2025 Dart Award Final Judging Committee

The final judging committee selected two Dart Award winners and two honorable mentions.

Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project, author of the book “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty,” and host of the podcast “Just Say You're Sorry.”

He won the 2024 Dart Award for his piece “The Mercy Workers” and was a Dart Center fellow in 2022 and 2023. 

Maurice has reported on the U.S. criminal justice system since 2010, and was on the team that won a 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He lives in Austin, Texas, after periods in New York City, Cairo, and Amman. ​

Rachel Dissell is a Cleveland-based journalist with more than two decades of experience reporting on the justice system. She is a two-time winner of the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma for “Johanna: Facing Forward” in 2008 and “Case Closed” in 2020. Dissell was a 2016 Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma Ochberg Fellow. 

Currently, she is managing editor at Signal Cleveland, a nonprofit newsroom she helped launch. Dissell also is a contributing editor for The Marshall Project in Cleveland, where “Testify,” a series she worked on won the 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation. For almost 20 years she reported for The Plain Dealer where her investigative pieces changed laws, policies, hearts and minds. Following her reporting , Ohio processed 14,000 untested rape kits leading, which resulted in more than 1,000 indictments unsolved sex crimes cases alone. Dissell also has created and led multi-disciplinary trainings on trauma and storytelling. Recently, she led a workshop with families whose loved ones were murdered where they wrote the stories they wished had been reported in the news. 

Juan Manuel Benítez has worked as a New York City-based bilingual journalist for more than two decades, covering politics, climate change, and the Latino community.

In 2003, he joined NY1 News as a reporter, launching its Spanish-language sister station, NY1 Noticias. There, he launched and anchored the current affairs show Pura Política and the weekly podcast Off Topic/On Politics. Both stations are part of Spectrum News, a network of more than 30 local news and regional sports channels.

Benítez has extensively covered the administrations of mayors Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio, and Eric Adams, as well as countless political campaigns, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary for the Democratic presidential nomination and the 2016 presidential election. He has also served as a moderator and panelist in many electoral debates.

Over the years, Benítez has also worked as a guest host for WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show and as a columnist for publications like El Diario La Prensa. He has also been a political commentator for MSNBC, NTN 24 and other outlets, and has served as a member of the jury for the Gabo Awards. He started his career in journalism as a reporter for Hispanic Market Weekly.

For more than a decade, he was an adjunct professor at CUNY’s Craig Newmark School of Journalism, where he designed its bilingual program.

Sacha Pfeiffer is a reporter for NPR's Investigations team and a guest host for NPR's national shows.

Pfeiffer came to NPR from The Boston Globe's investigative Spotlight team, whose stories on the Catholic Church's cover-up of clergy sex abuse won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, among other honors. That reporting is the subject of the movie Spotlight, which won the 2016 Oscar for Best Picture.

Pfeiffer was also a senior reporter and host of All Things Considered and Radio Boston at WBUR in Boston, where she won a national 2012 Edward R. Murrow Award for broadcast reporting and guest-hosted NPR's nationally syndicated On Point and Here & Now.

At The Boston Globe, Pfeiffer also covered the court system, legal industry and nonprofit/philanthropic sector; produced series on financial abuses by private foundations, shoddy home construction, and sexual misconduct in the modeling industry; and helped create a multi-episode podcast, Gladiator, about the life and death of NFL player Aaron Hernandez. She shared the George Polk Award for National Reporting, Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, and Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.

At WBUR, Pfeiffer also anchored election coverage, debates, political panels and other special events. Her on-air work received numerous awards from the Associated Press and Radio & Television News Directors Association.

Pfeiffer was a Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where she studied at its law school. She co-authored Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church and has taught at Boston University's College of Communication.

Andrea Phelps, PhD, is president-elect of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and deputy director of Phoenix Australia – Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health. In this role, Andrea has strategic oversight of the centre’s activities across research, service development and training and plays a key role in strategic planning and setting future directions. She has over 20 years of clinical experience in the assessment and treatment of posttraumatic mental health problems in veterans and was responsible for the accreditation of PTSD treatment programs for veterans across Australia for many years.

At Phoenix Australia, Andrea leads a number of major projects, including the Australian Guidelines for the Prevention and Treatment of Acute Stress Disorder, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Complex PTSD. She also consults to a range of government departments and industry partners on research, service development and policy issues regarding organisational responses to psychological trauma. Government departments include Veterans’ Affairs, Defence, Health and Human Services, Australian Border Force, and Australian Federal Police; industry partners include state police, fire, ambulance and rail services.

Andrea’s research interests center on the nature and treatment of posttraumatic stress with a particular focus on moral injury and posttraumatic nightmares.