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, in a piece entitled I Hate Men, she explored the story of a particularly malevolent abuser and his family and she examined her own building rage at the multitude of abuse stories that we have observed in our brief history of covering the LA criminal courts.
On Tuesday, I had Georgetown Law Professor Paul Butler on the podcast for the second time. Paul and I revisited my interview with Attorney General William Barr with the additional perspective of 10 eventful weeks behind us. We also discussed the societal questions raised by the police shootings in Texas. And we began to examine Professor Butler’s work in the context of his own life experience and in the context of the movement to completely transform the criminal legal process.
On Wednesday and Thursday, we introduced new writers to the Crime Story reader. In The Moment When a Trial Has No Judge, Tim Kontje wrote of a Kafka-esque moment when a sex abuse trial lost its judge to a preexisting commitment just as the jury found itself hung on two of the counts against the defendant.
And in Bodies in Malibu; Hearings in Van Nuys, Clare Byrne documents the thoughtful and sage processing of a fraught and volatile hearing by a criminal court judge. In this instance, the judge resisted stereotyping and cliches, which might have led to a rush to judgement in favor of the prosecution, in order to make sure that the defendant’s rights and best interests were minded.
We close this week 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 here to go to Hannah’s weekly essay.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Sincerely,
Kary Antholis
Publisher/Editor, Crime Story
editor@crimestory.com
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Crime Story LA
Week 1
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