Dart Center Honorees and Affiliates Win Polk Awards

Four journalists affiliated with the Dart Center were honored with George Polk Awards yesterday for achievement in journalism:

Ochberg Fellow Gina Barton, an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel won for local reporting for her investigative work on the July 2011 death of a man who died in police custody after repeatedly telling police officers he could not breath. The medical examiner ruled Derek Williams’s death was of natural causes, leading an internal police investigation to clear the arresting officers. Barton gained written records of the case, and then got the permission of Williams’ family to fight for the release of the police video. After a 10 month delay, Barton got the video, which she submitted to the medical examiner’s office. The cause of death was revised to homicide and the medical examiner resigned.

Sarah Stillman, of the New Yorker, who participated in the Dart Center’s Iraq Symposium last year, won for magazine reporting for a story about systemic abuse by authorities in Washington, Michigan, Kentucky, Florida and other states that led to the deaths of dozens of teens. The piece highlighted a brutal murder of a transgender Detroit teen, whose body was dismembered and set ablaze after she was discovered to be a police informant, a position she was coerced by police into taking following her arrest for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana.

McClatchy Newspapers Europe Editor, Roy Gutman, a member of the Dart Center advisory council, and reporter Hannah Allam, a participant in Dart’s 2004 war reporter’s retreat and a contributor to Dart’s Reporting War booklet, were part of a McClatchy team that won the war reporting award for its coverage of the civil war in Syria.