An interview with the reporter behind the story
A few years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Robin McDowell started a volunteer gig: mentoring incarcerated men running the Prison Mirror, the oldest prison newspaper in the United States. McDowell says the old-school journalism mindset used to be “giving voice to the voiceless.” She was interested in a different approach: “When I went to the paper, I told them I would rather help them find their own voice.“ The incarcerated editors of the paper told her about Burrell, who had maintained his innocence for 18 years in prison.
McDowell, co-reporter Margie Mason and Sasha Aslanian of APM Reports looked into Burrell’s case. In January 2020, Minnesota Public Radio and The Associated Press co-published a stunning investigation that exposed the lack of evidence in the case and the way Burrell’s arrest and sentencing were part of a larger pattern of racial disparities in the criminal justice system. McDowell, Mason and Aslanian’s reporting became this week’s episode of Reveal. I talked to McDowell about reporting the story.
What was challenging about reporting this story?
Robin McDowell: There were the people that I needed to talk to who were really hard to find. A lot of times, it'd be like, “Oh, I heard so-and-so was spotted at a Walmart where she seems to be working.” So I'd drive 40 minutes down there, and then she wouldn't be there. Or she couldn't talk or didn't want to talk to me. Just finding the people I needed to talk to was really time consuming.
And it took a long time to really understand what the story was. When you first start going through the court documents and the police reports, you're seeing it from the perspective of the police, the prosecutors and the witnesses that they choose. You're not seeing what witnesses are getting stricken from the record or who wasn’t interviewed at all. You’re not seeing all the evidence that was ignored. So it's giving you, in my opinion, a really slanted view of the case. You're thinking, “Is he even innocent?” Then when you start digging through the court papers and you start to see all the people that were stricken because they had criminal records but were saying things like, “His co-defendants are saying Myon was not there,” only the people that were supporting the (prosecutor’s) narrative were getting their chance in court.
That’s a really good point. A lot of bad journalism can come from taking the police account as the only narrative for an event. How did you start sorting through what actually happened here?
McDowell: You can take someone who the police interviewed the day of the crime and see what they were saying then, and then see what they said in court. Often, it's very different from what their initial report to investigators (was). That's a red flag, that someone has changed his story. One of the challenges with Myon’s case: He needed new evidence to prove his innocence. There were so many situations where clearly the police had massaged evidence. Witnesses were recanting. Jailhouse informants were recanting or getting money or years shaven from their sentence. Evidence that could have supported his evidence was ignored. But nothing was on its own enough to prove his innocence.
What journalism does that the courts can't do is tell the whole story from the beginning to the end. No one's gonna say, “Oh, you already presented that witness, you already brought up that evidence, we're not going to hear it again.” None of these things on their own tells the story, but put it all together, and people can see there was a miscarriage of justice here.
After working on it for a year and a half, how do you feel about having this story out in the world?
McDowell: I'm really happy. When I first started looking at this case, I was really interested in the “super predator era.” The Central Park Five was not an anomaly. There were so many juveniles locked up for life during that period. No country in the world has ever seen this number of juveniles locked away for life. How can all these kids have gotten fair trials? How can they all be guilty? And you see kind of a spectacular case like Central Park Five, and think, “Wow, this is crazy.” But the crazy part is there have to be more. A large majority of juvenile lifers were put away at a time when Democrats and Republicans were both trying to prove how they were tough on crime. So when the Central Park Five case fell apart, it has to make you wonder: How many other times has the public been fooled? And how many other times is the media fanning the flames?
Listen to the episode: The jail tapes in the dumpster
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Ike Sriskandarajah is a senior radio reporter and producer. From his home base with his wife and young son, Leroy, in New York City, he helps bring investigative reporting to the radio. 
