stone…..
Louisville police release the Breonna Taylor incident report. It’s virtually blank
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Nearly three months after Louisville Metro Police officers fatally shot Breonna Taylor in her South End apartment, the department has released the incident report from that night.
Except, it is almost entirely blank.
The four-page report lists the time, date, case number, incident location and the victim’s name — Breonna Shaquelle Taylor — as well as the fact that she is a 26-year-old black female.
But it redacts Taylor’s street number, apartment number and date of birth — all of which have been widely reported.
And it lists her injuries as “none,” even though she was shot at least eight times and died on her hallway floor in a pool of blood, according to attorneys for her family.
It lists the charges as “death investigation — LMPD involved” but checks the “no” box under “forced entry,” even though officers used a battering ram to knock in Taylor’s apartment door.
It also lists under the “Offenders” portion of the report the three officers who fired in Taylor’s apartment, fatally shooting her — Sgt. Jon Mattingly, 47; Myles Cosgrove, 42; and Brett Hankison, 44…..
Javier Ambler death was ruled a homicide, which officials said include “justifiable homicide.”
In March of 2019, a Williamson County sheriff’s deputy began chasing 40-year-old Javier Ambler after he failed to dim his headlights to oncoming traffic.
Javier Ambler was driving home from playing poker on March 28, 2019, when he failed to dim the headlights of his SUV to oncoming traffic.
A Williamson County sheriff’s deputy initiated a stop and began chasing him for the minor traffic violation. After Ambler apparently refused to pull over, a pursuit that lasted 22 minutes and ended when Ambler’s Honda Pilot crashed north of Downtown Austin.
Minutes later, Ambler, a 40-year-old father of two, was dying on a neighborhood street.
Records obtained by the KVUE Defenders and the Austin American-Statesman reveal that deputies used Taser stun guns on him at least three times, even as he told them multiple times that he had a heart condition and could not breathe.
The circumstances of Ambler’s March 28, 2019, death have never been revealed. The Williamson County Sheriff’s Office tried to shield information from release since receiving its first request in February.
Deep-pocketed actors have been leveraging the American legal system to stymie investigative journalists from looking into their affairs. Fixes are necessary—and within reach.
They own sports teams and newspapers. They travel in Gulfstreams and mega-yachts. They buy Renoirs and Matisses and entire buildings in New York, London, and Miami.
They give endowments to museums, think tanks, and universities. Most came from nothing in the collapsing Soviet Union and now they have everything, including their own definitional category: oligarchs.
More than mere billionaires, they are the plenipotentiaries of illiberal or autocratic governments, and their fortunes, empires, and freedoms depend entirely on their willingness to carry out the bidding of those governments.
And for decades, they have been waging a not-so-quiet assault on the First Amendment, using litigation threats and public relations teams to stifle or silence critical journalism on their activities.
As our report “Kill the Messenger,” published last month by the Free Russia Foundation, explains, oligarchs are even more thin-skinned than Donald Trump when it comes to media scrutiny.
Where these men don’t manage to get a story killed, retroactively “edited,” or wholly taken offline, they still create a deterrent against newsgatherers who would sooner not pursue an investigation than be forced to go the rounds with someone with far greater resources.
As our report makes clear, outdated civil litigation rules have become a playground for the foreign-born super-rich to smother stories that are squarely in the American interest to be published.
“Kill the Messenger” features anecdotes from prominent American reporters (who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity) detailing just how vitiating writing and publishing an expose on an oligarch can be….
Police culture can be insular and tough to penetrate, but the public can hold law enforcement accountable. Here are important methods and context you need to know.
The death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis has drawn historic levels of interest in police misconduct and drawn condemnation from law enforcement leaders nationwide.
As a reporter covering law enforcement for the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey, and now in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, I use investigative reporting techniques to strengthen police accountability.
Other journalists do the same. But, in truth, any citizen can apply the same methods to ensure the law enforcement system they’re funding is serving them well.
Police culture can be insular and tough to penetrate.
But I’ve been surprised by how often it’s possible, though time consuming, to expose important issues by requesting and examining records and data from police departments and other government agencies and engaging citizens and key leaders.
So here are five techniques concerned citizens, journalists and policymakers can use to examine police conduct in their communities…..
John Allen Paulos, Temple University math professor and best-selling author
Temple University mathematics professor John Allen Paulos, author of several books, including “Innumeracy” and “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” to get his take on the numbers surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
We report numbers precisely, down to the digit, as if they were extremely accurate when we know that most of the numbers are undercounts. He wrote in the Feb. 18, New York Times, that such precision can be dangerous.
Paulos offered the hypothetical example of the guard at the Museum of Natural History telling visitors that the skeleton in the lobby is 70 million and 8 years old. He knows because he was told, eight years earlier, it was 70 million.
Such precision isn’t necessary because most people understand estimates, Paulos said. We’re used to seeing polls that have margins of error.
President Trump continues to say that the U.S. is doing more testing than any other country. But “the relevant number is the percentage, not the raw number,” Paulos said.
But even when computing percentages we face a “nebulous fraction.” Because we don’t always have accurate numerators (the number on top of the fraction) or denominators (the number on the bottom).
Let’s take the percent of positive tests. Is it the percent of those tested? The percent of everyone? We know that testing levels vary widely, depending on where you live. If everyone hasn’t been tested, the figure could be confusing.
