Harvey A. Silverglate brings to his commentary on legal issues for The Boston Phoenix an impressive background. He is not only a journalist but a practicing lawyer, one with an acute sense of the failings of the criminal-justice system. His political column, Freedom Watch, won a 2005 AltWeekly Award. This is the 14th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
This report in the Parkersburg (W. Va.) News & Sentinel is pretty confusing, but it appears that a story published in "an alternative newspaper from Columbus, Ohio" caused Kevin Radcliff ("also known as Amanda Love") and Steven Lantz to engage in fisticuffs inside Radcliff's Club Utopia. Radcliff was acquitted of battery, says the paper.
A young man was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder, and a forensic psychologist who worked on the case didn't believe the teenager had done it. So he turned to Ann Mullen, then a writer at Detroit's Metro Times. She dug around and wrote an in-depth story on the flaws in the Detroit Police Department's investigation. Six months later, the young man was freed. This is the 13th in a "How I Got That Story" series highlighting the AltWeekly Awards' first-place winners.
