Mark Obbie's Blog, page 32
March 15, 2014
In loving memory
I wrote once before about how the power and poignancy of Erika Hayasaki’s work compelled me to thank her for a memorable reading experience. Now she’s done it again. Despite the clunky, search-engine-driven title (“Life of a Police Officer: Medically and Psychologically Ruinous”), it’s really about a remarkable connection between two people — a cop […]
March 14, 2014
BREAKING: conservatives support justice reform
The critic’s voice in my head is grumbling about the steady stream of stories expressing surprise at the bipartisan turn in the criminal justice debate, as if it’s a sudden, new development that conservatives are talking like liberal reformers. For weeks, maybe months, it seems an everyday event that a writer makes the discovery: hey, […]
March 12, 2014
Fugitive crisis redux
Reporter Brad Heath and a USA Today team have produced an ambitious and extensive series on criminal fugitives. Part 1, “The Ones That Got Away,” documents how many criminal fugitives are allowed to roam free once they cross state lines. Part 2, “A License to Commit Crime,” focuses on the multiplier effect of leaving felons free […]
Savage’s “raw take”
Now we learn that the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden have shed more light on the powerful and secretive Foreign Intelligence Security Court. But if you or I had to wade through raw documents to try to understand them, we’d be lost. Fortunately, as I see it, we have Charlie Savage, who […]
March 10, 2014
A father in hell
Writer Andrew Solomon is a logical choice for the assignment to write the definitive New Yorker feature on Adam Lanza’s father, Peter Lanza, considering his work on families, mental health, and their intersection in crime. Sure enough, he delivers in extraordinary style. His lengthy story sheds light not only on Peter, whom Solomon describes as a […]
March 9, 2014
Watchdog reporting in book form
A pair of recent articles make clear that a new book should be considered mandatory reading by anyone who follows this blog out of an interest in crime journalism (and if that’s not why you follow it, um, what were you thinking??). The book is Busted: A Tale of Corruption and Betrayal in the City of Brotherly […]
March 7, 2014
“Because I’m 16…”
The New York Center for Juvenile Justice published an effective piece of video advocacy (click here, or see below) showing a series of clips of 16-year-olds who explain all the things they can’t do legally — and the one thing they can: get convicted and serve time as adult criminals. This resonates particularly strongly with […]
Dewey’s email shame
Yesterday’s indictment of the leaders of the defunct major law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf is making me all kinds of nostalgic. In my years at American Lawyer Media, I worked on at least a dozen annual Am Law 100 and 200 reports, where the defining feature of the reporting is to have lawyers in thousand-dollar […]
March 5, 2014
The gunman’s helper
When a gunman ends a crime spree by killing himself, our instinct for retribution, and our quest to hold accountable anyone who played any role in the run-up to the crime, can lead to tricky questions of criminal culpability. The what-if questions — if this or that had not happened, would the crime have been averted? […]
March 3, 2014
“Compassion gap” and crime
Last month, when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to provide college classes to select prison inmates provoked an outpouring of public disdain for convicted criminals, I focused my criticism on news sites that invite mindless mob reactions rather than convene a more thoughtful debate. Nick Kristof’s column yesterday reminds me that the underlying problem […]
