LAURELS
The Darts & Laurels column is written by Gloria
Cooper, CJR's managing editor, to whom nominations should
be addressed.
A MODEL INVESTIGATION
If
you bought a Nicole Miller tie at Macy's or a private-label suit
at Nordstrom's or a Jenna Lane dress at Kmart, chances are that
neither you nor the store was aware of the conditions under which
the clothing had been made. But no one can claim ignorance now.
To the reluctant gaze of customers, manufacturers, union leaders,
labor department officials, and -- not least -- retailers who
advertise, the New York Daily News exposed the ugly underbelly
of the city's garment industry. Based on records obtained under
the Freedom of Information Act of labor violations during the
past ten years, as well as on visits with inspectors to seven
sweatshops in Manhattan and Queens, reporter Bob Port's four-part
series (beginning Sunday, July 8) described the heartless exploitation
of Chinese immigrants -- some, mere children -- forced to pay
off smuggling debts of more than $50,000 by working a hundred
hours a week in fire-trap factories for as little as two dollars
an hour. In addition to listing the names and addresses of fifty
city sweatshops together with the back wages they owe, the series
detailed the weakness of the unions in protecting workers; the
failures of the government in enforcing safety, immigration, and
minimum-wage laws; and the foolishness of a labor department policy
that does not systematically inform retailers of violations by
suppliers. Exploring the economic realities -- i.e., the cutting
away of domestic jobs by cheap foreign labor -- the series left
readers to ponder the question of whether New York's garment industry
can play by the rules without falling apart at the seams.
OUT-OF-POCKET-NEWS
When
the taxes on his Cleveland townhouse were lowered substantially
in a countywide reappraisal even as prime real-estate prices continued
to climb, Doug Clifton, who as incoming editor of The Plain Dealer
had bought the property in 1999, might have quietly welcomed the
windfall and cheered his personal good luck. But Clifton's professional
nose smelled a story; he asked his staff to sniff it out. The
result was a front-page article by reporters Bob Paynter and Timothy
Heider (Sunday, June 17) documenting a distressing pattern of
absurdly reduced appraisals by county auditors -- appraisals that
handed a tax break to the owners of lavish homes and a lot less
money to the public schools. Embarrassed officials, laying blame
on computer glitches and human error, promised that amended assessments
would soon be in the mail (a promise that many weeks later remained
unfulfilled). Meanwhile, in a June 19 editorial, the paper left
its door open to the possibility that the bungling of the bills
was not entirely benign.
DRIVER'S ED
The
road to District Booking is too often paved with the bad intentions
of cops eager to get a jump-start on punishing the perps. As officers
driving the wagons gun the gas and slam on the brakes, handcuffed
prisoners, locked in windowless rear compartments equipped with
low narrow benches but no seat belts or padding, can find themselves
on a wild and dangerous ride, hurtling like ping-pong balls from
wall to wall. The longstanding practice, documented in a three-part
exposé in The Philadelphia Inquirer by reporters Nancy
Phillips and Rose Ciotta, amounts to nothing less than a secret
form of police brutality -- a form so institutionalized that it
even has a name, "nickel ride," after the old five-cent
thrills of amusement parks. Left in the ritual's wake in recent
years: numerous lawsuits, over $2.3 million in taxpayer-funded
settlements, two permanently paralyzed men -- and, to add insult
to injury, not a single disciplined officer. Before ink on the
series' final installment was dry, police commissioner John F.
Timoney had banned the unsafe vans, begun to retrofit old ones
with seat belts and foam padding, and stepped up the lagging plan
for replacement.
GIVING
JUSTICE A HAND
In
1997, ten years into a twenty-five-to-life sentence in Arizona's
Perryville Prison for killing the husband at whose hands she and
her two young daughters had suffered unimaginable abuse, Carol
Herriman was in line for a hearing under a new state law that
finally -- and retrospectively -- not only recognized "battered
woman syndrome" as a legitimate defense in murder cases,
but also established specific criteria for clemency. Taking up
Herriman's story, journalist Jana Bommersbach made it her own.
In an August 1997 column and subsequent articles in Phoenix Magazine,
in reports and commentary for KTVK-TV's Good Morning, Arizona
and Good Evening, Arizona, Bommersbach never let it go, relentlessly
retracing the history of the case, tracking down witnesses supporting
release, interviewing state officials now championing Herriman's
cause, sharing her elation when the board recommended immediate
release, her anxiety while the governor hemmed and hawed (an anxiety
that prompted calls and letters and e-mails to the governor on
Herriman's behalf) -- and at long last, on April 20, 2001, sobbing
joyfully with Herriman (and surely with KTVK viewers) as the prisoner
walked out free and the two embraced.
