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Death of newspapers = more deaths on Death Row


As if the demise of newspapers wasn't bad enough, The NY Times reveals in "Death Row Foes See Newsroom Cuts as Blow" a singularly unfortunate by-product - lesser and lesser investigations of people wrongly sentenced, many of whom are on death row. Newspaper people have regularly been involved in the investigations together with lawyers.

"Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional papers.

In the past, lawyers opposed to the death penalty often provided the broad outlines of cases to reporters, who then pursued witnesses and unearthed evidence.

Now, the lawyers complain, they have to do more of the work themselves and that means it often doesn’t get done. They say many fewer cases are being pursued by journalists, after a spate of exonerations several years ago based on the work of reporters.

The decline in newsroom resources has also hampered efforts by death-penalty opponents to search for irrefutable DNA evidence that an innocent person has been executed in America.

Because judges and prosecutors are usually reluctant to reopen cases after an execution, advocates have been seeking to enlist the media as plaintiffs, to file motions under a novel legal theory that news organizations should have access to physical evidence under the First Amendment and state sunshine laws, which establish access to government records.

And here, the worry is that weakened newspapers will be increasingly reluctant to dedicate any resources.

“It’s extremely troubling, some of the leading investigative journalists in this country have been given golden parachutes or laid off,” said Barry Scheck, the co-founder of the Innocence Project in New York, which is affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “When procedural mechanisms begin to fail, the press is the last resort for the public to find out the truth.”

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