Can the media continue to help free the wrongfully convicted?
The battle to free someone wrongly convicted of a crime can be long and arduous. Typically, it is waged by attorneys and journalists, with a supporting cast of family members, innocence advocates and others willing to go the distance to help someone who is locked away for years or even decades.
The case of Dale Helmig of Missouri is an example.
Convicted and imprisoned for the 1993 murder of his mother, Norma, Helmig was freed last December after Dekalb County Missouri Circuit Court Judge Warren McElwain found “clear and convincing evidence” of his innocence. But Helmig might well still be in prison—if it had not been for the tenacious efforts of investigative reporters in Missouri and elsewhere in the country.
Ironically, the kind of journalism that helped free Helmig is threatening to disappear, as pressures mount on newsrooms around the country.
Journalists were not the only players in the 15-year battle that began with Helmig’s conviction in 1996. A pro bono legal team which managed to enlist the help of a regional innocence project as well as Helmig’s brother Richard were also instrumental.
Terry Ganey became aware of Helmig’s plight in the summer of 2005.
Then a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he wrote a three-part series on Dale, published in October. Ganey left the Post-Dispatch shortly afterward, but found the Helmig story so compelling that he promised himself he would continue to write about it whenever possible.
He went on to cover the case for the Columbia, Mo., Daily Tribune from 2005 to 2010, and later as a freelancer for the St. Louis Beacon , an online news site, and the Unterrified Democrat, a newspaper in Helmig’s former home town of Linn, Mo.
“If newspapers do not highlight such injustices, who will?” Ganey said. The press’s highest calling is its watchdog role over what happens in courtrooms,”
Steve Weinberg, a freelance writer, author, and University of Missouri School of Journalism professor, has long encouraged news media coverage of possible wrongful convictions.
Said Weinberg: “Unless journalists get better at covering the justice system, many criminals will continue to go unpunished, free to murder or rape or rob again. So investigating wrongful convictions is not—as perceived by too many police, prosecutors and judges—an assault by soft-on-crime bleeding hearts. Rather, it is an attempt to serve law and order, to improve the administration of justice, and to foster faith in the criminal justice system.”
Overall, however, media resources available for investigative reporting of criminal justice appear to be declining.
The number of stories about possible wrongful convictions is not keeping pace with that of potential cases reported to innocence projects.
Link:
http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/inside-criminal-justice/2011-06-anatomy-of-a-wrongful-conviction-case