Mark Obbie's Blog, page 34

A story for every victim

The Los Angeles Times just added itself to the growing list of news organizations committed to meticulously documenting homicides through the marriage of data and storytelling. Fast Company tells how the newspaper decided to fix and expand, rather than abolish, earlier versions of The Homicide Report. And the site’s FAQ goes into great detail about […]

Act like a victim

Andrew Cohen tells a remarkable story at The Atlantic illustrating an essential idea that confounds criminal justice policymakers and the public all too often. The idea is rather simple: Victims are entitled to their own feelings and reactions, and to heal in whatever way works best for them, without being told their reactions are illegitimate. In […]

When is a church a cult?

Those who read God’s Nobodies know that the families’ church played a big part in their lives. Understanding its teachings and the effect they had on certain members is critical to understanding how good people ended up in a series of tragedies. This new story in Texas Monthly, by Sonia Smith, concerns a very different […]

Trilateral justice

At the Volokh Conspiracy, former federal judge and prosecutor Paul Cassell has just posted an important treatise on what he hopes is the next phase in crime victim services. Considering Cassell’s bona fides on this topic — his commentary, research, and advocacy on victim issues have few peers — we can forgive him for attaching […]

A new Marshall plan

The rumblings of an impending launch have grown louder over at The Marshall Project, where the site and associated social-media feeds have begun to fill in details about what’s coming. Noting a growing appetite for criminal justice reform and a “pressing national need for excellent journalism about the U.S. court and prison systems,” the site […]

Headlines that convict

Allow me to nitpick. When we write that someone was indicted or charged “for” doing something, we’re saying they actually did it. Of course, it’s only an allegation when we write a story about new charges. Thus, we’ve made the most basic of legal-reporting errors: to assume facts not yet proven, and usually not yet […]

What price for victimhood?

The New York Times‘ Room for Debate feature asks how we should compensate victims of mass violence, and who should foot the bill. It’s an important question to ask when we’re not in crisis mode and prone to reinventing systems on the fly, veering off in inconsistent directions. In fact, journalists have done a fairly […]

Two shots on target. One miss.

Thanks to my profound cluelessness about television and the rest of pop culture, I had never heard of the A&E show The First 48 until I read this Miami New Times takedown of it by Terrence McCoy. The story  of a popular, decade-old show (who knew?) that leaves in its wake “sloppy crime scenes, rushed arrests, […]

Three tales about blame and forgiveness

  Thanks to a former student’s tweet, I discovered this absolutely fascinating and illuminating RadioLab trio of stories on blame: all stories, in the host’s words, that “make you judge how you judge” others and ”ask what blame does for us — why do we need it, when isn’t it enough, and what happens when we try […]

NYPD’s great new hire

Exciting news in the victims-rights world: prominent and creative advocate Susan Herman has been named by New York Police Commissioner William Bratton as the city’s first deputy commissioner for collaborative policing. In a post on the Parallel Justice Facebook page, she writes: I write to let everyone know that I will be taking down this […]