Apps, maps, edits and clips
Read my recent stories at The Marshall Project and see the data and code behind them on Github.
Tracking COVID-19 in prisons nationwide
When the coronavirus pandemic swept into the United States and cities and states began to lock down, we knew at The Marshall Project that we needed to watch how coronavirus was going to affect the people who live and work in our prisons. We knew social distancing and PPEs wouldn’t exist there, making everyone vulnerable. We quickly built a system for collecting counts of cases from every prison system in the country, involving dozens of reporters from our newsroom and our partners at The Associated Press. For every week after, we've continued to collect and publish the data, tracking the explosion of COVID-19 in many of our prisons and exposing the toll it's taken on prisoners and workers alike. Read the clip
Shining a light on the death penalty
For five and a half years, The Marshall Project tracked every execution in the U.S., counting down until each one was carried out or stayed. Partnering with reporters and editors at nine other news organizations, we examined how executions happened in death penalty states, in near-real-time. In this final story, you can read what we learned about the death penalty and how capital punishment has become more slower, more winding and erratic. This application was powered by a PostGreSQL database and Django admin I built. It also featured an automated Twitter feed I created from the data we've collected. Read the clip
The victims of the Newtown shooting
Within hours of reports about a mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., my data team at Project Thunderdome launched this app to collect the faces and profiles of the lives who were lost. The four of us then spent the next four days working with journalists in two states to help report out the stories and bring them into the app. Read the clip
Distracted driving still a problem, despite attempts to curtail cell phone use
Lawmakers and law enforcers had not been shy about claiming a ban on cell phone use while driving was making New Jersey's roads safer. But my reporter found this simple, but effective story hiding in plain view. When we looked at the state's accident data, it showed that the number of crashes involving cell phones were unchanged in the years since stricter laws had gone into effect. Read the clip
Lien deal leaves Paterson in dire straits
A tip from a source in Paterson’s city government led me to look into a deal in which the mayor sold liens against scores of abandoned lots to a developer. By digging through hundreds of documents and county land records, I built a database that tracked thousands of land transactions and analyzed how the city lost $13 million in potential revenue in the deal. Much to my dismay, due to the sands of time, the Google Map I built that showed data on each property in the scheme is no longer available on the internet. Read the clip
A Temporary Life
I wanted to find a compelling way to illustrate the challenges facing the working poor and immigrants in North Jersey. For one month, I gave up all my money, moved out of my apartment and got a low-wage job. The resulting story of how I made ends meet resonated with readers across the socioeconomic spectrum, won several state contests and was a finalist in the Deadline Club’s annual awards. Read the clip