by Kate Womersley, special to ProPublica

At 11:58 p.m. this past June 25, Helen Taylor gave birth to her first baby, a boy, at West Suffolk Hospital in the east of England. At 11:59 p.m., with 15 seconds to spare before midnight, his sister was born. The obstetrician and her team were pleased; the cesarean section was going smoothly, fulfilling Helen’s wish that her twins share a birthday.

But 40 minutes later, Helen had lost over a third of her blood.

Enraptured by new motherhood, she barely noticed when the obstetrician’s head appeared around the surgical drape. “We need to give you a drug to help stop the bleeding, is that OK?” Helen nodded. Ten minutes passed before the question came again. Then again. The fourth time, Helen realized something was seriously wrong.

During pregnancy, the uterine blood vessels that nourish the fetus are wide open. Once the baby is delivered and the placenta removed, these vessels should constrict and close. If they don’t, as with Helen, the mother can bleed profusely. She may reach a point where her body can no longer compensate for the blood loss. The extent of the flow can be unpredictable and sometimes catastrophic. The surgical team’s response must be meticulous. And fast.

Helen’s team — an experienced obstetrician with her resident in training, a pediatrician, an anesthesiologist with an assistant, two nurses (one scrubbed-in, one fetching equipment), and three midwives — responded to her developing hemorrhage with a routine ingrained from rehearsal and real life.

“We are like a Formula One race team at a pit stop,” the anesthesiologist had reassured Helen by way of introduction.

The key to this well-oiled machine is standardization. It used to be that every obstetrician in the U.K. had his or her own signature strategy to manage an emergency. In the U.S., that still sometimes happens. But these days, every British doctor, whether newly qualified or approaching retirement, is required to follow the same guidelines for many aspects of maternity care, including treatment of bleeding. Postpartum hemorrhage guidelines are regularly updated by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, and then written into local protocols for practice in every National Health Service hospital. You don’t need to be a doctor to read the guidelines: They are freely available online. Women can find out exactly what standard of care to expect.

Helen’s was the kind of deceptively complex case that shows why a consistent approach is desirable. Her hemorrhage flared from minor (over 500 milliliters) to major (over 1 liter) to massive (over 2 liters) in less than an hour. First, the team gave her IV fluids to help replace the lost volume. After checking for bits of retained placenta, the obstetrician massaged Helen’s uterus to encourage its natural ability to contract, but her bleeding continued. The anesthesiologist lifted the surgical drapes to inject Helen’s thigh with a drug containing syntocinon, which stimulates the uterine muscle to tighten the blood vessels. The same medication was then given by a drip.

But there’s a catch: Drugs that narrow arteries can increase blood pressure. During her third trimester, Helen had developed preeclampsia, a type of hypertension induced by pregnancy that can lead to seizures and strokes. Not only does preeclampsia complicate treatment for bleeding, it makes hemorrhage more likely in the first place.

The immediate danger of more blood loss outweighed the risk of raising the blood pressure. The anesthesiologist followed protocol and administered two more drugs to intensify uterine contraction, with several minutes of watching and waiting in between. Still the blood flowed. The final step would be a transfusion.

Then, just as the team was about to dial up units of O-negative from the blood bank, the obstetrician noticed that her absorbent surgical swabs were taking longer to soak through with red. The uterus felt firmer, more like a bicep than loose tissue. Helen’s bleeding was under control. Due to the guidelines, a more serious crisis was averted. A transfusion wouldn’t be needed after all.

As a medical student at the University of Cambridge in England, I got to know Helen on the ward. This account of her pregnancy, labor and medical emergency is based on my observations and interviews with Helen, her partner Marcus and caregivers at West Suffolk Hospital. The hospital approved my access to interview patients, and Helen gave full consent to share her experience. It’s a tale that highlights the profoundly different approaches in the U.K. and the U.S. to maternal care — and to saving mothers’ lives.

“Ultimately, it’s a story I didn’t think I’d get to tell,” Helen said.

For a pregnant woman in the 1950s, the two childbirth complications most likely to prove fatal were hemorrhage and preeclampsia. Whether American or British, one in every 1,000 expectant and new mothers died.

British health authorities recognized this number was unacceptably high, given that nearly half of the deaths were considered preventable. Starting in the late 1940s, a national commitment was made to standardize maternity care across the NHS, assess each maternal fatality, and learn how it might have been avoided.

That campaign has succeeded. Today, the average mother in the U.K. receives more comprehensive and consistent care, ranging from earlier prenatal appointments to closer monitoring after she gives birth, than does her American counterpart. And if a mother dies, the U.K. investigates and tries to learn from it. Medical authorities in the U.K. view maternal deaths as public health failures that underscore deficiencies in health care systems. In the U.S., maternal deaths are too often treated as disconnected, private tragedies. If they are scrutinized by hospitals or regulators at all, the findings typically prompt institutional rather than national reforms. 

Underlying these contrasts is a different view of the medical responsibility to mother and child. In the U.S., laudable aspirations for infant safety have intensified focus on the fetus — more sonograms, continuous fetal heart monitoring and granting rights to the unborn. But these measures may at times distract attention from the mother’s health.

By contrast, British medical professionals are legally required to prioritize a mother’s wellbeing if both she and her baby are in danger. They’re trained to stabilize mom first, and then tend to baby. “That sense that the woman (while the fetus is in utero) is the agent in charge is in place. I think that’s the right way,” said Denis Walsh, a midwife and associate professor in midwifery at the University of Nottingham. “Otherwise you start undermining individual women’s autonomy and then you go down a slippery slope.”

The numbers reflect the difference in national priorities. Today in the U.K., 8.9 women for every 100,000 live births die from complications of pregnancy or childbirth, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. In the U.S., this figure declined in tandem with Britain’s until 1990. It then reversed course, rising to 25.1 women per 100,000 in 2015, almost three times higher than the U.K., and among the worst in the Western world.

These U.S. deaths are not spread equally. Women who are poor, African American or live in a rural area are more likely to die during and after pregnancy. In the U.K., while inequalities persist when it comes to serious complications, according to 2012-2014 data, there is no statistically significant difference in mortality rates between women in the highest and lowest socioeconomic groups. All British women have equal access to public medical services, including free care and prescriptions from pregnancy through the postpartum period.

There is a significant gap between the U.K. and U.S. in outcomes for pregnancy-related conditions that are highly treatable but can lead to death if they are not recognized and managed in time. One in 1 million women die of preeclampsia in the U.K.; that’s less than a single death per year. By contrast, preeclampsia killed an estimated 50 to 70 women in the U.S. in 2016, accounting for 8 percent of maternal deaths. According to the most recent data available, hemorrhage is responsible for 6.5 percent of maternal deaths in the U.K. versus 11.4 percent in the U.S.

The U.K. has achieved these results while spending less on delivering babies. On average, the total price charged for a vaginal birth in the U.S. is $30,000 (£24,000), which rises to $50,000 (£39,000) for a cesarean section, according to Truven Health Analytics, a New York firm that collects health care data. The BBC reported that in the U.K. the average cost for a normal delivery or planned cesarean section on a hospital labor ward in 2016 was $2,300 (£1,755), while a complicated case like Helen’s rose to $3,400 (£2,582).

Ironically, the centerpiece of the U.K.’s strategy to reduce maternal mortality is an American import. In 1949, the British Congress on Obstetrics and Gynecology suggested adopting a new method for reviewing maternal deaths that was already practiced in some parts of the U.S. Fatalities in those regions were assessed by local committees of experts, who published reports in medical journals to educate the profession. The British minister of health agreed to try it. The result was the Report on Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths in England and Wales, established in 1952.

The confidential inquiry has far outstripped its American forebears. Now run by MBRRACE-UK (Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries in the United Kingdom), its report drives training, assessment and practice in British obstetrics — including the types of treatment protocols that saved Helen Taylor’s life. Crucially, hospitals can neither opt out of MBRRACE’s surveillance nor ignore its recommendations.

In many parts of the U.S., such enquiries do not have the same prominence and clout. There is no federal-level scrutiny of maternal deaths, and only 26 states have an established committee (of varying methodology and rigor) to review them. Nor do all U.S. hospitals routinely examine whether a death could have been avoided. Procedures for treating complications such as preeclampsia, and for responding to emergencies such as hemorrhage, vary from one doctor, hospital and state to the next.

The Richard Doll building at the University of Oxford, named after the epidemiologist who saved millions of lives by establishing the link between smoking and lung cancer, is the home of MBRRACE. That the inquiry can declare itself “the international gold standard for maternity audit and quality-improvement programs” is due to more than 100 doctors and midwives who read the cases in their spare time for free. MBRRACE continues the search for answers begun in 1952: What are the causes of maternal deaths, why are they occurring, and how can they be prevented?

MBRRACE’s full report covers a three-year period and includes data on every woman in the U.K. who has died during pregnancy or up to six weeks after childbirth. It also discusses later maternal deaths — those occurring up to a year after delivery — and makes recommendations for improvements to care. Direct deaths from obstetric causes, such as hemorrhage, sepsis or blood clots, are distinguished from indirect deaths from conditions worsened but not caused by pregnancy, such as epilepsy or certain types of heart disease.

When a woman dies, the delivery unit responsible for her care submits a local report, which includes perspectives of the health professionals who treated her, and a copy of her medical notes. First, a pathologist reviews the documents to pronounce the cause of death. Next, 10 to 15 practitioners from specialties including obstetrics, anesthesiology, emergency medicine, psychiatry and midwifery piece together what happened, and decide whether the death could have been prevented.

Data about maternal age, race and cause of death is extracted and analyzed. Also counted are the survivors who must grow up without a mother’s care. The 2012–2014 report states that “the women who died left behind a further 253 children, thus together a total of 358 motherless children remain.” The individual women are not named, but their stories are preserved in the report through short vignettes. Marian Knight, head of MBRRACE’s maternal program, who trained in obstetrics and is now professor of maternal and child population health at the University of Oxford, insists that statistics alone do not have the same impact.

“Stories are what make the difference,” Knight told me. “That’s what people remember. In the States, they are just collecting numbers. It’s all very well to know a woman died of sepsis, but to know that she died of sepsis because nobody measured her temperature, as they had no thermometers on the postnatal ward, that’s where the instruction Put a thermometer on your postnatal ward might make a difference. It’s not just the what, it’s the why.”

MBRRACE doesn’t seek to blame individual health professionals, but rather to learn from systemic mistakes. These lessons feed back into NICE’s and the Royal College’s guidelines, standardizing care from Inverness to Southampton. Committing to predetermined pathways of treatment, as in Helen’s delivery, requires humility from clinicians. The power of protocols — informed by the profession’s collective experience and research findings — is that, over time, they will result in better outcomes than one doctor’s instinct.

Catherine Aiken, fellow in maternal-fetal medicine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, interned at Yale New Haven Hospital before returning to the U.K. “As a behemoth organization, [the NHS] is good at agreeing that there is a way of taking a woman’s observations [vital signs] in labor. If you don’t have a thermometer, the whole thing grinds to a halt until you find one, which can be frustrating at times,” she said. “You have to remind yourself in the moment this is good, and ultimately it will save lives because you have less of the stupid mistakes.”

There are, of course, moments when deviating from a protocol is defensible, but “you should have something that makes you think very hard before you override a safety mechanism in any situation,” Aiken added. “I’m glad that I work in an operation where I would be stopped if I were doing something off-piste,” or in other words, not recognized as best practice.

MBRRACE’s findings also influence how interns and residents are evaluated. Questions about the confidential inquiry appear on the Royal College’s examinations, which all aspiring obstetricians and gynecologists must pass.

The Care Quality Commission, which inspects medical services nationwide, takes MBRRACE’s report to birthing units and labor wards to ask doctors and midwives how they are integrating its findings. PROMPT (Practical Obstetric Multi-Professional Training), a nonprofit formed in response to evidence from the confidential inquiry, runs drills and refresher courses for obstetricians, anesthesiologists and midwives. Protocols are practiced in simulated emergencies to make the pit stop in real crises as efficient as possible.

Despite these measures, the U.K. appears to be one of the poorer-performing European Union countries. France and the Netherlands, the two other nations that conduct enquiries comparable to MBBRACE, have lower maternal mortality ratios (7.6 per 100,000 live births, and 6.3 per 100,000 respectively).

Does comparison with the U.S. mask the U.K.’s shortcomings? Defenders of the British system say the NHS is simply more vigilant in defining and identifying all pregnancy-related deaths. If you search hard enough for bad news, you are likely to find more of it. In the U.K., 85 percent of women who die of causes connected to pregnancy or childbirth have an autopsy, versus 49 percent in the Netherlands and 29 percent in France.

“I’m pretty sure we’re very close, if not perfect, at identifying all of our maternal cases. So obviously our rates look higher,” Knight said.

The U.S. lags behind the U.K. in this area too. In the U.S., for deaths listed as related to pregnancy on death certificates from 2011 to 2013, the autopsy rate is estimated at close to 60 percent, said Dr. William Callaghan, chief of the Maternal and Infant Health Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “There is little to no standardization regarding autopsy,” he said. “States and even localities have their own practices.”

Last year, at the age of 42, Helen Taylor had almost given up hope she would ever hold her own baby. After 12 years of trying, and three unsuccessful cycles of in vitro fertilization provided free by the NHS, the chances looked slim.

Balancing her job as a primary school teacher with IVF treatment was “incredibly hard,” she said. After one appointment, she had to lead a sex education class, “talking about eggs and sperm.”

“You had to leave it behind, leave it in the car, and then go into the classroom, put a smile on your face and try and forget about it.” She paused. “You start to bury it a bit.”

After the third failed IVF cycle, a private fertility doctor had bluntly told her the few eggs she had were “poor quality.”

“You’re really scraping the barrel,” he said.

Devastated but determined, Helen and her partner Marcus decided to pay for one final attempt. This time they opted for an egg donor. She was 34 years old, a Caucasian brunette with blue eyes. That’s all they knew.

After implanting a couple of embryos in Helen’s womb in November 2016, her doctor told her to wait two weeks before taking a pregnancy test. But after 10 days, Helen noticed some light spotting: the familiar sign of failure. The next morning, her birthday, she just wanted to get the bad news over with. Three minutes later she was staring at a pair of blue lines. After another four tests, she let herself believe it was true.

Maternal care in the U.K. and the U.S. begins to diverge early in the first trimester. When she was less than a month pregnant, Helen shared the news with her family doctor, following the NHS recommendation to do so as soon as possible. In the U.S., the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says care should be initiated by 10 to 12 weeks, and the first point of contact is likely to be an OB-GYN practice. In Britain, it’s usually a community midwife, and Helen was put in touch with the local branch in Sudbury.

A kindly 40-something woman led the first meeting, known as the “Booking Appointment,” and talked Helen through what to expect from the next months. As a first-time mom, she would be scheduled for 10 prenatal sessions (which would have been seven sessions if this were her second child), and was reassured there would be no limit if she had trouble.

They spent over an hour going through Helen’s past medical history, checking her weight and blood pressure, testing her urine and discussing diet and self-care. The midwife encouraged Helen to consider the NHS “Bump, Birth and Beyond” prenatal classes, a breastfeeding workshop, screening tests for fetal abnormalities and immunizations. She asked whether Helen had concerns about her mental health or domestic violence. (She didn’t.) Screening for both is mandatory in the U.K., but not in the U.S.

To each midwife appointment Helen brought her NHS pregnancy booklet — “maternity notes” — given to every expectant mother. It is designed to ensure that all risk factors are considered, with checklists of questions and space for the midwife’s comments on mom and baby’s progress. At delivery, this booklet provides useful information to the medical team.

Perhaps the biggest difference compared with the U.S. is the way pregnancies are quickly triaged into two broad categories: low or high risk. Low-risk women — those deemed unlikely to have complications — account for 45 percent of pregnancies, and see a midwife every four weeks. A quarter of these women will end up being escalated to the care of an attending obstetrician during or just before labor. But if a pregnancy is uneventful it is possible, even probable, that the woman will not see a doctor over the entire nine months.

In the U.K., all planned births, from home deliveries to complex C-sections, are attended by midwives, whereas in the U.S., midwives are present at just 8 percent of births. Helen would have liked to deliver on a midwife-led birthing unit, but her pregnancy was high risk from the outset because she was over 40 and had conceived by donor IVF, both of which increased the likelihood of complications, including preeclampsia and hemorrhage.

Other factors that can elevate risk include pre-existing medical conditions, increased maternal age or substance abuse. Risk factors may also relate to the baby: If there is more than one in the womb, or if the fetus is small for its age, moves less than expected, or in the last days of pregnancy is positioned breech (with bottom or legs at the lowest point in the uterus).

High-risk women see an obstetrician and a midwife, as well as a specialist if the mother has a co-morbidity — a disease or disorder that could complicate pregnancy and childbirth. Their deliveries take place on hospital labor wards, overseen by an attending obstetrician. Helen’s midwife automatically checked the “location of birth” box that said “Labor ward.”

Risk can change as pregnancy progresses. With this in mind, many hospitals are designed with their maternity unit next to the labor ward. “We are very good at sliding people between the high- and low-risk models of care,” said Sally Collins, associate professor of obstetrics at the University of Oxford. Or, as Helen said to Marcus, “No one can know what’s going to happen. You better cover all your contingencies.”

Helen went back to the IVF clinic for an early ultrasound scan. The NHS routinely offers two ultrasounds for every low-risk pregnancy: at 12 weeks and 20 weeks. High-risk women may be scanned more regularly.

As the sonographer moved the probe over Helen’s jellied tummy, she paused.

“There isn’t just one heartbeat. There are two.”

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”

“Does she say anything else?” the sonographer laughed, turning to Marcus.

Despite her excitement, Helen knew twins increased the likelihood of complications. She was booked for a scan every two weeks from 20 weeks, and then would see a doctor for 10 minutes to talk through the results. More business-like than meetings with the midwife, these appointments would give Helen a formal reassurance that the pregnancy was going according to plan.

The first trimester started with nausea, but by the second, Helen was in her element. “It was brilliant,” she said, beaming. “You’re in a position where you can tell everybody, everyone knows, you’ve got a bump but it’s not massive and weighing you down.”

An ongoing complication of pregnancy for Helen was over-Googling. “I would go to the midwife with a list of questions that I was worrying about,” she said, such as what might be causing a rhythmic beat, not as fast as a heart pumping, deep in her abdomen. “Oh, that’s probably baby hiccups,” the midwife said. “Totally normal.” Her WhatsApp group of six other moms and dads from prenatal classes added to this pool of practical wisdom.

As if on a timer, at 28 weeks — the beginning of her third trimester — Helen’s usually low blood pressure started to rise. Her feet swelled, then her ankles, then her calves: the telltale signs of preeclampsia. Although Helen’s blood pressure was at the upper end of normal, the midwife sent her to the hospital twice a week for closer monitoring. There, an obstetrician prescribed labetalol — a drug that widens the arteries to lower the pressure.

On the 34-week scan, the babies were fortunately in the correct position: head-down, four feet kicking above Helen’s navel. A vaginal delivery still looked likely.

Helen wanted her delivery to be as natural as possible, even though she was resigned to the necessity of being induced at 37 or 38 weeks if the babies hadn’t arrived by then, standard practice for the delivery of twins.

“Natural birth” — now called “physiological birth” within the midwifery profession — is a common request in the U.K., and not something women have to fight for. It tends to be defined by what it is not: no induction, minimal medical involvement and certainly no cesarean section. Every pregnant woman is encouraged to write a birth plan with her midwife, which includes the desired location of birth, medical interventions mom would agree to, the role a partner is to have (cutting the cord, for example), and forms of acceptable pain relief.

Making it more likely that U.K. women get the kind of delivery they want is due to the influence of midwives. The NHS employs over 21,000 midwives, compared with 4,710 OB-GYNs. Unlike obstetric nurses in the U.S., midwives in Britain do not work under the auspices of obstetricians. Midwives are independent practitioners in their own right, but trained to recognize when a woman or her baby is in trouble and needs an obstetrician’s eye.

“A midwife looks at a pregnant woman and sees a beautiful, normal, physiological, wonderful event about to happen,” Oxford’s Sally Collins told me. “An obstetrician looks at a pregnant woman and sees a disaster lying in wait for them. If you’ve got these two health care professionals working together as a team and meeting in the middle, what you end up with is really good health care. The normal women are normalized and the high-risk women are medicalized.”

Thirty-five weeks pregnant to the day, Helen was at home in the twins’ new jungle-themed nursery. Her induction date was over a fortnight away, but she was already hanging up the tiny clothes handed down from her nieces.

At 4:30 p.m., the phone rang. The line was crackly, as usual in her rural neighborhood, but she could just make out the voice of a midwife at the other end.

“Your urine reading is not good, the protein level is very high. You need to come in.”

Helen had a doctor’s appointment the following morning and suggested she could talk through the results then.

“No, you need to come now.”

Hearts racing, Helen and Marcus drove the 40 minutes to West Suffolk Hospital, forgetting their pregnancy notes in the rush. On arrival, the midwife repeated the urine test, which showed 370 mL/deciliter of protein, or more than 12 times the normal level. Helen’s blood pressure was up, too, exacerbated by anxiety. Another midwife strapped a fetal heart monitor around Helen’s large bump: 138 and 125 per minute, both babies beating perfectly normally, oblivious to what was about to happen.

Helen’s preeclampsia had worsened rapidly. In line with NICE protocol, the obstetrician-on-call decided that immediate induction and delivery was imperative.

Helen was given a steroid shot to accelerate the babies’ lung development over those final hours. Entering the world five weeks early, the twins might struggle to breathe unassisted.

It was the end of a weeklong heatwave in the U.K. with temperatures over 90 degrees, the hottest June days in 40 years. Helen settled into a six-bed bay on ward F11 for the night. The window safety catches opened less than a hand’s breadth and there was no air conditioning. Three other women were on the ward, too, separated by disposable fabric curtains.

“They’re going through their own experiences and you don’t really want to share that, but because they’re next to you, you do,” Helen told me later. Two were moved to the labor suite in the early hours as their deliveries progressed, while the remaining woman endured the first stages of labor that night, gasping with each contraction.

The next morning I met Helen for the first time. Wearing a loose jersey dress, she was propped up in bed to ease her back pain, with her legs stretched out, shiny and swollen as though a needle might pop them. She had made herself at home, unpacking her pregnancy kit: a half-liter bottle of Gaviscon antacid, a large tangerine-colored birthing ball, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” cereal bars, and “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” the American pregnancy Bible. As 3 milliliters of prostaglandin hormone were infused through a pessary (a ring-shape device which sits in the vagina and delivers medication to start the contractions), Marcus fell asleep in the chair beside her.

After 24 hours in the hospital and three pessaries, not much was happening. Helen’s Bishop’s score was five, meaning that her cervix was still too narrow for delivery. “I had some period cramps and a little bit of backache,” Helen said, “but I’m meant to be having full-on contractions, and there was just nothing, which I really wasn’t expecting.”

It was agreed that the next day an obstetrician would break Helen’s waters. “It sounds like a hook,” Helen recalled. “You have to have your legs up in stirrups and then they literally find where the cervix is and tear [the membranes], which was incredibly painful,” so bad that she had to be on a painkiller, nitrous oxide, known as “gas and air.” A syntocinon drip was started at 6 milliliters per hour to coax the uterus toward delivery. Helen was allocated her own midwife for the day, and was pleased that this woman “was totally focused on us.”

After examining Helen’s cervix, still far from the 10-centimeter dilation needed for active labor, the obstetrician increased the drip. This happened four times over the course of the day.

“I got more and more disheartened because I was really set on a vaginal birth and it all being as natural as possible,” said Helen. After eight hours, she had reached 60 milliliters per hour, the recommended maximum amount. The obstetrician agreed to go one dose higher. Without saying a word, she seemed to understand how much Helen wanted to avoid surgery.

During the last half hour on the drip, Helen anxiously searched the U.K. parenting website Mumsnet on her phone to see what other women had done in her situation. “I thought, could I just leave it and go another day and see what happens?” But with her waters already broken, the risk of infection was too high.

By 10 p.m., Helen was exhausted. Other than a hurried slice of toast and jam for breakfast, she hadn’t eaten all day. “It was definitely my decision to say I’ve had enough of being on the drip, it’s not working and I can feel it’s not working.”

The obstetrician nodded.

“We’re going to have to do a C-section.”

For Helen, this felt like a failure.

NHS doctors and midwives are working together to reduce the number of cesarean sections in the U.K. C-sections are one of the most common operations in the world (and the most common inpatient surgery in the U.S.), but far from all of them are necessary. Incidence of surgical births has been steadily rising — from one in 10 births 30 years ago, to almost one in four today. For the U.S., this number is even higher: one in three pregnancies end in a C-section.

Most are emergency procedures, but too many are elective. The World Health Organization suggests that an “ideal rate” of C-sections is 10 to 15 percent of total births, which would maximize survival of mothers and babies without causing needless complications.

In the U.K., many hospitals are seeking to reduce the number of C-sections that are requested by patients but are not medically indicated. The NHS supports vaginal delivery for even complicated presentations, sometimes when the baby is in the breech position (head uppermost), commonly for twin deliveries and often after a mother has had a prior C-section (known as vaginal births after cesarean, or VBACs). Counseling and individualized birth plans have enabled skeptical women to choose a vaginal delivery tailored to their needs rather than default to surgery.

Besides the immediate dangers, including postpartum hemorrhage and infection, C-sections increase the risk of problems in subsequent pregnancies. The placenta is more likely to embed on an old cesarean scar, where the uterus is thinner, and sometimes invades the uterine muscle, which can cause serious organ damage or even death.

NICE states that women should have the right to choose a C-section, but many hospitals in the U.K. are extremely reluctant to perform them unless strictly necessary or if the woman is diagnosed by a psychiatrist to have tokophobia, a fear of childbirth.

Jac Reeve, an attending obstetrician and gynecologist at West Suffolk Hospital, said she’s “very anti” performing C-sections simply because a patient wants one. “I take the ‘first do no harm’ principle as fundamental,” she said. “For me, cutting someone open when there is no need to is first doing harm.”

Nevertheless, when options for a vaginal birth have been exhausted or deemed unsafe, emergency cesareans can be the only choice for mom and baby. That was Helen’s situation.

On Sunday night at 10:30 p.m., Helen was prepped for surgery. The anesthesiologist, obstetrician and a midwife each carefully explained to Helen every stage of what was about to happen and she consented.

“I was petrified,” she recalled. “I probably looked very calm. I’m almost glad it happened that quickly, because if I’d have had time to sit and think about it, I’d have felt even more scared.”

She perched on the edge of the operating table in the blue backless gown she had worn all day, not resisting as an IV drip was placed in her arm. She leaned forward as the injected local anesthetic tingled her lower spine before the larger epidural needle went in. The anesthesiologist tapped her thighs to test the numbness as it spread. He touched an ice cube to Helen’s leg, then over her tummy, asking if she could feel its chill.

A surgical drape was hoisted, dividing the intimacy of expectant parenthood from the business of surgery. At Helen’s side sat Marcus, togged in navy scrubs, a yellow cap and disposable booties. “I look like a doctor now,” he said. Three senior midwives stood around the couple, soothing them with jokes and stories.

“This is going to feel like someone washing up in your stomach,” said the obstetrician. Scalpel to skin at 11:53 p.m. “I don’t know why, but I kept waiting for the knife to go in,” Helen remembered. “Obviously, I wouldn’t have been able to feel that. It was only then that I felt this rummaging sensation. They’re in!”

One of the midwives leaned firmly on Helen’s stomach to push the twins towards the incision. Even though she hadn’t been allowed to eat before surgery, Helen was sick four times, and felt relief only after a shot of anti-nausea medication.

Helen listened to her son and daughter before she saw them, relieved that their lungs were strong enough to cry. Those first screams in stereo were the happiest sounds of her life. It took 15 minutes until she finally held them, one in the nook of each arm, just 5 pounds, 1 ounce, and 5 pounds, 6 ounces, swaddled and topped in pink and cream knitted hats. Helen stroked a spot of milky vernix from her son’s cheek. Marcus took a picture on his iPad.

“It’s strange, because I look at the photos now,” Helen said, “I’m cuddling these two babies, and I think to myself, ‘I was bleeding out at that point.’”

It was an emergency landing, but everyone survived. Pilots learn early in their training that every descent is a calculated crash, nothing less. The same is true for obstetricians.

For Helen, the post-op hours passed in a haze. “I may have slept slightly. I remember being checked on a lot, and they’d ask me if I could feel my legs yet, and I couldn’t,” she recalled. “They were monitoring my blood pressure the whole time, and they’d come in and take readings every so often.”

The obstetrician who performed the C-section visited Helen the next morning on her rounds. “You had me really worried there,” she said, her poker face breaking into a smile.

A midwife arrived to ask Helen if she wanted to express colostrum, the first milk, for the twins in NICU. “It was just what I needed really because I felt slightly disconnected because they weren’t with me,” Helen said. “By doing that, I felt like I was helping.”

Another midwife came to check Helen’s pain level. Halfway out the door, she turned back, “You don’t look like someone who’s lost three liters of blood.”

An hour later, when I went to see Helen, she told me about the midwife’s comment. I had to agree. Helen struck me as animated, even vibrant, showing few signs of the physical and emotional strains of the past 24 hours. I thought to myself: “How should someone look who for 12 years has longed for a baby, and then gets two?”

Contrary to what some obstetricians still believe, delivery does not always cure preeclampsia. Its course is variable, with the potential for devastating outcomes post-partum. Helen was offered a transfusion two days later to recover some much-needed energy after the hemorrhage. “My first reaction was, ‘No, I don’t want any more medical intervention,’” she said, but after talking to her sister-in-law, who had also suffered a hemorrhage with her first baby, Helen changed her mind. Although she felt somewhat better after the transfusion, her blood pressure remained stubbornly high, peaking at 177/97 three days after the birth. She was prescribed a drug to help prevent these spikes, which she would continue to take for several weeks.

On July 4, after 11 days of recovery and care, mother and babies left the hospital, finally free.

In both the U.K. and the U.S., the demographics of maternity are changing. Women tend to delay motherhood to an older age, and obesity and pre-existing conditions like diabetes are more common. Despite the associated rise in high-risk pregnancies, the U.K. government set an ambitious goal in 2015: to reduce maternal mortality by a further 20 percent before 2020, and 50 percent by 2030. MBRRACE is expanding its mission, to learn from near-misses as well as fatalities, morbidity as well as mortality. The U.K. Obstetric Surveillance System is part of this effort, and sends out monthly forms to hospitals nationwide asking about recent cases of specific severe maternal morbidity. It is not mandatory for clinicians to reply; nevertheless, 93 percent of the cards are returned with information.

U.K. maternity services, though, face a looming crisis. One in three midwives in England is now in his or her fifties or sixties — a “retirement time-bomb,” according to an October 2015 report by the Royal College of Midwives. Funding for training has been cut, and pay has been frozen. Diminished numbers of practitioners are entering and staying in the profession, while total births rose by 10,000 last year. Currently there are 3,500 fewer full-time midwives in England than required for the volume of work. This, as well as a shortage of beds, forced 40 percent of maternity units to close temporarily at least once in 2016.

“The single biggest thing we can do in the U.K. to improve obstetric care is to value our midwives,” Collins said. “Not just train more but retain the quality we have got. We are losing them like a hemorrhage, and it’s desperately sad.”

The heaviest things Helen picks up these days are the babies. Resuming her old habit, she incessantly Googles the significance of each of their new sounds and gestures.

In the U.S., new mothers are usually sent home with only their family and friends for support. While the newborn is supposed to see the pediatrician early and often, the mom typically doesn’t see her doctor for a follow-up for four to six weeks, which can delay recognition of postpartum depression and other serious problems.

In Helen’s case, a community midwife and a “health visitor” (an NHS professional who takes over fully from the midwife two weeks postpartum if everything is going well) dropped in the day after she and the twins arrived home. In the first two weeks after discharge, every woman in the U.K. should receive four visits, or more if either mom or baby is having problems. There is also a 24-hour obstetric triage helpline that new mothers can call with any concerns.

When I visited Helen one recent sunny morning, she sat in her living room, the music from the mobile on the babies’ downstairs crib tinkling in the background. “It’s funny how naïve I was,” she told me, remembering her pre-birth expectations that feeding twins at the same time would be a breeze. “It’s really tricky!” Like an athlete, she’s tested different techniques with the help of her coaches, the neonatal nurse and lactation consultant, both NHS employees who help with premature babies and suckling difficulties. In bed, surrounded by a dam of pillows, two pairs of blue eyes staring up at her, Helen likes to tuck each baby under an arm and support their heads in her hands, known as the “rugby ball hold.” After feeding, brother and sister fall asleep in a star pose, arms stretched up and heads together. The health visitor told Helen it’s a sign of contentment.

There is barely a minute in the day for Helen to worry about her own recovery. If she does, the twins are on her mind: “I do need to be healthy, I do need to get a certain amount of sleep because otherwise I’m no good to these babies. It’s always in terms of, am I going to be strong enough to look after them?” Marcus spends time with his son and daughter after work in the evenings so Helen can get some rest, and the babies’ grandparents are regular visitors.

Luckily, the health care team is keeping an eye on mom. “I didn’t have to be too worried, because they were being overly cautious for me,” Helen said. The midwife suggested compression stockings to guard against clots. Helen’s scar will be troublesome for a while longer, but there has been no infection or bleeding, and driving is now possible. She can see her anklebones again. Her latest blood pressure is within the normal range, and she is due to come off the tablets in several days.

At the six-week appointment in the local clinic, the babies are on track with their weight — in fact they’re “thriving.” It's the word all mothers are relieved to hear. The health visitor laid the twins down, turning her full attention to the other person in the room. Any pain, exhaustion, sadness, bleeding, anxiety, headaches, dizziness?

She starts with a simple question:

“So, Helen, how are you?”

by Derek Kravitz, Isaac Arnsdorf and Marina Affo

by Derek Kravitz, Isaac Arnsdorf and Marina Affo

President Donald Trump has left hundreds of government jobs unfilled that require a vote by the Senate. Yet his administration has installed more than 1,000 people through political appointments at every major federal agency, handing over control of the government’s day-to-day operations to industry insiders and loyalists to an unprecedented degree.

Among the latest Trump administration appointees is a lobbyist who until March worked for a leading hepatitis C drugmaker that priced its treatment at $1,000 a pill and is now leading a White House working group setting drug pricing policies. The list includes the new head of the government’s offshore oil drilling safety and enforcement agency, who previously sat on the board of Sunoco Logistics and who told an industry conference earlier this month that deepwater drilling should ramp up. Then there’s the Hollywood actor who has called global warming and climate change a “leftist political tool” and “not sound science” on Twitter and who is now the communications director at the Department of Health and Human Services. Finally, this group also includes the 80-year-old retired chief legal officer of Morgan Stanley, who once told government lawyers he was “going to kick your ass” and is now a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, overseeing litigation while his boss awaits Senate confirmation. (At the time, Kempf denied using the expletive in exactly those terms.)

These political appointees, some of them members of what have been dubbed “beachhead teams” during the presidential transition, and others who are now permanent employees, don’t need Senate confirmation. Many of them have operated in the shadows and the White House has declined to publicly reveal their identities. Some political appointees, such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s chief of staff, Wendy Teramoto, were initially hired as special government employees, or SGEs. They are brought on as temporary advisers and don’t face the same rules that other federal employees do. But Teramoto and others have stuck around, and been promoted to permanent jobs. The administration reveals virtually nothing about this category of staffers.

“As long as you know who to call, they are more than willing to work with ‘industry,’” said Scott Mason, a Trump campaign veteran who’s now a lobbyist with Holland & Knight. “The swamp continues as the ecosystem it has always been, advocating on behalf of Americans who are all represented in one way or another by an interest group.”

We now have a full list from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, and it counts more than 1,000 political appointments since Trump took office on Jan. 20. The 1,000 include some 400 that ProPublica first revealed in March, and another 140 that were added in subsequent updates. We found that of the roughly 500 new appointees on our list, at least 61 have been registered lobbyists at the federal level. (This is likely an undercount since it does not include those who have not registered or who worked solely on the state level.)

We found at least 44 people who have been rehired for second stints in the same government jobs after their initial terms expired. Another 194 people have been given new jobs after their initial beachhead terms.

“The pool of ‘Trump Republicans’ was small so that they had to go to regular Republicans, a lot of whom worked for the Bush administration,” said Ivan Adler, a lobbying headhunter with the McCormick Group. “And there happen to be a lot of lobbyists among that group.”

We’re still sorting through the new names and we want your help. If you have tips or want to flag someone for us, email beachhead@propublica.org.

“What’s unusual is the size and scope of these teams,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, which advises both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations on transitions. “The normal process in filling your political team is going from the campaign to the transition team to a political appointment. The cabinet picks manage all of this. But without them, the beachhead teams have been in charge. It’s added a whole other level of confusion to an already difficult process.”

It has also added a layer of shadows, said Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving Door Project at the D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research. “These are political appointees who are subjected to much less scrutiny than if they went through the Senate-confirmed process,” he said. “And these special employees, many of whom are on short stints and go back to regulated industries, are not answerable to anyone except the White House. It’s an outsourcing of government.”

Dozens of original beachhead team members have left government altogether, with several returning to lobbying or other industry-advocacy work. Donald Schnare, a lawyer and longtime critic of the EPA named to that agency’s beachhead team in December, resigned in March after infighting between political appointees and the hand-picked staff of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt boiled over. Schnare told ProPublica that nearly every member of the Trump administration beachhead team at the EPA were refused permanent jobs by Pruitt.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is lagging in nominating key leaders to government jobs that require a vote of the Senate. As of the August congressional recess, the Trump administration has nominated 277 people for Senate confirmation and just 44 percent have been confirmed, according to the Partnership for Public Service. By comparison, the previous four presidential administrations — those of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush — had nominated at least 315 people by the August recess and had their picks confirmed at rates above 60 percent at that point in the process.

To fill the gaps, the White House placed at least 18 “senior White House advisers” at federal agencies, to act as the administration’s eyes and ears. Many were Trump campaign staffers and loyalists with little to no government experience and they publicly clashed with several of Trump’s top Cabinet picks, including Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin and Transportation secretary Elaine Chao.

Staffing records show that at least 11 of these advisers have left their original jobs or departed the government. (Several advisers, such as Paula Stannard at Health and Human Services, Mary Anne Bradfield at the Small Business Administration and Maren Kasper at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, were promoted to permanent positions.)

But seven still remain, including Sam Clovis, a former radio host whose nomination as the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist is pending. (Clovis has attracted press scrutiny for, among other statements, his assertions that he is “extremely skeptical” about climate change.)

Here are a few Trump political appointees we’ve found:

• Joe Grogan, an associate director for health programs at the Office of Management and Budget, most recently worked as a lobbyist for Gilead Sciences, the pharmaceutical company that has been accused of price-gouging in its sales of a novel hepatitis C treatment. Since his appointment, Grogan has taken a leading role in a White House working group on drug pricing policies. As reported by Kaiser Health News, internal documents from the working group show that, despite vows by President Trump to lower the price of medications, Grogan’s team is pushing pharma-friendly policies, such as extending a drug’s patent time in foreign markets. Grogan and the Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.

• Donald G. Kempf Jr., a hard-nosed attorney and former Marine who spent 35 years at Kirkland & Ellis and another six years as chief counsel at Morgan Stanley. He was personally recruited by incoming Deputy Attorney General Makan Delrahim, whose nomination has languished without a vote since March. As to why he came out of a 12-year retirement, Kempf told ProPublica that “my country has been very good to me” and that he “welcomed the responsibility.” Kempf had a storied career, often representing corporations in antitrust and mergers and acquisitions litigation at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. But during his tenure at Morgan Stanley, the bank suffered a series of legal defeats and regulatory fines before his retirement from the organization in 2005.

• Brad Bailey is the new Deputy Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, focusing on tax and the budget, at the Department of the Treasury. Before his new role he was a registered lobbyist for O’Rourke and Nappi where one of his clients was H&R Block. As ProPublica has reported, H&R Block has been fighting to stop a free government tax filing system for years that would make the company obsolete. As recent as April, Bailey was one of the people lobbying on behalf of H&R Block. In response to questions, the Treasury Department said in a statement: “Treasury’s ethics officials work with agency personnel to address and mitigate potential conflicts if and when they arise.”

• Scott Angelle is the director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the agency that oversees safety for offshore oil and gas drilling. He served as Louisiana’s secretary of natural resources from 2004 to 2012, and was appointed interim lieutenant governor from May to November 2010. During that time, Angelle helped lead a successful effort to bring an early end to the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling that was imposed after the April 2010 BP oil spill. Before joining the Trump administration, Angelle spent several years on Louisiana’s Public Service Commission, where his position on the board of Sunoco Logistics Partners, an oil pipeline company — for which he received $989,238 — raised conflict of interest concerns. (Angelle denied any conflicts at the time.) Sunoco Logistics merged with Energy Transfer Partners, the developer of the Dakota Access pipeline, in April. Angelle spoke at an industry conference this month where he encouraged oil and gas companies to drill deepwater wells. Angelle did not respond to requests for comment.

• Charles Faulkner, who was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state on June 11, left BGR Government Affairs, a D.C. lobbyist firm, where he had been a lobbyist for several foreign governments. His client list included the Kazakh embassy, for which he provided political consulting and arranged meetings between U.S. and Kazakh government officials. He also advised the Kurdistan Regional Government, a semiautonomous part of Iraq that often has tense relations with Baghdad, as well as neighboring Syria, Turkey and Iran. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

• Until March, Wendy Teramoto was a managing director at Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s former investment firm, WL Ross & Co., and held board positions on several Ross-connected corporations, including the Greenbrier Companies, an Oregon supplier of railroad equipment. Teramoto took a job as a part-time special government employee at the Commerce Department, as an adviser to Ross, in mid-March. Commerce Department officials said that between March and August, Teramoto “resigned from all outside non-federal positions” and signed an ethics pledge but she did not become a full-fledged government employee, subject to ethics requirements, until Aug. 1, when she was appointed Ross’s chief of staff. In a statement, the Commerce Department said Teramoto is “subject to the same disqualification requirements under conflict of interest statutes as the Secretary and other federal employees.”

• As assistant secretary for border, immigration and trade policy at the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Dougherty could be in a position to benefit his former employer. Dougherty was previously CEO of the Identification Technology Association, a trade group for companies that sell biometric and cybersecurity technologies for borders, law enforcement and emergency management. Before that, he worked for the Raytheon unit that sells products and services to U.S. law enforcement agencies. Dougherty is careful to comply with ethics rules and keep his government work separate from his past employment, according to his successor at the trade group, Jason Conley. “Where members have tried to reach out, he’s been appropriately nonresponsive,” Conley said. In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it provides ethics training to all political appointees and reviews any potential conflicts of interest.

• Mark Vafiades, a Hollywood actor (best known for roles in “An American Carol” and “Vengeance Trail,” according to his IMDB listing) is now communications director at Health and Human Services. Vafiades has been particularly vocal on social media, calling global warming and climate change a “leftist political tool” and “not sound science!” and advancing claims of voter fraud in his home state of California. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.

• Emily McBride, a former aide to Jeff Sessions when he was a senator, and then an assistant in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs, in June became a special assistant to the head of the General Services Administration. The GSA leases the building housing Trump’s Washington hotel, which ethics experts say is a conflict of interest because the president is effectively both tenant and landlord. The GSA has already concluded that Trump’s ascension to president didn’t violate his lease (despite the opinion of some legal experts), but the agency is still responsible for ongoing review of the hotel’s finances. A GSA spokesman said McBride won’t participate in the oversight of Trump’s hotel.

• Adam Kissel, who joined the Department of Education as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs, has spent the past five years at the Charles Koch Foundation, working on higher education projects. The foundation has faced scrutiny for donating millions to colleges and universities around the country, including to academic institutes focused on “market-oriented ideas” and “the practice and potentials of freedom.” Before his role at the Charles Koch Foundation, Kissel worked at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where he was a prominent critic of the Obama Administration’s approach to investigating sexual violence on campus. Kissel and the Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.

• Jonathan Galaviz was hired as an adviser at the State Department's Office of Security, Democracy and Human Rights, on June 11. He has consulted for foreign governments, including Russian state-run investment firms, helping with a host of gaming industry issues. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

• Alexander Fitzsimmons was appointed chief of staff and senior adviser at the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. He came to government from the advocacy group American Energy Alliance and Fueling U.S. Forward, a public relations group supporting fossil fuels. Both organizations are backed by Koch Industries and they called for the elimination of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 2015.

by David Sleight

Websites are like icebergs. What you see on the surface usually offers the merest hint of the big, complex world that lies beneath. ProPublica’s site is no different.

Since our start nearly 10 years ago, the system we use to publish our website has cranked out thousands of entries and been through countless retrofits, modifications, gleeful hacks and willful workarounds. It’s picked up its fair share of iceberg-level complexity, too.

Digital publishing is a bigger, wilder and way more interesting beast than when we started, reflecting both the march of technological change and the evolution of how journalism is done. So today we’re taking the wraps off ProPublica’s new CMS to help us stay at the forefront of our rapidly evolving field. This is the first complete overhaul of our publishing platform since, well, ever. We’ve designed this new system to take us into the next phase of our journey, and we’ve taken the opportunity to build in a few additional improvements.

Regular visitors to the site will notice a cleaner, more modern design along with improved navigation. A new “Topics” section helps users find reporting that’s of interest to them, and a new “Impact” page helps everyone quickly see the effect our journalism is having in the world. It’s also easier to scan and move between pieces in our regular reporting series (formerly “Investigations”), as well as our Data Store and new Illinois unit. We even took a moment to freshen up our logo.

Everything is built on a fully responsive “mobile-first” design that looks and works well on all devices. Pages load faster and are more secure thanks to completely rebuilt front-end code and the removal of outdated third-party software. And a modular design system lets us update and add features quickly and easily.

Below the waterline, we’ve gained the ability to publish even faster and with less overhead. Hundreds of old settings, switches and fields have been streamlined or removed to create a production environment that’s built by and for producers. And our developers have gained a whole new set of tools to build and deploy updates to our site, paving the way for improvements to come.

You’ll also be able to read more about our work going forward with a key addition to ProPublica’s Nerd Blog: More nerds! In addition to posts from our data journalism team we’re expanding this space to include behind-the-scenes updates from our design, engagement and business development groups.

We’re looking forward to building an even better ProPublica for you. In the meantime, if you spot an issue or want to share your thoughts, email us at feedback@propublica.org.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

Virginia environment officials say they will soon begin monitoring the air near a public elementary school outside the town of Radford amid concerns that pollution from an Army weapons plant there is endangering people’s health.

For the first time in the more than 65 years since the facility, the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, began burning hazardous explosives and other waste without environmental controls, the monitoring will measure how much lead reaches the surrounding community. Officials may add the capability to measure arsenic, chromium and other pollutants as well.

In July, ProPublica reported that open burning of hazardous waste was standard practice at U.S. military facilities despite the fact it has been banned by law for years at almost every other type of industrial operation. The Radford plant is just one of at least 51 military sites across the country where dangerous materials are burned on a regular basis, according to documents obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency and reported by ProPublica.

The Department of Defense and environmental regulators have insisted that the burns are safe, but those assurances have relied on computer models to estimate the pollution and officials had never measured the actual emissions — either at the burn sites within the boundaries of the military bases, or in the surrounding civilian residential areas.

According to the federal toxic release inventory, the Radford plant is the single largest polluter in Virginia, responsible for millions of pounds of toxic chemicals every year. Some who live near Radford fear that the pollution has contributed to poor health in the region, including unusually high rates of thyroid disease and elevated rates of cancer in the surrounding counties.

But the health links have never been studied and no measures have ever been taken of the reach of the actual pollution from the plant.

Earlier this month, a draft EPA report obtained by ProPublica showed that the first tests of the burn pollution taken by Army officials inside the plant detected higher levels of some pollutants than previous computer models had estimated. Arsenic was emitted at rates 37 times greater than what federal officials had previously estimated when determining the burns were safe for public health. Lead — dangerous to children’s cognitive development — was emitted at five times the level estimated to be safe. Cadmium, silver and methyl chloride also exceeded previous estimates.

The new air monitor will be purchased by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, with a grant from the EPA, and will cost $26,000. It will mainly detect lead levels, but a DEQ spokesman says arsenic and chromium may also be part of the monitoring.

According to the spokesman, the monitor’s installation has been planned since the spring, and is unrelated to ProPublica’s reporting about the open burn practices in Radford. The monitor is being installed to comply with new EPA guidelines requiring monitoring for facilities that are known to emit lead in excess of new federal ambient air quality standards proposed by the EPA in 2015. In numerous interviews with the agency’s staff over the past four months, plans to install the monitor were never mentioned.

Once in place, the monitor could provide the first concrete answers for a region that has been seeking them more than a half a century. DEQ officials could not say when the monitor would begin operating or how soon its findings would be available to the public.

by Isaac Arnsdorf

The Trump administration made false assertions to justify an executive order expanding police forces’ access to military equipment such as tanks and grenade launchers.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on Monday that President Trump would make defensive gear available to police again by undoing a policy from the Obama administration. Trump then signed an executive order whose title emphasized that branding: “Restoring State, Tribal, and Local Law Enforcement’s Access to Life-Saving Equipment and Resources.”

“He is rescinding restrictions from the prior administration that limited your agencies’ ability to get equipment through federal programs, including life-saving gear like Kevlar vests and helmets and first-responder and rescue equipment like what they’re using in Texas right now,” Sessions said in the speech.

But that’s not what the Obama administration’s restrictions did, according to documentation from a unit inside of Sessions’ own Justice Department, the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

Kevlar vests were never subject to any restrictions. Most helmets weren’t, either. Riot helmets (defined as those with shields over the face), Humvees and helicopters that are sometimes used in rescue missions, were still available to police forces as long as they explained why they needed them and certified that they had protocols and training in place so officers would use them safely. That requirement was dropped for riot helmets last October.

“Kevlar vests were never on any lists. That part is simply lying about what we did,” said Roy Austin, who worked on the Obama policy as a deputy assistant to the president for the Office of Urban Affairs, Justice and Opportunity. “He was being untruthful about helmets as well.”

A Justice Department spokesman acknowledged that the items Sessions cited were never prohibited by the Obama administration and that only some of them were even subject to additional procedures. Still, the spokesman, who did not want to be named, said: “There is absolutely nothing misleading about what the Attorney General said.”

What the Obama administration did actually prohibit were tanks, weaponized vehicles, .50 caliber guns, grenade launchers, bayonets and digital-pattern camouflage uniforms. Those restrictions applied only to purchases using federal dollars through a Pentagon surplus program. Police departments remained free to buy them with state, local or private funds.

“The attorney general and whoever advised him on these policies didn’t read them carefully and didn’t understand what they actually did,” said Ed Chung, who worked on the Obama administration policies in the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs. “The safety of officers was never jeopardized because the overwhelming majority of equipment, including the ones cited by the attorney general, were still available to law enforcement.”

The Obama administration implemented the restrictions in the spring of 2016 in response to public concerns over the display of military-style hardware deployed by police to control riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after an officer fatally shot Michael Brown. Chung said the administration worked with civil rights organizations and police groups in an effort to meet law enforcement agencies’ needs while improving their relations with the communities they protect.

Sessions, in his speech, harshly dismissed such considerations. “We will not put superficial concerns above public safety,” he said.

The attorney general asserted that the types of equipment limited by the Obama administration saved an officer from a bullet at the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando and helped police pursue the shooters in San Bernardino. But that’s not accurate, either. As shown in the very articles that Justice Department officials provided to reporters to support Sessions’ speech, the Orlando officer’s helmet that blocked the bullet wasn’t a riot helmet, so it never faced any restrictions. And the armored vehicles used in San Bernardino had wheels, so the Obama policy still permitted them, with the additional precautions described above. The Obama administration only prohibited buying tanks (armored vehicles that run on tracks instead of wheels) using federal resources.

Sessions shared an anecdote in which a sheriff told him that the Obama administration “made his department return an armored vehicle that can change the dynamics of an active shooter situation.” The Obama administration did ask those few departments that had tanks to return them, according to Chung and Austin, but offered to replace them with equivalent wheeled vehicles.

“For every tracked vehicle, we replaced it with a wheeled vehicle so they didn’t lose anything,” Austin said. “His anecdote makes no sense because it skips the whole part that if they really needed this thing, all they had to do was say we want a replacement and we’d provide a replacement.”

Sessions’ anecdote referred to Sheriff Mike Bouchard of Oakland County, Michigan, who is also vice president of government affairs for the advocacy group Major County Sheriffs of America. In an interview, Bouchard confirmed that the Obama administration replaced his tracked armored personnel carrier with a wheeled one, but he said the wheeled version wasn’t as useful on the sandy and marshy terrain he has in his county.

The Justice Department spokesman said the Obama administration’s additional measures were onerous because departments had to demonstrate a “clear and persuasive” need for the equipment, certify approval from a civilian governing body and keep records of incidents when the equipment was used.

By repealing the Obama administration’s policy, the Trump administration also abolished reporting procedures to help the government keep better track of the equipment it distributes. The Government Accountability Office recently tested the controls in the same program by creating a fake agency that was able to obtain $1.2 million worth of night-vision goggles, and simulated pipe bombs and other potentially lethal items.

“We viewed the Obama reforms as very modest,” said Kanya Bennett, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “We’re certainly disappointed not only by the action that the administration took on Monday but again in suggesting to the public that the previous administration had taken away critical tools for law enforcement. In reality, there was very little that the Obama administration did with respect to taking military weapons and equipment out of rotation for state and local law enforcement use.”

Sessions’ speech cited studies showing that such equipment reduces crime, assaults on officers and complaints against them. In the materials provided to reporters, Justice Department officials pointed to a pair of studies in the American Economic Journal. But those studies considered all equipment supplied through the Pentagon’s surplus program, without distinguishing the items the Obama administration restricted. They also studied the years 2006 to 2012, before the Obama policies took effect.

“Our findings do not necessarily mean that saturating our local law enforcement agencies with military hardware is good policy,” researchers at the University of Tennessee wrote in one of the papers. “These results should not be used to diminish concerns about police-community relations, the role of police in our society, violence against civilians by police, or vice versa.”

The other study observed that the type of equipment that had the biggest effect on reducing crime was nonlethal non-military gear, such as computers and office supplies. The researchers suspect that’s because those supplies free up time and money for officers to spend on policing.

“There is a tendency to conflate military equipment with weapons,” the lead researcher, Vincenzo Bove at the University of Warwick of England, told ProPublica in an email. “Whereas we find that weapons is an unproductive category (it does not significantly affect crime) the miscellaneous category has the strongest effect, followed by vehicles and gear.”

“We do not explore the effect on crime of the items prohibited under the Obama policy,” Bove added. “But, as most of the prohibited items were weapons, note they do not seem to have (in aggregate) any effect on crime.”

Sessions announced the change of policy at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police, which viewed repealing the Obama-era restrictions as one of its top-priority asks for the Trump administration. “The previous administration was more concerned about the image of law enforcement being too ‘militarized’ than they were about our safety,” the organization’s president, Chuck Canterbury, said in a statement.

But not all police groups agree. The Obama policy was sensible to restrict non-essential lethal equipment like bayonets and to encourage police to consult local elected officials before acquiring equipment that could be controversial, said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation and a retired police chief in Redlands, California.

“The Obama executive order represented a best practice for acquiring military surplus equipment for local policing, and I still think it could serve and should serve as a best practice even though the rules have changed,” he said. “I was supportive of the overarching goals of the previous executive order, but I also understand what this president is trying to do. I view this through the lens of a police chief, and I would say to my city manager and council, ‘Ignore all of this that’s the federal government’s activity — under both sets of rules, we should still go to the public to explain our rationale.’”

by Marcelo Rochabrun

Marco Guajardo starts a new job today that, he said, will provide him with health insurance for the first time. Matias Zubko is set to close on a new house on Wednesday. Roberto Angulo is hoping for a promotion at the electrical company that employs him as he nears his first anniversary there.

All three of them, immigrants in their 20s, now fear those prospects could vaporize in a matter of days. Guajardo, Angulo and Zubko were all brought to the U.S. illegally as children, yet since 2012 they’ve been able to work legally, get access to credit, obtain drivers’ licenses, buy houses and travel around the country. In short, they could achieve a semblance of a normal life.

Now, they may lose their jobs and face deportation.

The Trump administration seems poised to eliminate the immigration program on which the three men have depended. Called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the program has allowed almost 800,000 young immigrants to receive renewable work permits. But as an executive order from President Barack Obama — announced after his administration’s failure to pass the DREAM Act, which would’ve enshrined the protections in law — it can be reversed with the swipe of a presidential pen.

Trump has shown some hesitation to undo the order, expressing sympathy for those protected by it. But a group of state attorneys general, who view the program as an example of illegal executive overreach, have given him an ultimatum: End DACA by Tuesday or defend it before a judge who blocked a similar program in 2014 that would have protected undocumented parents.

An announcement could come as soon as today. Trump could cancel all of DACA’s provisions on the spot, though a February draft order that circulated in the administration suggests he may phase out the program in stages. Under that plan, 1,000 immigrants a day would lose their work authorizations and deportation protections until none are left.

ProPublica spoke on Thursday with more than a dozen people helped by DACA whose work permits expire as soon as a month from today and as far out as August 2019. They expressed a combination of dread and uncertainty, describing plans aborted, a terror of deportation they hadn’t felt in years, and anxiety that their lives are about to be upended.

The potential change is forcing them to make decisions they didn’t expect to have to make. “Should we buy this house?” asked Zubko, a 28-year-old Argentinian whose wife is also protected by DACA, of the purchase he was about to make. “We got a loan,” he said. “We both have good paying jobs. And last year we had a baby and she’s an American citizen. But if DACA gets taken away, we’re not sure we’d be able to close on the house and that’s scary.”

Such concerns are widespread. Two immigrants said they’re frightened that losing their jobs means their homes will be taken away in foreclosures. One said she didn’t know whether to renew her lease. Another said she would drop out of school: Why study to be a teacher if no one will be able to employ you?

“I don’t know what would happen to my 401(k) or my taxes or my lease,” said Nathali Bertran, an engineer in Honda’s research and development division. A native of Peru, Bertran helped create DACA Time, a website that allows immigrants to prepare their applications digitally.

As for Angulo, the man nearing his one-year anniversary at the electrical company, his work permit expires on October 6. Angulo renewed his Mexican passport last week — just in case. On Wednesday, he emailed his company’s human resources department wondering if they could sponsor him for an employment visa. He hasn’t heard back yet.

“It feels like I just went from being able to look at the stars and shoot for them to all of a sudden getting dragged down,” he said, “like if someone put cement blocks on your feet.”

For Guajardo’s part, his new job — and his health insurance — may turn out to be temporary. Before DACA was implemented, he lived near the Mexican border and had never left his town, scared of what would happen if he encountered one of the dozens of immigration checkpoints that the Border Patrol operates along the border.

“Now I’ve traveled all around the country,” he said. “DACA changed my life completely, from being stuck in a little town, to going to my favorite university, to getting a great job and exploring new places.”

When DACA was created in 2012, only four states allowed undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, and that list didn’t include Texas or California, where the majority of DACA recipients live.

“To have a driver’s license is a tremendous thing,” said Ken Schmitt, an immigration lawyer who has helped file hundreds of DACA applications. “In the past, one way ICE got people into removal proceedings was after they were pulled over by police,” he said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They would arrest them for driving without a license and then turn them over to ICE.”

Barclay’s livelihood depends on his commercial driver’s license. A 25-year-old immigrant from Guyana, he drives a truck in New York, where, should he lose his legal status, he would no longer be eligible for a license.

“The only thing that I can do now is honestly to work as much as I can, basically get no sleep until that day,” Barclay said. “Once my work permit expires, I still have to pay rent, eat and live and that money won’t be building anymore, just depleting every single day. I can’t even fathom this right now.”

Applying for DACA costs $485 every two years, excluding attorney fees. At any given moment, there are around 100,000 applications and renewals pending, according to statistics from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the program. Steve Blando, a USCIS spokesman said on Thursday evening the agency was still accepting and processing DACA applications.

Carlos Garcia is worried not only about losing his job but also that the government will try to deport him and his wife, who is not shielded by DACA. His work permit expires on Dec. 3 and his renewal is pending. After obtaining DACA privileges, he had started a job as an IT help desk technician and moved up to become a server administrator.

“No matter what the administration says, it’s open season on immigrants now,” Garcia said. “It’s easy to find us.”

DACA applicants feel particularly nervous because applying for the program meant they voluntarily revealed information to the government, including where they live. They also submit new portrait photographs of themselves every two years and provide details such as their height, weight, and eye and hair colors. A large number have also provided copies of their birth certificates, which identify their parents by name.

Alan Torres, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant, experienced firsthand what happens when DACA protections lapse. A few years ago, his new work permit did not arrive before his old one expired. His company told him he’d have to take a leave of absence.

Indeed, Torres’s career wouldn’t have been possible without the program. He has a degree in information systems but when he started college he thought he might never be able to work in his field. Said Torres: “If I had graduated without DACA I would still be working in the restaurant industry.”

by Ginger Thompson

Top Democrats on both the House foreign affairs and judiciary committees called Thursday for an inquiry into Drug Enforcement Administration-led operations in Honduras and Mexico that resulted in the deaths of dozens, possibly hundreds, of people who had nothing to do with the drug trade.

The letter, addressed to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, drew on a scathing Justice Department inspector general investigation into a 2012 DEA operation in Honduras — known as “Operation Anvil” — that had targeted drug trafficking networks operating along that country’s Caribbean coast. During one botched operation, members of the agency’s vetted Honduran federal police unit — acting on the DEA’s orders — fired on a water taxi carrying people who were apparently unarmed and not connected to the drug trade. Four people were killed and another four were injured.

The letter also refers to a ProPublica investigation into a 2011 massacre by the Zetas cartel in the Mexican state of Coahuila that was triggered after sensitive information shared by the DEA with its Mexican vetted police unit wound up in the hands of cartel leaders, who ordered a wave of retaliation against suspected traitors.

The massacre left dozens and potentially hundreds of people dead and missing in and around a small, quiet ranching town called Allende, which is a 40-minute drive from the Texas border. The story was published in partnership with National Geographic in June.

“We believe these and other troubling issues merit further inquiry,” read the letter, written by Rep. Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr., of Georgia, and signed by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking member of the judiciary committee, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the ranking member of the foreign affairs committee, and 11 other representatives.

“Given that both the (IG) review and a recent ProPublica report have revealed deficiencies in U.S.-vetted police units in Honduras and Mexico, are you carrying out a thorough review of our government’s system of vetted units to ensure that improvements are made?” Johnson asked in the letter.

For two decades, the so-called “Sensitive Investigative Unit Program” has been the DEA’s workaround method of battling drugs with a foreign partner it doesn’t trust. The agency sets up a unit under its supervision, culling members from the host country’s police forces. Then it trains these foreign officers — often in the U.S. — polygraphs them, and, in some cases, works alongside them in the field.

The agency has established SIUs in some 13 countries around the world. Administrators at the agency have hailed them as the “bread and butter” of the DEA’s activities abroad.

In Mexico, however, the SIU has been plagued by corruption from the start. Since 2000, at least two supervisors have been assassinated after their identities and locations were leaked to drug traffickers by SIU members, according to allegations by current and former DEA agents who worked in Mexico. Earlier this year, another SIU supervisor, Ivan Reyes Azarte, flew to Chicago and surrendered to U.S. authorities who charged him with collaborating with drug traffickers.

The DEA doesn’t dispute the corruption within their Mexican unit’s ranks. In interviews, several agents said that part of “the game” of working in Mexico involves understanding that the vetted unit — and every other Mexican law enforcement agency — might leak to a specific cartel and reliably help pursue another. The trick, they said, was figuring out which cartel the vetted unit was helping, and then using the unit to pursue that cartel’s rivals.

But the investigations by ProPublica and the inspector general made clear that sometimes there are tragic consequences to the game. And while the DEA is quick to take credit for the times it helps its foreign partners capture drug cartel kingpins, it remains silent or claims innocence when lives are lost as a result of its operations.

In the case of the Mexican massacre, DEA officials failed to conduct an internal review of the agency’s role in the attack, and did not either suspend its relationship with the vetted unit or offer to provide assistance to those victimized by the leak. And in Honduras, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz found that the DEA not only failed to conduct a review of the gunfight, but knowingly misled Congress in an attempt to cover up its role.

Among the revelations in the IG’s report: DEA and state department officials told Congress that their Honduran law enforcement partners fired on a water taxi because passengers on the taxi had fired first, but there was “no credible evidence that the individuals in the passenger boat fired first.” Available evidence “places into serious question whether there was gunfire from the passenger boat at any time,” the report said.

Although the DEA has insisted that it played only a supporting role in the Honduran operation, the inspector general found that it was a DEA agent who ordered a helicopter gunner to open fire on the water taxi.

In a press release, Johnson wrote that the IG report “confirms our worst fears,” and leaves many questions unanswered. “The biggest question of all is: what is our government doing to fix this and make sure that, going forward, any U.S. agent involved in the loss of innocent life abroad is held accountable?”

by Lisa Song, Hannah Fresques and Al Shaw

by Lauren Kirchner

Over the past decade, the DNA laboratory in the office of New York City’s chief medical examiner emerged as a pioneer in analyzing the most complicated evidence from crime scenes. It developed two techniques, which went beyond standard practice at the FBI and other public labs, for making identifications from DNA samples that were tiny or that contained a mix of more than one person’s genetic material.

As its reputation spread, the lab processed DNA evidence supplied not only by the New York police, but also by about 50 jurisdictions as far away as Bozeman, Montana, and Floresville, Texas, which paid the lab $1,100 per sample.

Now these DNA analysis methods are under the microscope, with scientists questioning their validity, ProPublica has found. In court testimony, a former lab official said she was fired for criticizing one method, and a former member of the New York State Commission on Forensic Science said he had been wrong when he approved their use. The first expert witness allowed by a judge to examine the software source code behind one technique recently concluded that its accuracy “should be seriously questioned.”

Earlier this year, the lab shelved the two methods and replaced them with newer, more broadly used technology.

A coalition of defense lawyers is asking the New York State inspector general’s office — the designated watchdog for the state’s crime labs — to launch an inquiry into the use of the disputed analysis methods in thousands of criminal cases. While the inspector general has no jurisdiction over the court system, any finding of flaws with the DNA analysis could prompt an avalanche of litigation. Previous convictions could be revisited if the flawed evidence can be shown to have made a difference in the outcome.

The medical examiner’s office “has engaged in negligent conduct that undermines the integrity of its forensic DNA testing and analysis,” the Legal Aid Society and the Federal Defenders of New York wrote the inspector general on Friday. Because the lab has kept problems with its “unreliable” testing and “unsound statistical evidence” secret from the public and the courts, they continued, “innocent people may be wrongly convicted, and people guilty of serious crimes may go free.”

In addition to those convicted using the disputed methods, many defendants may have chosen to plead guilty when they learned prosecutors had DNA evidence against them. Their cases face significant barriers to reconsideration.

The medical examiner’s office stands by its science. Its chief of laboratories, Timothy Kupferschmid, said that the discarded techniques were well-tested and valid, and that the lab was adopting newer methods to align with changing FBI standards. He compared it to a vehicle upgrade.

“So just because we’re switching to the new model, I mean, our old pickup truck worked great, but my new pickup truck is so much better,” he said.

One case that hinges on the disputed DNA techniques stemmed from the beating of Taj Patterson in December 2013. A group of Hasidic men attacked Patterson, a black student, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Prosecutors blamed the attack on the Shomrim, a Hasidic group that patrols Williamsburg, a neighborhood where tensions between Orthodox Jews and blacks have long simmered.

Six days after the attack, the police found one of Patterson’s black Air Jordan sneakers on a nearby roof.

The police sent the sneaker to the DNA lab, where a technician swabbed a 3-inch by 6-inch area of its heel — and recovered 97.9 picograms of DNA from at least two people. A picogram is one trillionth of a gram.

The sample bore Patterson’s DNA. Using software developed in-house, the lab calculated that it was 133 times more likely than not that the remainder belonged to Mayer Herskovic, a young father who lived and worked in Williamsburg and had no criminal record.

“I don’t believe that this is DNA,” Herskovic told ProPublica. “A mixture, like you take milk, orange juice and water and you mix it, what is it? Is it still milk? Is it still orange juice? I don’t know.”

“DNA is the magic word,” he added. “If you throw it into a trial, they eat it up. For me, it’s not magic at all.”

No other physical evidence linked Herskovic to the attack on Patterson, who was blinded in his right eye. Neither the victim nor those who witnessed the crime identified Herskovic at trial, nor was he seen on surveillance video. Herskovic said he has never been part of the Shomrim, and deplored the assault on Patterson.

Nevertheless, he was convicted by a judge of gang assault, and sentenced this past March to four years in prison. He is appealing.

Three years ago, Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that uses DNA evidence to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners, yelled at his colleagues on the state forensic commission about the potential perils of the DNA work at the city’s lab.

“The day of reckoning is going to come,” Scheck told his fellow commissioners, some of whom rolled their eyes, a video of the meeting showed. “Someday people are going to review this,” he continued. “It’s an Ebola. It is a cancer here that could be spreading. We are all on notice.”

For three decades, forensic DNA evidence has been a valuable tool in criminal investigations, incriminating or exonerating suspects. Matching a defendant’s genetic material with a sample found on a weapon or at a crime scene has proved extremely persuasive with judges and juries.

But not all DNA evidence is equal. Sometimes it’s clear: blood or semen identifies a single person. If it’s just a few skin cells left on an object, or if it contains more than one person’s genetic material, it can be more ambiguous. In such situations, labs used to report that the results were inconclusive, or the defendant could not be excluded from the mix.

New types of DNA analysis have been introduced in recent years to interpret trace amounts or complex mixtures, spawning an industry of testing tools, chemical kits and software. As analysis has become more complex, the techniques and results are coming under fire nationwide.

In the past three years, flaws in DNA methods have temporarily shut down testing in public crime labs in Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Lab analysts “make it seem like it’s a completely objective process,” said Bicka Barlow, a lawyer in California with a master’s degree in genetics and molecular biology. “But I’m 100 percent convinced that there are many people who are incarcerated who were convicted with DNA evidence who are innocent.”

The two techniques that New York’s lab introduced were the “high-sensitivity testing” of trace DNA amounts, and the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, in which software calculates the likelihood that a suspect’s genetic material is present in a complicated mixture of several people’s DNA. By its own estimate, the lab has used high-sensitivity DNA testing to analyze evidence samples in 3,450 cases over the past 11 years, and FST in 1,350 cases over the past six. Cases in which both methods were used may be counted in both totals.

In February 2012, responding to a 911 call about gunshots near East Tremont Avenue, police officers from the 45th Precinct in the Bronx saw a passer-by make a motion as if he was dropping an object under a parked car.

His was a familiar face: Johnny Morgan, who had been arrested 75 times. The police found a .40-caliber Glock 23 beneath the car. Morgan was charged with gun possession, based both on DNA evidence and witness testimony. But the amount of DNA recovered from the gun was extremely small; the lab initially said it was unsuitable for testing.

After the prosecutor and the police requested a high-sensitivity test, analysts said Morgan’s DNA was a match. He was convicted.

Public crime labs assessing DNA evidence, including the FBI’s lab, “amplify,” or copy, the material 28 times to conduct their analysis. Under the high-sensitivity testing method developed by Theresa Caragine, a forensic scientist, and implemented in 2006, New York’s lab began to push very small amounts through three more cycles, bringing the total to 31. This approach provided more material to look at — as much as eight times the standard approach. But, like turning up the volume on a radio, those additional cycles amplified small imperfections from missing or contaminated DNA.

To reduce potential problems, the lab decided not to amplify samples smaller than 20 picograms, or about three cells’ worth of DNA, its then-director, Mechthild Prinz, said in 2005 during the state’s approval process for the test. She declined to comment for this article.

“The scientific community has been asked to test more and more evidence with less and less amounts of DNA,” Prinz explained in 2009 to the DNA Subcommittee of the state forensic science commission, which approves all forensic methods used in New York State.

“A couple of years ago, DNA testing was limited to body fluids — semen, blood and saliva. Now every laboratory in the country routinely receives swabs from guns,” other weapons, burglary tools and cash registers, she said.

After several years of high-sensitivity testing of small amounts of DNA, the lab developed a second method: a piece of software to interpret complex mixtures.

Invented by Caragine and Adele Mitchell, a geneticist with a specialty in statistics who joined the lab in 2008, the Forensic Statistical Tool, or FST, considers the overall amount of DNA in the mixture, how many people are in it, how much information is probably missing or contaminated, and the frequency with which each piece of DNA appears in different racial or ethnic groups. Then it compares the defendant’s DNA profile to the mixture, and calculates a likelihood ratio, which it expresses as a single number.

The bigger that number — and it’s sometimes in the millions or even trillions — the more likely that the defendant’s DNA is present. Caragine and Mitchell testified in 2012 that about a third of all test results were favorable to defendants, by indicating that their DNA was probably absent.

Only a small proportion of cases using the Forensic Statistical Tool went to trial. Most defendants faced with unfavorable FST results pleaded guilty, defense lawyers say. “Just the prospect of those numbers going in front of the jury could really warp the plea bargaining process,” said Brad Maurer, a lawyer and DNA specialist at New York County Defender Services.

Eric Rosenbaum, an assistant district attorney and head of the DNA Prosecutions Unit in Queens, described FST as an “extremely powerful tool because it is devastating in court.”

In December 2012, The New York Times profiled Mitchell and Caragine in the article “Helping Decide Guilt or Innocence,” which described their fruitful collaboration, but also hinted at a brewing controversy. The Legal Aid Society was gearing up for an extensive fight against admission of FST results in court.

One interested reader was Eli Shapiro, the former mitochondrial DNA technical leader in the DNA lab. One reason for his early retirement, he later testified, was the stress over having to sign off on lab reports generated by the software. Even in the lab, few people knew the science behind it.

Shapiro later said in court that he found the FST process described in the article “very disturbing.” He reached out to his former boss and colleagues to express his alarm. “They were not concerned,” he testified.

So, in early 2013, Shapiro offered his help to Legal Aid, which had just formed a unit specializing in DNA evidence. Under a judge’s order, the lab had given Legal Aid the results of its validation studies — internal tests of FST’s accuracy. Shapiro helped decipher the data.

“He knows the math,” said Clinton Hughes, a Legal Aid lawyer. “For relaxation, he does long division on the beach with a pencil.”

From 2012 to 2014, a hearing in Brooklyn before Judge Mark Dwyer focused on DNA evidence in two cases: it had been recovered from the handlebars of a bicycle after a shooting, and from the clothing of a sexual assault victim. With the help of testimony from Shapiro and some of the world’s most renowned DNA experts, Legal Aid hoped to persuade the judge to throw out the evidence.

The defense experts were denied access to FST’s software code, which would later come under scrutiny. Instead, they criticized the way that Caragine and Mitchell designed and tested FST.

Bruce Budowle, an architect of the FBI’s national DNA database, testified that New York’s statistical methods were “not defensible.”

He said that FST was designed with the incorrect assumption that every DNA mixture of the same size was missing information or had been contaminated in just the same way. He also criticized the lab’s overreliance on “pristine” saliva and samples to test its methods, which do not mirror the ways real crime-scene evidence is degraded by time and weather. The lab underestimated the challenges, he testified.

“Five-person mixtures can look like three-person,” he said, “four contributors can look like two-person mixtures. It’s almost impossible to actually be accurate.”

The software’s inventors acknowledged a margin of error of 30 percent in their method of quantifying the amount of DNA in a sample, a key input into the FST calculation. They acknowledged that FST didn’t consider that different people in a mixture, especially family members, might share DNA.

In April 2013, weeks after testifying, Caragine was forced to resign from the lab after New York’s inspector general found that she had violated protocol by changing her colleagues’ FST results in two cases. Her defense was that she was correcting their mistakes. Mitchell left in 2014. Caragine declined to comment for this article, and Mitchell did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Perhaps the most dramatic testimony in the hearing came from Ranajit Chakraborty, who had developed the FBI’s policy on DNA in the 1990s and, as a member of New York’s DNA Subcommittee, voted to approve both high-sensitivity testing in 2005 and FST in 2010. What he had since learned about FST bothered him.

“What would your vote be today?” Jessica Goldthwaite, a lawyer for Legal Aid, asked Chakraborty on the stand.

“My answer would be no,” he said. In November 2014, Judge Dwyer sided with the defense, excluding evidence produced by both high-sensitivity testing and FST. He was the first state judge to do so, and so far the only one.

Appointed to the state forensic science commission when it formed in 1994, Scheck didn’t vote for either of the lab’s methods. His misgivings grew when he learned that the DNA sample used to convict Morgan in the Bronx gun case was only 14.15 picograms. That was below the 20-picogram minimum for high-sensitivity testing the lab had promised to set during its approval process back in 2005.

At the October 2014 commission meeting, Scheck pounded the table as he proposed to compel the lab to turn over any validation studies it had conducted for high-sensitivity testing of especially small samples. He accused lab officials of not having performed the necessary studies, despite their assurances otherwise. While Scheck’s motion failed, it drew a vote from an unexpected supporter: Marina Stajic, who then worked for the medical examiner’s office as the director of the toxicology lab. She supported the motion, she later testified, because she believed that the DNA lab should be transparent with its data.

Her boss, Dr. Barbara Sampson, the chief medical examiner, heard about Stajic’s vote the next morning. She expressed her anger in an email to a colleague, “Hold me down.”

Mimi Mairs, then a lawyer for the DNA lab, emailed, “She sucks.”

A spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office declined to comment on the correspondence, as did the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where Mairs is now a prosecutor.

In April 2015, Dr. Sampson and Kupferschmid fired Stajic, who had worked at the lab for 29 years. Kupferschmid then called a commission member to inquire whether Stajic would also be removed from the oversight group, according to court documents.

In February 2016, Stajic sued Dr. Sampson, Kupferschmid and the city for allegedly violating her First Amendment rights. The defendants’ lawyer contends Stajic can’t prove why she was fired, and that her vote wasn’t constitutionally protected speech. Her case is pending.

The case that finally revealed FST’s source code began with a few drops of cooking oil.

Kevin Johnson and his ex-girlfriend Octaviea Martin shared custody of two sons, and he sometimes stayed over in her Bronx apartment. One night in April 2015, he was cooking cheeseburgers when some oil spilled. He and Martin argued about cleaning it up.

Her daughter got upset and called 911, telling the dispatcher that Johnson was pointing a gun at Martin. A police search of the apartment turned up two socks wedged between the refrigerator and the wall. In one sock was a black pistol; in the other, a silver revolver.

Johnson, who had been convicted on a previous weapons charge, was arrested.

The lab found that one gun contained two people’s DNA; by FST’s calculation, it was 156 times more likely than not to contain Johnson’s DNA. The second gun had three people’s DNA and a formidable likelihood of 66 million.

Hoping to cast doubt on the DNA results, his lawyers, Christopher Flood and Sylvie Levine, asked for the FST source code, which other lawyers had sought in vain.

Again, the government refused to hand it over on the grounds that it was a “proprietary and copyrighted” statistical tool owned by the City of New York.

The federal judge granted the defense access to the FST code in June 2016 under an order that bars wider disclosure. (The medical examiner’s office denied ProPublica’s public records request for the code, citing its “sensitive nature.”)

Nathaniel Adams, a computer scientist and an engineer at a private forensics consulting firm in Ohio, reviewed the code for the defense. He found that the program dropped valuable data from its calculations, in ways that users wouldn’t necessarily be aware of, but that could unpredictably affect the likelihood assigned to the defendant’s DNA being in the mixture.

“I did not leave with the impression that FST was developed by an experienced software development team,” Adams wrote in an affidavit. Pending more rigorous testing, “the correctness of the behavior of the FST software should be seriously questioned.” Characterizing Adams’ criticisms as merely stylistic rather than substantive, the lab told ProPublica that FST provided reliable calculations.

Technology consultants wrote the software code for FST, according to a spokeswoman at the medical examiner’s office. Few, if anyone, at the lab or on the state’s DNA Subcommittee had the expertise to double-check the software, said a scientist in the lab who worked on the techniques who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions. “We don’t know what’s going on in that black box, and that is a legitimate question,” the scientist said, adding that evidence in older cases should “absolutely” be retested in light of growing questions about FST. “As a scientist, I can’t say no.”

The U.S. attorney’s office withdrew the DNA evidence against Johnson days before the hearing about its admissibility was scheduled to begin.

Nevertheless, Johnson pleaded guilty this past May. On Aug. 28, he was sentenced to 28 months in prison, almost all of which he has already served. His lawyers declined to make him available for an interview.

As Johnson’s case proceeded, the lab circulated a memo to clients in September 2016, notifying them that it would replace both high-sensitivity testing and FST on Jan. 1. A new chemical kit would make the additional amplification cycles of the high-sensitivity method unnecessary. The lab would retire FST in favor of STRmix, a commercially available and FBI-endorsed software program for DNA mixtures that dozens of public labs use.

The medical examiner’s office “is fully committed to staying on the cutting edge of new technology to best serve the City of New York,” Kupferschmid wrote in the memo. He added that the lab would raise the minimum sample size for testing to 37.5 picograms — almost twice the initial floor of 20 picograms.

The change in policy is scant consolation to those who were convicted based on the discarded DNA techniques, like Mayer Herskovic. After the gang attack on Patterson, two confidential informants gave Herskovic’s name to a police detective. Herskovic was then arrested and swabbed for DNA. Neither informant testified against him at trial.

Sitting at a table in his apartment in Williamsburg, Herskovic discussed the DNA evidence, first calmly and then indignantly. The white walls were bare except for a small mirror, a clock and a portrait of his children, who were scribbling in coloring books on the kitchen floor. He recalled how, when the police asked him to give a DNA sample, his lawyer cautioned him not to, but Herskovic went ahead and did so.

“I was the first one to give DNA,” Herskovic said. “He told me they needed it, I said, ‘Go ahead, take it! It will be better.’”

The DNA on Patterson’s sneaker was pivotal to the case against Herskovic. Patterson testified that whoever pulled off his shoe had punched and kicked him. Although four other suspects were arrested, and several other men were identified by witnesses, seen on surveillance video, or had their license plates photographed at the scene, only Herskovic has been tried or sentenced to prison. Two people pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and were given probation; charges were dropped against the other two.

Herskovic’s four-year sentence was stayed pending appeal. He’s working at an hourly job for a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning company to support his wife and two young children. His appeals lawyer, Donna Aldea, plans to argue that FST was never tested on a population as insulated as the Hasidic Jews of Williamsburg, who very likely share many of the same ancestors, and therefore much of the same DNA.

“This case is a poster-child for how ‘DNA evidence’ can literally be fabricated out of thin air, and how statistics can be manipulated to create a false impression of ‘scientific evidence’ of guilt,” Aldea said. “This must be exposed.”

by Ginger Thompson

Demócratas de alto nivel en los comités tanto de asuntos extranjeros como los judiciales de la Cámara de Representantes exigieron eljueves una investigación de los operativos liderados por la DEA en Honduras y México que resultaron en las muertes de docenas, posiblemente cientos, de personas que no tenían nada que ver con el narcotráfico.

La carta, dirigida al Fiscal General Jeff Sessions y el Secretario de Estado Rex Tillerson, se basó en una contundente investigación por el inspector general del Departamento de Justicia de un operativo de la DEA en Honduras en 2012 — conocida como Operación Anvil (Yunque) — contra las redes de narcotráfico que operan en la costa caribeña del país. Durante un operativo fallido, oficiales de una unidad de la policía federal hondureña escogidos, entrenados y comandados por la DEA dispararon contra un taxi acuático en el que viajaban personas aparentemente desarmadas y no vinculadas al narcotráfico. Cuatro personas murieron y otras cuatro fueron heridas.

La carta también menciona una investigación de ProPublica de una masacre cometida en 2012 por el cartel de los Zetas en el estado mexicano de Coahuila que se desencadenó después de que información sensible compartida por la DEA con una unidad de la policía mexicana bajo su control llegó amanos de los jefes del cartel, quienes ordenaron una ola de represalias contra gente sospechada de ser traidora.

La masacre dejó docenas y potencialmente cientos de personas muertas y desaparecidas dentro y alrededor del pequeño y tranquilo pueblo de ganaderos, Allende, que está a 40 minutos en auto de la frontera con Texas. El reportaje fue publicado en colaboración con National Geographic en junio.

“Creemos que estos y otros asuntos problemáticos merecen aún más investigación,” dice la carta, escrita por el representante Henry C. “Hank” Johnson, Jr., de Georgia, y firmada por el representante John Conyers de Michigan, el miembro de más alto rango del comité de asuntos judiciales, el representante de New York Eliot Engel, el miembro de nivel más alto del comité de asuntos extranjeros, y 11 representantes más.

“¿Dado que tanto el informe (del Inspector General) como un reciente reportaje de ProPublica han revelado las deficiencias de las unidades policiales bajo escrutinio de los Estados Unidos en Honduras y México, están ustedes llevando a cabo una evaluación completa del sistema de unidades especialmente entrenadas por nuestro gobierno para asegurar que se realizan mejoras?” preguntó Johnson en la carta.

Durante dos décadas, el llamado “Programa de Unidades Investigativas Sensibles” (SIU por sus siglas en inglés) ha sido la solución alternativa con que la DEA ha manejado el problema de combatir la droga al lado de un socio extranjero del que no se confía. La agencia establece una unidad bajo su mando, seleccionando agentes de las fuerzas policiales del país anfitrión. Después entrena a estos agentes extranjeros — frecuentemente en Estados Unidos — les somete a pruebas de polígrafo y, en algunos casos, trabaja a su lado en la calle.

La agencia ha establecido “SIUs” en alrededor de 13 países en el mundo. Administradores de la agencia los han avalado como el “pan nuestro de cada día” de las actividades de la DEA en el extranjero.

En México, sin embargo, la SIU ha estado plagada por la corrupción desde el inicio. Desde el 2000, al menos dos supervisores han sido asesinados después de que sus identidades y ubicaciones fueran filtradas a narcotraficantes por miembros de la SIU, según las acusaciones de agentes actuales y antiguos de la DEA que han trabajado en México. Este año, otro supervisor de la SIU, Iván Reyes Azarte, voló a Chicago y se entregó a las autoridades estadounidenses quienes le acusaron penalmente de colaborar con narcotraficantes.

LA DEA no niega la corrupción entre los rangos de su unidad mexicana. En entrevistas, agentes dijeron que parte del “juego” de trabajar en México consiste en entender que la unidad especial — y cualquier unidad policial mexicana — puede filtrar información a un cartel en concreto y ayudar de buena fue a perseguir a otro. Los agentes dijeron que se trataba de determinar a cuál cartel la unidad especial estaba ayudando, y entonces usar la unidad para perseguir a los rivales de este cartel.

Pero las investigaciones hechas por ProPublica y el inspector general han dejado claro que a veces el juego tiene consecuencias trágicas. Y mientras la DEA rápidamente se atribuye el mérito cuando ayuda a sus socios extranjeros a capturar a capos importantes de la droga, se mantiene silenciosa o proclama su inocencia cuando se pierden vidas como resultado de sus operaciones.

En el caso de la masacre en México, oficiales de la DEA no hicieron una evaluación interna del papel de la agencia en el ataque, y no suspendieron la relación de la agencia con la unidad especial ni ofrecieron asistencia a las víctimas de la filtración. Y en Honduras, el Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz concluyó que la DEA no solo omitió hacer una revisión del tiroteo, sino que a sabiendas despistó al Congreso en un intento de encubrir su papel.

Entre las revelaciones del informe del inspector general: oficiales de la DEA y el departamento de estado dijeron al Congreso que sus socios policiales hondureños dispararon contra el taxi acuático porque los pasajeros del taxi dispararon primero, pero no había “pruebas creíbles de que los individuos en el barco de pasajeros abrieran fuego primero.” Las pruebas disponibles “suscitan interrogantes serios sobre si hubo disparos desde el barco de pasajeros en algúnmomento,” dijo el informe.

Aunque la DEA ha insistido que solo jugó un papel de apoyo en el operativo hondureño, el inspector general determinó que fue un agente de la DEA quien ordenó a un artilleroen el helicóptero abrir fuego contra el taxi acuático.

En un comunicado de prensa, Johnson escribió que el informedel inspector general “confirma nuestros peores temores,” y deja muchas preguntas sin respuestas. “¿La pregunta más importante de todas es: que está haciendo nuestro gobierno para corregir esto y asegurar de que, de ahora en adelante, cualquier agente de los Estados Unidos involucrado en la pérdida de vidas inocentes en el extranjero tenga que rendir cuentas?”

by Adriana Gallardo and Nina Martin

Maternity care is disappearing from America’s rural counties, and for the 28 million women of reproductive age living in those areas, pregnancy and childbirth are becoming more complicated — and more dangerous. That’s the upshot of a new report from the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota that examined obstetric services in the nation’s 1,984 rural counties over a 10-year period. In 2004, 45 percent of rural counties had no hospitals with obstetric services; by 2014, that figure had jumped to 54 percent. The decline was greatest in heavily black counties and in states with the strictest eligibility rules for Medicaid.

The decrease in services has enormous implications for women and families, says Katy B. Kozhimannil, an associate professor in health policy who directs the Minnesota center’s research efforts. Rural areas have higher rates of chronic conditions that make pregnancy more challenging, higher rates of childbirth-related hemorrhages — and higher rates of maternal and infant deaths. And because rural counties tend to be poorer, any efforts to revamp or slash Medicaid could hit rural mothers especially hard. We spoke with Kozhimannil about the new study and the implications for maternal care. (The conversation has been edited and condensed.)

You and your colleagues have been looking at maternal health issues for several years. What’s the most surprising part of this new study?

I was surprised about the findings on race. Being aware of structural racism in U.S. health care, I shouldn’t have been. But we found that hospitals are more likely to close their doors entirely or close their obstetric units in communities that have more black residents. Rural black communities also experience some of the poorest birth outcomes in the country, especially in the Southeast.

I think [the race findings] are new and really important. In all the discussions I've had around maternity care access, I think there's often a false association of “rural” with white communities and with farming, but that doesn't represent the demographic reality of rural America, which is very diverse. There are 10 million people of color in rural America, that’s about 20 percent of all rural Americans.

What has led to the decline in rural obstetric services more broadly over this 10-year period?

We didn’t choose this period because we thought it was particularly unique. We chose it because it was the most recent decade of data we could get. That said, this was a period when there was a substantial shift in the health care delivery system. The debates around Obamacare, the implementation, the threats to repeal — all that really created instability with respect to what hospitals and clinicians were expecting around payments.

And the role of finances is key. If hospitals want to offer obstetric services, they need to be ready for a baby to be born at any time — they need to have a bed available, the equipment available for mom and for baby, clinicians and staff available that have the necessary skills. That's a substantial expense. If a hospital’s revenues are limited because it has a low volume of births — as many rural hospitals do — or if revenues are unpredictable, that creates a really difficult administrative problem.

How does Medicaid play into this?

Medicaid funds about half of all births in the United States, and an even greater percentage of births in rural hospitals. Medicaid funding for births is incredibly important and it’s one factor in hospitals’ decisions around whether to keep obstetric services. We found that rural counties in states with more generous Medicaid programs — with higher income eligibility limits for pregnant women — were less likely to lose hospital-based obstetric services.

Meanwhile, there’s talk of allowing states to impose new rules that could restrict access to Medicaid.

Changes to the financing of Medicaid would likely have big negative effects on the availability of obstetric services in rural areas. Based on our study, the generosity of a state’s Medicaid program seems directly linked to access to maternity care in rural counties. As such, any new reductions or restrictions on Medicaid funding or services may affect rural hospital financing.

What is it like to be pregnant in a rural area that doesn’t have adequate maternity care? What do women do?

For some women, there may be a nearby clinic or their general practitioner may be able to see them for prenatal visits if they have a low-risk pregnancy. But then they need to give birth in a more distant area with a different set of providers.

That may not even be a choice for women who live in communities that don't have any providers that see pregnant patients, or for women that have higher risk complications that require more specialized care.

I remember talking to one woman who lived in rural northern Minnesota and who had a preterm birth with her first pregnancy. For her second pregnancy, she had to drive two hours to the nearest hospital with a high-risk obstetrician. With one child at home already, and a full-time job and a partner who worked, it was almost untenable. It would take a whole day for her to drop her child off at daycare, drive all the way to the hospital, wait for a 15-minute visit that felt rushed, then drive all the way back.

I just heard on the radio this morning that a truck ran into a railroad bridge that goes over the highway that this woman would take to go back and forth to the hospital. So if she was pregnant right now, there's a 27-mile detour on three dirt roads to get around this broken bridge. That adds probably another 45 minutes to an already two-hour drive. Things like that can happen, you know, all the time.

What about giving birth? How does living in a remote area affect the kinds of choices doctors and women make?

In a typical childbirth education class in an urban area, childbirth educators say things like, “Go to the hospital when your contractions are five minutes apart.” None of that makes any sense in a rural context where women give birth far from home.

For rural moms, a lot of the conversation in childbirth education and in prenatal care revolves around logistics and transportation: “Do you know how you’re going to get to your appointment? Do you have access to a car? Is your car reliable? Do you have money for gas? Do you have a backup plan if your car doesn't start? Do you have someone that you can call if you need to go in quickly?”

Anecdotally, I hear a lot about labor induction. The rural physicians I’ve talked to are like, “I can't believe I am trying to talk patients into having an induction.” They believe in letting labor start naturally, but given the long drive, induction is often better for patients clinically. So that if complications come up, someone’s there, monitoring your blood pressure and vital signs. It’s not, you know, your partner or friend desperately driving down dirt roads as fast as they can while you yell in the back seat.

How does all this affect outcomes for babies?

We have good information from Canada that the women who have to drive long distances to give birth have higher rates of the babies being in the neonatal intensive care unit, and even of infant mortality. And so we know that distance is associated with outcomes of care. When rural hospitals close the doors of their maternity units, women have to drive longer distances.

These seem like pretty huge hurdles for rural mothers and babies. Is there any way to address these problems to improve maternity care?

One idea is programs to support pregnant women and families, especially with respect to their housing and transportation needs when they live far away from where they're going to give birth. Alaska has actually done a tremendous job of this.

Another is for states to allow midwives and nurse practitioners to play a greater role in offering prenatal and postpartum care, without having to be under a doctor’s supervision. That would be useful. Our prior research shows that midwives, for example, attend births at about one-third of all rural hospitals, and that hospital administrators would like to expand the role midwives play.

State and federal programs to support the rural maternity workforce are crucial. There ought to be programs to support training in emergency births in rural communities that lose obstetric care, and to support the costs of providing maternity care in communities where there are willing providers.

by ProPublica

By many measures, the U.S. has become the most dangerous place to give birth in the affluent world. Each year 700 to 900 American women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes – up to 60 percent of which are preventable – and some 65,000 women nearly die.

ProPublica and NPR have shined a light on this issue through the joint investigative series Lost Mothers, shifting the national conversation on maternal mortality from one of private tragedy to public health crisis. Now the news organizations are teaming up, in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library’s BPL Presents, to host a community forum about protecting more women from harm.

Titled “Lost Mothers: Key Ways to Improve Maternal Health,” the event will bring together leading medical experts, survivors and impacted families. Panelists will share insights on topics including:

• finding the best possible provider
• strategies for self-advocacy and conveying levels of pain
• changing the culture of the “perfect birth story”
• preparing for an emergency
• paying attention to symptoms even after the delivery

The expert panel will also take questions from audience members seeking answers and support, and refreshments will be provided. This one-of-a-kind event encourages women and families to share their stories and connect with one another, and elevates a much-needed national dialogue.

This event is free. RSVP here.

What: Lost Mothers: Key Ways to Improve Maternal Health

When: Tuesday, October 24, 7:30–9 p.m. (Doors open at 7 p.m.)

Where: Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238 (Stevan Dweck Auditorium)

Who:

• Mary D’Alton, MD, chair of Columbia University Medical Center’s department of obstetrics & gynecology
• Chanel Porchia-Albert, founder and executive director of Ancient Song Doula Services
• Larry Bloomstein, widower of Lauren Bloomstein, featured in the first article of the series
• Nina Martin, reporter for ProPublica
• Renee Montagne, special correspondent for NPR
• Other invited guests

This event will be livestreamed on both the ProPublica and BPL Presents Facebook pages at 7:30 p.m. EST. For more information, contact Cynthia Gordy at cynthia.gordy@propublica.org.

by Megan Rose

Despite new evidence undermining the convictions of at least eight men for violent crimes in both Baltimore City and County over the last two decades, none were exonerated. Instead, they left prison only after agreeing to plea deals with state prosecutors. In each case, the men took either Alford pleas, in which defendants can maintain their innocence for the record, or were given time-served arrangements. With these deals, the defendants were granted their freedom, but gave up the right to clear their names. (Two additional men took similar deals but years later were fully exonerated after more exculpatory evidence was found in the police files.)

ProPublica’s examination of these cases reveals a troubling pattern — one that legal experts say plays out across the country. Persuasive innocence claims were met with refusals by the state’s attorney’s office to reexamine the cases, sometimes despite — or perhaps because of — discoveries of official misconduct. Prosecutors often fought for years to prevent the consideration of any new evidence or the testing of old evidence for DNA. Or they accommodated contrary new facts by stretching their theories of crimes. If the DNA in a rape case, for example, didn’t match the defendant, prosecutors would assert that another unknown assailant was involved, too. When judges ordered new trials or granted writs of innocence, prosecutors started bargaining for plea deals that would maintain the convictions.

Over time, prosecutors have defended their decision to seek deals, claiming in each case that they still believed in the defendants’ guilt. They also argued that given the amount of time passed, the cases would be difficult to retry.

But Michele Nethercott, the head of the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, said with these cases, “often, the truth doesn’t seem to matter much.”

George Seward

• Convicted: 1985
• Released: 2016
• Type of Deal: Alford plea
• Crime: Rape

The Original Case

The white victim identified him 10 weeks after the crime. The victim’s ID of Seward, an 18-year-old black man who had a moustache and goatee at the time of the murder, conflicted with her contemporaneous description after the attack of a clean-shaven assailant. Neither the fingerprints nor biological evidence from the crime matched Seward.

New Evidence Later Discovered

Seward’s employment records as a part-time dog washer, which were discovered 12 years after the trial, showed he’d been at work the day of the shooting. His boss also testified she kept the shop locked and it would have been “impossible” for him to have left.

Prosecution Reaction

Fought for the next 19 years, arguing, in turn, that the records weren’t admissible as new evidence and shouldn’t be given any consideration; that they didn’t provide an alibi because no hours were specified; and that they bolstered the case against Seward because the shop was near the victim’s house. One of the prosecutors on the case, John Cox, also told ProPublica that the records’ discovery so long after the trial meant they couldn’t be trusted.

Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger said recently that because the victim saw her attacker up close, he wasn’t concerned that the case rested on a cross-racial identification. (That type of ID has been shown to be less reliable because people are generally bad at distinguishing facial features of people who aren’t their own race. Of the 351 people exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989, the national Innocence Project found that 41 percent had been convicted on mistaken cross-racial identification.)

How the Deal Happened

Judge said the employment records “thoroughly exculpate[d]” Seward and granted a writ of innocence. The state appealed and eventually lost. “The state’s immediate reaction was to offer a plea,” said Shawn Armbrust, of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project and one of Seward’s lawyers.

Shellenberger said that he’d been confident about the case and wanted to go to trial, but the victim didn’t want to testify again. “Keeping something on the record was extremely important to us.”

Why Defendant Agreed to Deal

Seward first turned prosecutors down, but then, as he awaited a new trial, a close friend was stabbed in prison. Seward had nine months before the trial began, so he reconsidered.

Jesse Barnes

• Convicted: 1972
• Released: 2011
• Type of Deal: Time served
• Crime: Murder

The Original Case

Based solely on Barnes’ confession made after 31 hours in custody. A largely illiterate 17-year-old with a low IQ and no prior record, Barnes’ police-typed statement conflicted with the evidence in the case in major ways, such as how and where the 15-year-old female victim was killed. And he had an alibi for the time of the murder. (Barnes’ confession also incriminated two others, but no one else was charged.)

New Evidence Later Discovered

In 2009, 37 years after Barnes’ conviction, DNA evidence collected from the victim’s body was tested and excluded him from any sexual assault, further undermining his confession, which had described a violent gang rape that included Barnes and another man ejaculating. The DNA, which only came from one male, also excluded one of the other teenagers implicated in Barnes’ statement.

Prosecution Reaction

Prosecutor Sharon Holback said at the time that the state “vehemently and firmly believes that [Barnes] was fairly and properly convicted.” She argued that his confession was sound and that the third person implicated in it must have been the source for the DNA. That man couldn’t be found for comparison testing. (Holback was also the prosecutor who handled the post-conviction hearings in the case of James Thompson, whose rape and murder conviction was undermined by DNA testing, but was offered an Alford plea.)

How the Deal Happened

Judge Yvette Bryant went many months without issuing a ruling on the case, so Barnes’ lawyer took the innocence claims directly to Gregg Bernstein, who recently had been elected as Baltimore City state’s attorney on a reform agenda and had started a conviction integrity unit. The fighting over Barnes’ post-conviction motions had happened under Bernstein’s predecessor, so he had not publicly committed to any position. He was also free of one common concern prosecutors face when dealing with potentially wrong convictions: angry relatives of the victim who don’t want the case to unravel. With Barnes, the victim’s family so believed in his innocence that they had hired a lawyer to defend him.

Bernstein, who said recently that he didn’t recall the case, would concede only that Barnes didn’t deserve to be in prison anymore, seizing on a mistake in sentencing. The judge who had sentenced Barnes had thought wrongly that his only option was life.

Why Defendant Agreed to Deal

Barnes was 57 years old, had been in prison for more than 40 years and was in failing health. “I had to say to him ‘I’m confident in the end we will vindicate you, but it might be 1, 2 years or even 4 to 5 years, and there’s no guarantee,’” said Barnes’ pro bono lawyer, Michael Imbroscio, noting it was “the most difficult conversation I’ve ever had in my 22-year legal career.”

Wendell Griffin

• Convicted: 1982
• Released: 2012
• Type of Deal: Time served
• Crime: Murder

The Original Case

A neighbor testified that she saw Griffin before and after the murder with a gun, and a second neighbor, who was 150 feet away, said she heard Griffin make threatening remarks the night of the murder. A set of keys found about 90 feet from the crime scene was connected to Griffin, who lived in the neighborhood.

New Evidence Later Discovered

In 2011, significant evidence was found in the police’s files that had never been given to the defense: three photo lineups in which eyewitnesses failed to identify Griffin and eight witness statements that either incriminated another suspect or contradicted the testimony used to prosecute Griffin.

One eyewitness pointed to Griffin’s picture in the lineup and said that he looked like the suspect, “but it’s not him.” Griffin’s picture was nine years old, so detectives went back to that witness and showed her another array with a current picture. She still did not identify him. Nonetheless, detectives used her description of the suspect to get a search warrant for Griffin’s home — never mentioning that she’d twice failed to pick him out of a photo array. The warrant also cited a neighbor who saw a man with a gun, but left out that he said the man wasn’t Griffin.

“There was pretty powerful evidence of innocence that was buried by the state,” Steve Mercer, Griffin’s attorney, said.

Prosecution Reaction

Baltimore City prosecutor Michael Leedy denied that the evidence represented a Constitutional violation. (In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the state must turn over all favorable information to the defense in order for a trial to be fair, which has come to be known as the “Brady” requirement.) Leedy wouldn’t agree to a new trial.

How the Deal Happened

When a judge, who called the evidence “earth shattering,” indicated she’d be ordering a new trial, Leedy shifted, saying that although he didn’t believe “there were, in fact, any Brady violations” the allegations were “plausible enough” that he’d “concede to a resentencing on this matter.” This was the “best course,” Leedy said, to “ensure that Mr. Griffin will for the rest of his life remain convicted for the murder of James Wise.”

Leedy also wanted it on record that by accepting the deal Griffin gave up the right to an actual innocence ruling.

Why Defendant Agreed to Deal

Griffin was 61, knew his best years were gone and he might “die in here.” Having spent nearly 31 years in prison, he didn’t have it in him, he said recently, to wait another year-and-a-half for a new trial. But he is now trying to withdraw his deal, so he can clear his name and sue over the Brady violations. Marilyn Mosby, the current state’s attorney who ran in part on a platform of police accountability, is fighting his motion. (Her spokeswoman didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) A hearing is set for November.

Antoine Pettiford

• Convicted: 1995
• Released: 1998
• Type of Deal: Alford plea (exonerated in 2000)
• Crime: Murder

Original Case

Pettiford, 23 and with a record, was identified as one of two shooters by two eyewitnesses and was tied to the murder weapon by a suspect in a related crime. But at trial, the witnesses said they’d been mistaken and the suspect said he’d lied about the weapon. Late in the trial, prosecutors produced a new witness who identified Pettiford. Pettiford had an alibi and no motive.

According to The Baltimore Sun, before the judge sentenced Pettiford to life plus 20 years, he said: “I don't care if every witness that appeared in the trial — including the detectives — come back here and say it was all a farce and it was all false and it was all wrong. I think justice was done.”

New Evidence Later Discovered

A year later, a separate federal drug investigation led to a different suspect in the murder, who pleaded guilty in federal court and told investigators that Pettiford had nothing to do with the crime.

There was also evidence that had never been given to the defense: a three-page statement from a friend of the victim that said he was the intended target and pointed to the same suspect prosecuted by the feds; a police bulletin that named that same suspect in connection to the murder; a statement from an eyewitness who identified the second shooter as someone the federal prosecutors thought was involved; and a police report naming that second person as a suspect.

Prosecution Reaction

Baltimore City prosecutor Nancy Pollack, who had handled the trial, didn’t act on the information federal prosecutors gave her suggesting Pettiford was innocent. Michelle Martz, Pettiford’s lawyer, said she went repeatedly “to beg and plead for [prosecutors at the time] to do something. I was floored the state wouldn’t be more concerned that they might have the wrong guy.”

How the Deal Happened

At the end of a post-conviction hearing, at which a detective revealed the existence of the three-page statement implicating someone else, the judge ordered Pollack to turn over everything in her files. Pollack agreed to a new trial and offered the plea.

Why Defendant Agreed to Deal

Pettiford, scared of what the prosecutors might do during a second round, had only one question: “Do I have to go back to prison if I take it?” He accepted the Alford plea, walked down the courthouse steps and into his family’s waiting car.

How He Was Later Exonerated

A year after the Alford plea, The Baltimore Sun newspaper exposed that the state had suppressed even more evidence and that a detective had misled the defense. In response, the judge vacated the Alford plea, saying it had been “a miscarriage of justice,” and the state declined to prosecute again. Pollack, who declined to comment, had already resigned, but the Baltimore Police Department found that the detective did nothing wrong. That detective was also named in a lawsuit filed by Sabein Burgess, who was wrongfully convicted in 1995 and exonerated in 2014.

by Megan Rose

On Oct. 15, 2008, James Owens shuffled, head high despite his shackles, into a Baltimore courtroom, eager for his new trial to begin. Two decades into a life sentence, he would finally have his chance to prove what he’d been saying all along: The state had the wrong man.

Owens had been convicted of murdering a 24-year-old college student, who was found raped and stabbed in her home. Then he’d been shunted off to state prison until DNA testing — the scientific marvel that he’d watched for years free other men — finally caught up with his case in 2006. The semen that had been found inside the victim wasn’t his. A Maryland court tossed his conviction and granted Owens a rare do-over trial.

State prosecutors balked, insisting they still had enough evidence to keep Owens locked away and vowed to retry him. But they had also offered him an unusual deal. He could guarantee his immediate release from prison with no retrial and no danger of a new conviction — if he’d agree to plead guilty. The deal, known as an Alford plea, came with what seemed like an additional carrot: Despite pleading guilty, the Alford plea would allow Owens to say on the record that he was innocent. The Alford plea was an enticing chance for Owens, by then 43, to move on as a free man. But he’d give up a chance at exoneration. To the world, and legally, he’d still be a killer.

Owens refused the deal. He told his lawyer he wanted to clear his name, and he was willing to take his chances in court and wait in prison however long it took for a new trial to begin. It was a startling choice for an incarcerated defendant — even those with persuasive stories of innocence typically don’t trust the system enough to roll the dice again with 12 jurors or an appellate court. Most defendants, lawyers say, instinctively and rationally, grab any deal they can to win their freedom back.

The decision cost Owens 16 more months behind bars. Then, on that fall day in 2008, when the trial was set to begin, the prosecutor stood and, without a glance at Owens, told the judge, “The state declines to prosecute.”

In a legal gamble in which the prosecution typically holds the winning cards, Owens had called the state’s bluff. He walked out that day exonerated — and with the right to sue the state for the 21 years he spent wrongly imprisoned.

It seemed the ultimate victory in a city like Baltimore, with its deeply rooted and often justified mistrust of police and prosecutors. But Owens wasn’t the only man convicted of murdering that 24-year-old college student. Another white Baltimore man, James Thompson, had also been put away for life. Tests showed that his DNA didn’t match the semen either, but the state’s attorney’s office refused to drop the charges. Instead, as it had with Owens, it offered Thompson an Alford plea. Thompson grabbed the deal and walked out of prison a convicted murderer.

Same crime. Same evidence. Very different endings.

Ever since DNA ushered in a new era in criminal justice, even the toughest law-and-order advocates have come to acknowledge a hard truth: Sometimes innocent people are locked away for crimes they didn’t commit. Less widely understood is just how reluctant the system is to righting those wrongs.

Courts only assess guilt or innocence before a conviction. After that, appellate courts focus solely on fairness. Did everyone follow the rules and live up to their duties? Getting a re-hearing of the facts is a monumental, often decades-long quest through a legal thicket. Most defendants never get to start the process, let alone win. Even newly discovered evidence is not enough in many cases to prompt a review. And, for the tiny percentage of defendants who get one, the prosecutors still have the advantage: They have final discretion about whether to press charges and how severe they’ll be. Powerful influence over the pace of a case, the sentence and bail. And, compared with an incarcerated defendant, vast resources.

No one tracks how often the wrongly convicted are pressured to accept plea deals in lieu of exonerations. But in Baltimore City and County alone — two separate jurisdictions with their own state’s attorneys — ProPublica identified at least 10 cases in the last 19 years in which defendants with viable innocence claims ended up signing Alford pleas or time-served deals. In each case, exculpatory evidence was uncovered, persuasive enough to garner new trials, evidentiary hearings or writs of actual innocence. Prosecutors defend the original convictions, arguing, then and now, that the deals were made for valid reasons — such as the death of a key witness or a victim’s unwillingness to weather a retrial. The current state’s attorney in Baltimore County, Scott Schellenberger, said that “prosecutors take their oath to get it right very seriously” and wouldn’t stand in the way of exoneration if the facts called for it.

The menace of such deals, though, is clear: At worst, innocent people are stigmatized and unable to sue the state for false imprisonment, prosecutors keep unearned wins on their case records and those of the department, and no one re-investigates the crime — the real suspect is never brought to justice.

The plea deals ProPublica examined in Baltimore City involved two prior state’s attorneys. A spokeswoman for Marilyn Mosby, the current chief, didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment or for interviews with prosecutors in those cases.

The pleas in two of these Baltimore cases were later overturned after misconduct was uncovered in the original convictions, and the men won full exonerations. One, Walter Lomax, a black man convicted by an all-white jury shortly after the 1968 race riots in the city, served 38 years of a life sentence before taking a time-served deal in 2006. The state didn’t concede he was innocent until 2014.

Wrongful convictions are bad enough, Lomax said, but they’re even more “horrible when it becomes obvious the person is innocent and the state won’t at the very least acknowledge that.”

Some legal and cognitive science experts suggest that once detectives and prosecutors commit to a suspect and a theory of the crime, it changes how they evaluate evidence, and then the system itself exacerbates that focus at every step. Prosecutors are rewarded for proving and defending their theories, leaving little incentive to acknowledge weaknesses in cases, particularly in high-stakes crimes such as rape and murder. This mind-set is bolstered by one of the great positives of the system, one which legal experts, even those dedicated to exposing wrongful convictions, acknowledge: Prosecutors generally get it right.

Psychologists have a myriad of terms for the powerful, largely subconscious biases at play, but most people would call the collective phenomenon “tunnel vision.”

Wrongful convictions involving violent crimes typically involve poor, often minority defendants, sometimes with limited education or IQs, who are convicted on scant evidence or flawed forensics. The cases are fueled by an early theory of the crime that relentlessly drives the investigation and prosecution — even, in some cases, to official misconduct.

“At some point psychologically, you go from figuring out what happened to figuring out how to prove it happened the way you said it did,” Barbara O’Brien, a law professor involved with the National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan, said. “It’s very difficult to take a step back from that.”

Marty Stroud, a former Louisiana prosecutor, made national headlines in 2015 when he penned a rare public apology for putting an innocent man on death row for 31 years. He told me recently that the system comes down hardest on those without the means to defend themselves. “It’s easy to prosecute those people and put them away and not think twice about it because no one is speaking for them,” he said.

The certitude of detectives and prosecutors hardens when their theory is validated by a judge or jury, and later, by an appellate court. Time, instead of allowing for fresh eyes, often makes biases worse. When a defendant like Owens gets a new hearing, the district or state’s attorney’s office — long committed to his guilt — has to re-justify that decision.

If they admit they got it wrong, prosecutors have to accept that a person was robbed of years of his life, the real perpetrator was never found, the victim’s family was let down, and, to top it off, they now have a cold case that’s unlikely to be solved. With the Alford plea, not only is the real perpetrator not caught but the case is officially closed on the books. It also dings their won-loss record on typically high-profile cases. The idea of a wrongful conviction, Stroud said, assaults a prosecutor’s sense of identity that “we’re the good guys. We have the white hats and are putting the bad guys in jail.”

Exonerations are also like a Pandora’s box in two important and unsettling ways. First, looking closely at why wrongful convictions happen — even in cases when everyone worked in good faith — could force a reckoning about deeply held beliefs on what is required to solve and punish crimes. False confessions, for example, often are a result of time-honored, and perfectly legal, tactics to soften up a suspect, such as lying or conducting questioning in the dead of night, said Steven Drizin, the former director of Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions. When wrongful convictions are a result of misconduct, there could be a string of other bad convictions connected to that prosecutor or detective.

It’s no coincidence, many defense lawyers across the country say, that when misconduct comes up, prosecutors are quicker to propose an Alford plea or similar deal, effectively quashing any further inquiry into the behavior. One ACLU attorney told me about a galling Alabama case in which prosecutors insisted they would re-seek the death penalty, and it was “only because we were continuing to expose prosecutorial misconduct that they finally agreed to settle the case.”

On a muggy August evening in 1987, police officers swarmed a block of squat brick rowhouses in a mostly white, working-class neighborhood in southeast Baltimore. A young woman had been raped, strangled with a sock and stabbed to death in her second-floor bedroom. Detective Thomas Pellegrini, who’d been assigned to homicide only the year before and, who, by his own admission, was green enough not to sweat the details, caught the case as lead detective. He was assisted by Detective Gary Dunnigan and the squad’s boss, Sgt. Jay Landsman. The trio would become famous a few years later when David Simon heralded them in his book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” and on the subsequent prime-time TV show it inspired.

The next morning, the neighborhood reverberated with the choppy drone of police helicopters circling overhead. Thompson, a gas station attendant who’d suffered a brain injury in childhood, lived down the street with his wife and their two young boys. He’d heard detectives were looking for a knife and offering a $1,000 reward. It seemed a prime opportunity for a quick buck. The short, stocky 27-year-old wandered over to the yellow police tape and handed Pellegrini a large switchblade. Thompson said he’d found the bloody weapon in the grass the night before, pocketed it, and cleaned it at home — somehow unaware of the massive overnight police presence. At Pellegrini’s urging, he fetched a pair of cut-off jeans he said he’d been wearing at the time, which had a small bloodstain on the back right pocket.

Forensics showed a possible presence of blood or other unknown substance on a small area of the knife and no evidence to suggest it was used in a violent struggle, such as a broken tip from hitting bone. The detectives moved forward on the assumption it was the murder weapon.

Two days later, rather than being thanked and handed the reward money, Thompson found himself under suspicion. In a panic, he fingered Owens. The two had been casual friends, but they’d had a falling out over accusations of theft when they’d briefly worked together at the gas station. In a thoughtless burst of vengeance, Thompson gave an official statement at the police station; he said the knife was actually his but claimed Owens had stolen it and then told him where to find it the day after the murder. Thompson noticed the detectives ate up everything and realized they had nothing else to go on. At the time, there seemed to be no risk in just making it up as he went along. After he retrieved the knife, Thompson told detectives, Owens washed it in the kitchen sink. Thompson didn’t give the police any details about the murder, but he said Owens had told him he’d had sex with the victim.

Owens, 22 at the time, was arrested and charged with burglary, rape and first-degree murder. In just 72 hours, the detectives had closed the case. There was no forensic evidence, motive or eyewitnesses linking Owens to the crime. Landsman and Pellegrini would later say they had believed at the time that without Thompson, Owens would walk. Even the prosecutor, Marvin “Sam” Brave, said he viewed Thompson’s story as “implausible” and didn’t think he had the truth, but he nevertheless pressed charges.

Brave recently told me that “if you think you’ve got the right guy, but not that you can necessarily prove it beyond reasonable doubt, it doesn’t mean you don’t go forward.”

When Owens’ trial began in February 1988, Thompson was the star witness. He’d considered coming clean several times but was afraid he’d be sent to jail. He’d lied to the cops during a previous encounter and had been arrested for making a false police report. Despite that history, the detectives in this case had made him feel like a hero. Pellegrini didn’t think Thompson was “the sharpest pencil in the box,” but at that point in his career, he said in a recent deposition, he thought only suspects would lie to him. Brave also was unconcerned. “If the part that you think he is telling the truth [about] contributes to your case, you use it,” he said. “He doesn’t have to be telling the truth about everything.” The rest of the case relied mainly on minor scratches Owens, a factory worker, had on his arm and a spot of possible blood that had been swabbed from his hand. Two jailhouse snitches who’d been Owens’ cellmates while he awaited trial claimed he had separately confessed to them, though the story Owens purportedly told them contradicted the version Thompson had given police.

In his opening statement, Brave told the jury that any notion that police had “bungled the investigation” and the defendant was innocent was from the fantastical realm of television. But Brave was concerned enough about Thompson’s story that he took him aside the morning of his testimony and warned he was going to “look silly” and it was time he “told us the truth about how that knife really got back into his possession,” according to testimony Brave later gave about the conversation. He even assured Thompson he wouldn’t be prosecuted for making a false statement.

When Thompson took the stand, he told the jury he’d had a “heart to heart” with the prosecutor and was “ready to tell the truth.” In this new version of events — which Brave described later as “sellable” to a jury — Thompson said that around 8 a.m. the morning after the murder, Owens had come by his house and given him the bloody knife. Except this story, too, was a lie. As one of the detectives noted to Brave afterward, Owens’ boss had told police he’d been at work by that point in the morning. “The more I tried to fix things to go in my favor, the bigger hole I dug for myself,” Thompson told me recently.

That Friday Brave went home “really worried about the case,” and stewed over the weekend that he was on “a sinking ship.” Late Sunday evening, he met with Pellegrini and told him to take blood and hair samples from Thompson for testing to exclude him as a suspect and bolster his credibility as a witness. Brave already knew the pubic hairs found on the victim didn’t match Owens. Neither did saliva on a cigarette found at the scene.

During a lunch break at trial the next day, Brave and the three detectives met with the city’s forensics expert who, they said, told them the hair was a match to Thompson. Detectives brought Thompson in, read him his rights, and told him “he was in a lot of trouble” and might be charged. His hair, Landsman told him, had been found in the victim’s house. Thompson later contended he knew this couldn’t possibly be true — he hadn’t been there at all. But at the time, he said, he was scared and thought if he just said what pleased the detectives and got Owens convicted, he’d be alright.

Like an actor doing take after take to accommodate the wishes of a director, Thompson went through several more versions about what supposedly happened, adjusting his story to reflect additional pieces of evidence the detectives told him about. Thompson first said he broke into the house but didn’t go upstairs. After the detectives told him his hair had been found on the second floor, Thompson then said he did go upstairs but hid in the bathroom while Owens attacked the victim after she unexpectedly came home. Detectives then told him his pubic hair had been found on the victim’s buttocks, suggesting his pants must have been down. After several hours of this back and forth, Landsman went to the courtroom and handed Brave a note, saying Thompson had admitted to burglarizing the house with Owens.

Thompson was taken directly from the interrogation room to the witness stand to testify a second time. Now, speaking so softly at first that the judge twice had to tell him to raise his voice, Thompson said he and Owens had broken into the apartment to steal jewelry, and Owens attacked the victim when she came home unexpectedly. Then, while Owens raped her, Thompson testified that he masturbated over her back — his newly concocted explanation for how the pubic hair the state claimed was his had ended up on the victim. Owens, Thompson said, then stabbed her and threw the knife on the ground, which Thompson picked up on the way out.

This was, unbeknownst to Owens or his lawyer, Thompson’s eighth version of events — the one that satisfied the officers that they had enough “to get James Owens,” as one detective later put it.

Even on the stand implicating himself in the crime, with both Brave and Owens’ lawyer stressing charges he might face, Thompson said the full ramifications of his lies didn’t dawn on him. He thought he’d be fine once the trial was over.

“I never hurt anyone. I never touched that young lady,” Thompson said again and again on the stand, adding at one point that he’d take a polygraph to “prove my innocence on that particular behalf.”

Owens was convicted of the burglary and the murder but found not guilty of the rape. Thompson’s changing stories had cast enough doubt that Brave acknowledged in his closing argument that either man could have committed the rape. Thompson, who had been arrested right after testifying and immediately recanted his confession, was later convicted of burglary, rape and murder. Thompson’s multiple different stories of the crime had been accepted as truth, but his multiple attempts to protest his innocence were taken as lies.

Both men were sentenced to life without parole. Owens was the first in Maryland to receive such a punishment.

Owens never resigned himself to his fate. A few years into his sentence, he read about DNA in a magazine and implored everyone he could think of to test the evidence in his case. He eagerly conferred over coffee with Kirk Bloodsworth, the inmate across the hall, then cheered Bloodsworth’s exoneration by DNA in 1993, the first of its kind in the nation involving a death sentence. Shaking Bloodsworth’s hand when he left prison, Owens thought, “Man, one day I’ll be out there.” Then the O.J. Simpson trial introduced him to Barry Scheck, the founder of the Innocence Project, and Owens sent his office a letter. Shunned by his family and cut off from the way most convicts got cash, he traded chicken sandwiches from his kitchen job for stamps to mail it. Still, no one took up the cause. The semen found in the victim and the blood on Thompson’s shorts sat undisturbed in the Baltimore medical examiner’s office for 19 years.

Finally, after a special division within the Maryland public defender’s office became interested, he got a new lawyer and a hearing. A judge ordered DNA testing in 2006 — over the objections of prosecutors — and the results dismantled the state’s theory of the crime. At both trials, the state had argued that the break-in, the rape and the murder were inextricably linked. At Owens’s trial, the prosecutor told the jury Owens had leered at the victim as she sunbathed and “decided that he wanted her.” He broke into her house, laid in wait for her to return, raped her, strangled her and “for good measure … mutilate[d] her with multiple stab wounds.” The prosecution doubled down on this narrative at Thompson’s trial, telling the jury he and Owens “had to humiliate [the victim] by taking turns raping her.” And the blood on the back pocket of Thompson’s shorts, the prosecutor said, was definitively the victim’s.

DNA proved most of those arguments false. The semen found in the victim didn’t come from Owens or Thompson, and the blood on the shorts wasn’t even from a woman. It was Thompson’s own. When Owens heard the news at Jessup Correctional Institution, just southwest of Baltimore, he sat on the floor of his cell and cried.

The Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office was unmoved. Prosecutors fought both Thompson and Owens as the two separately sought to have their convictions overturned.

Owens’ case moved faster through the courts. His new attorney was Stephen Mercer, a Maryland defense attorney with an earnestness that had survived more than 20 years in the trenches. Mercer knew the state, with its evidence decimated, was going to push for a deal. He fumed that prosecutors were using psychological warfare to do it — opposing bail and slowing the case, so Owens would spend more time on the inside thinking about being on the outside. Owens’ evidentiary hearing was moved from January to March to May. Only then, nine months after the DNA showed Owens wasn’t the rapist, did the state agree to a new trial while insisting that Owens was still guilty of murder.

The state’s attorney’s office, run at the time by Patricia Jessamy, argued that the rape was immaterial to the murder, and, a spokeswoman said, the DNA evidence was “trivial.” Mark Cohen, the new prosecutor, told Mercer that other evidence in the case, including Thompson’s confession and the testimony of jailhouse informants, was still persuasive. (Jessamy didn’t respond to several phone messages requesting comment and Cohen has since died.)

Mercer said the prosecutor’s stance was “very cynical. It really seemed that the desire to keep the conviction was for reasons that had nothing to do with the evidence.” The state’s guiding star, Mercer knew, was a rigid belief that what was long ago decided by a jury, and upheld by an appellate court, shouldn’t be continually second-guessed.

In Owens’ case, it wasn’t just the semen and the blood that didn’t hold up 20 years later. The type of hair analysis done on the pubic hair had subsequently been dismissed as junk science. The hair, along with the knife, had been destroyed. But the state’s own expert, who’d inspected the hair at the time of the original trials, said at a hearing that the scientific community no longer does a visual hair comparison to “draw the conclusions we drew back in 1988 with a microscope.” Now analysts use DNA analysis.

Not long after Owens was granted a new trial in May 2007, Cohen proposed a deal. It wasn’t surprising. The plea bargain is the lifeblood of the overburdened criminal-justice system. About 95 percent of cases never go before a jury. Instead, most defendants agree to plead guilty in exchange for lesser sentences. In cases like Owens’, in which new evidence undermines old, legal advocates question whether incarcerated defendants should even be offered a plea. In every case, prosecutors “need to really inspect their own motivations,” Thiru Vignarajah, a former federal and Baltimore City prosecutor who later served as deputy attorney general of Maryland, said. “Are they offering a plea or time served because that’s in the best interest of the case, or are they allowing some institutional interest of preserving the conviction to trump a prosecutor’s duty to seek justice?”

A year before Owens’ retrial, Jessamy’s office had convinced another defendant to take an Alford plea. Locked up for 20 years, that defendant had at first refused a deal after he, too, was granted a new trial because of DNA evidence. As the trial was set to begin, the prosecution requested a postponement. When the state again delayed the subsequent trial date, the defendant broke down. He accepted the plea.

Afterward, Jessamy’s spokeswoman scoffed at the defendant in a news story, saying it was “inconceivable” that after 20 years the defendant couldn’t wait a little longer, and “if he truly believes he is innocent, he should have gone to trial to see that justice is served.”

As Owens’ trial got closer, Cohen kept sweetening the deal, knocking down the charge and requiring less probation. Finally, they offered Owens an Alford plea for second-degree murder, time served and no probation. Mercer lost sleep over whether Owens should take it. A trial was risky and a chance at guaranteed freedom was rare for any defendant. Owens repeatedly asked himself: “Why are they doing this to me? Why should I have to plead guilty to something I didn’t do?” Now mostly bald and with a moustache, he’d grown up in the foster care system. He’d been viciously attacked while in prison. He didn’t have much to hold onto except his resolute insistence from day one that he was innocent. He wasn’t about to “admit there was sufficient evidence to convict him while playing this wink-and-nod game that he was claiming his innocence,” Mercer said. So the Alford plea, like all the others Mercer had passed to Owens through the Plexiglass, was flatly rejected: “Mr. Mercer, there is no way. I am going to trial.”

Cohen, suspicious that the deal hadn’t been properly relayed, had Owens and Mercer join him for a bench conference, so that the Alford plea could be offered in front of the judge. “I’m not taking nothing, dude,” Owens recalled saying. “I will die in the penitentiary if I have to.”

In October 2008, Owens was vindicated. Cohen was forced to tell the court he didn’t have the goods for a retrial. Owens stepped out of prison free for the first time in 21 years, telling gathered reporters, “You can’t give me that time back.”

Thompson, meanwhile, was fighting the same battles while incarcerated about 75 miles away at Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, Maryland. But in his case, prosecutors were employing a perplexing logic. They’d agreed that the DNA evidence from the semen warranted a new trial for Owens, who had not been convicted of rape, but they refused a new trial for Thompson, who had been.

Thompson, by now gray-haired and hard of hearing, was dismayed. He’d saved the newspaper clipping about the DNA findings, and when he read that Owens had gone free, he was certain he’d be next. He couldn’t understand why the DNA could clear Owens of all charges while it did nothing for him, even though the DNA excluded him as well. But Mercer, who’d picked up Thompson’s case after freeing Owens, did. Thompson had confessed, and that was prosecutorial gold. In Simon’s book about the Baltimore detectives who’d secured Thompson’s confession, he detailed the interrogation tactics they had commonly employed. To get confessions, he wrote, the detective became a “huckster … thieving and silver-tongued,” and without the “chance for a detective to manipulate a suspect’s mind, a lot of bad people would simply go free.”

Poorly understood at the time is that such manipulation can also compel innocent people to agree to whatever the police want. As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in 2009, “a frighteningly high percentage of people … confess to crimes they never committed.” According to the Innocence Project, 28 percent of defendants later exonerated by DNA had falsely confessed.

During the initial trials in 1988, prosecutors had argued that the pubic hair and the blood on the jeans proved Thompson was telling the truth, but in 2009 the Maryland Court of Appeals wrote that the DNA finding “usurps the State’s arguments all together.” In essence this meant none of Thompson’s statements to police or prosecutors throughout the case were corroborated by evidence.

Despite the statistics, convincing a jury that someone would falsely confess to a crime — particularly to something as heinous as a murder or a rape — is incredibly hard. Juries want to believe that people are rational actors, like themselves, with an almost primal instinct toward self-protection. It wouldn’t matter that the state no longer had the evidence to prove it, Mercer knew, a jury would most likely myopically focus on the confession.

Thompson told me he’d been happy for Owens when he was released — he’d always wished he could apologize to him for what he did — but that feeling had faded into self-pity as the calendar went from 2008 to 2009 to 2010 and his case stalled in the courts. Now he was mostly anxious. He just wanted relief, whatever it might be, so when Sharon Holback, the new prosecutor on the case, eventually offered him an Alford plea — 23 years after he’d first fatefully approached police — his excitement overwhelmed his sense of injustice.

Mercer worked to make it the best deal he could. If Thompson took the plea, it meant the state would let him go, but the deal had some risky strings attached. Any charge that carried a life sentence had to come off the table, because in Maryland, a probation violation — even something as relatively minor as a DUI — sends the defendant back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. The two sides agreed to second-degree murder, which carries a maximum of 30 years. That way if Thompson violated probation, he’d only have seven and a half years over his head, since he had served more than 22.

Gregg Bernstein, Baltimore City state’s attorney from 2011 to 2015, oversaw at least two similar deals. He couldn’t remember the details but said he’d thought a lot about whether it was okay for an innocent man to take an Alford plea. In the end, he said, most cases lack black-and-white certainty, regardless of evidence suggesting innocence. “It’s not that simple to say yay or nay,” he said. “Pleas are a way to resolve them.”

Former prosecutor Vignarajah, though, told me he wonders if that kind of resolution only looks like a win for everyone on paper. “In reality everyone lost,” he said. “The victim sees no justice. The defendant is walking away with a conviction. And the prosecution didn’t get anyone to take responsibility [for the crime].”

On July 29, 2010, when Thompson left prison under the Alford plea, Holback got the last word: Thompson “is in no way exonerated.”

Since their releases, Thompson and Owens have led dramatically different lives.

Thompson thought he could go back to the person he was almost 23 years earlier, before the murder rap, but society didn’t look at him that way. When he applied for a job, he put a question mark where the form asked if he’d been convicted of a felony.

“I tried to explain I was wrongfully convicted, but people don’t want to hear that,” Thompson said. “There’s no reasoning with somebody. ‘Innocent people do not go to prison’ is just the motto.”

Thompson held onto his freedom for only a little over a year. In October 2011 he was arrested after his ex-girlfriend claimed that he had molested her young daughter. Thompson, who’d recently kicked the girlfriend out of his apartment, denied the charge, saying he’d spanked the girl’s bare butt to discipline her. The state reduced the charges to a misdemeanor for touching the girl’s buttocks and gave him time served for the five months he’d been in jail.

It didn’t end there, though. Because the misdemeanor violated his probation attached to his Alford plea, Thompson went from a local jail to a state prison to serve the remaining seven and a half years.

Mercer said he believes the Alford plea made it very difficult for Thompson to defend himself. “It was a question of credibility,” Mercer said. “Who’s going to believe him? He was stuck having to do damage control.”

Owens has fared better. He has been embraced by what little family he had. He has moved into a cousin’s house and has begun working with him cleaning gutters and doing landscaping. And he has grown close to his nieces and nephews, a bittersweet feeling for someone who’d had no chance to build a family of his own. Owens told me he has tried not to let the anger sink him, but he struggles. His exoneration came without compensation or even an apology. “What’s striking in these cases is a total lack of accountability,” said Michele Nethercott, of the Innocence Project in Baltimore. “Nothing ever really happens” to the police and prosecutors whose actions led to wrongful convictions.

Owens wonders today if his prosecution became all about keeping the win. “Instead of focusing on me and getting me to take a deal for something I didn’t do, they need to focus on the victim. Her murder has never been solved,” he said. “I think they should go back and look and do something for this girl.”

In 2011, Owens found a lawyer, Charles Curlett, to sue Baltimore. Curlett determined that there were several issues of misconduct involved in Owens’ conviction. First, his lawyer had been told nothing of the changing stories Thompson gave the detectives. The information could have been used to undermine Thompson’s credibility and failing to share it was likely a violation of Owens’ due-process rights. Such failures are known as Brady violations, after a 1963 Supreme Court case in which the justices determined that withholding favorable information from the defense is unconstitutional. Also, one of the jailhouse snitches who testified that Owens had confessed had been a police informant for years and said he recruited the other snitch. This, too, wasn’t revealed to the defense, nor were the informant’s letters asking for favors in exchange for his testimony.

Brady violations had become so prevalent in Baltimore’s courts that the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals recently admonished the city’s prosecutors to remember their legal obligations: “Only this practice ensures the fair trial that our justice system aspires to provide” and makes it so “no one has to worry after the fact whether the jury convicted the wrong person.”

The city furiously fought Owens. Dodging such suits, many defense lawyers contend, is part of what drives these plea offers. “If not expressly that, it’s implicit in a lot of decisions made in this setting,” said Michael Imbroscio, an attorney who had a client in Baltimore City take a time-served deal. The city won dismissal of Owens’ suit against the state’s attorney’s office and Brave, who the court ruled had immunity, and the Baltimore Police Department. But the case is going to trial in federal court, likely early next year, against detectives Pellegrini, Landsman and Dunnigan as individuals. There’s millions in compensation at stake for Owens and a public airing of misdeeds for the city.

Civil litigation is “so important,” Mercer said. “Often, that’s the only time there’s scrutiny into what wrongs were done.”

The type of misconduct alleged in Owens’ case is echoed in nine more of the 14 exonerations out of Baltimore City and County since 2002, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The 2014 exoneration of Sabein Burgess, for example, came after it emerged that Baltimore detectives never revealed a key detail to the defense: that a young witness had told them he saw the murder suspect and it wasn’t Burgess. The detectives even submitted a report falsely stating that the witness had been asleep during the crime. Like Owens, Burgess is suing, claiming that detectives “cut corners and rushed to judgment.” His trial is set for this fall and names a different group of detectives.

Misconduct can also be found in the cases of some of the remaining exonerated defendants who, like Thompson, aren’t officially considered exonerated at all but who were released under Alford pleas or time-served deals after questions were raised about their initial convictions. Curlett is representing one such man, Wendell Griffin, who was convicted of murder in Baltimore in 1982. Decades later, it came to light that three detectives — two also featured in Simon’s book and a third who is Landsman’s brother — had buried photo lineups and witness statements pointing to Griffin’s innocence. He was let out on a time-served deal in 2012.

The detectives named in the Owens and Burgess lawsuits have denied allegations of misconduct. Michael Marshall, who represents the detectives in Owens’ and Griffin’s suits, declined to comment, referring questions to the chief of legal affairs for the Baltimore City Police Department, who didn’t return several calls.

Thompson, whose parents died while he was in prison, has been abandoned by the rest of his family. He was released early for good behavior in February after serving a little more than five of his remaining seven and a half years, and as much as he blames himself for his mistakes, he now thinks his plea was a “bum deal.” He wishes there was a way to prove to his loved ones that “although I served 30 years … I didn’t commit the crime.”

The strain of the Alford plea proved too much for one of Baltimore’s wrongly convicted. Chris Conover left prison under the plea in 2003 after DNA called into question his murder conviction in Baltimore County. On the outside, he suffered from severe panic attacks and depression, but his wife told the local newspaper that he couldn’t face in-patient treatment, which meant being back behind locked doors. His petition for a pardon from Maryland’s governor was turned down in 2012. Three years later, Conover killed himself.

“Having been convicted really defines who you are — it becomes itself a prison,” Mercer said. “Once out, with a conviction still on your shoulders, having maintained your innocence in a Alford plea is of little comfort and of very little practical benefit.”

by Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson

During the 2016 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump’s operatives bragged to the press that they tried to dissuade African Americans from voting by targeting them with Facebook posts titled “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.”

If similar ads had appeared on TV, radio or in newspapers, journalists and advocacy groups would have fact-checked them. Negative ads in those media are closely monitored because historically they have influenced elections — most notably in 1988, when a television ad accused presidential candidate Michael Dukakis of “weak-on-crime” policies that enabled a furloughed prisoner named Willie Horton to commit rape.

The Trump ads may have been effective as well. But since they supposedly appeared on Facebook, nobody can say for sure if they ran, what they said or whom they targeted. Even though it’s the world’s largest social network, what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook.

The nature of online advertising is such that ads appear on people’s screens for just a few hours, and are limited to the audience that the advertiser has chosen. So, for example, if an advertiser micro-targets a group such as 40-year-old female motorcyclists in Nashville, Tennessee, (Facebook audience estimate: 1,300 people) with a misleading ad, it’s unlikely anyone other than the bikers will ever see those ads. Yesterday, 10 months after Trump was elected, Facebook officials acknowledged discovering that a Russian “troll farm” paid $100,000 during the campaign to place political ads on issues such as gun rights and immigration, The Washington Post reported.

With online ads, “you can go as narrow as you want, as false as you want and there is no accountability,” said Craig Aaron, president and CEO of Free Press, a public interest media and technology advocacy group.

ProPublica wants to change that. Today we are launching a crowdsourcing tool that will gather political ads from Facebook, the biggest online platform for political discourse. We’re calling it the Political Ad Collector — or PAC, in a nod to the Political Action Committees that fund many of today’s political ads.

We will begin using the PAC this month to track ads during the run-up to the German parliamentary election, which will be held on Sept. 24. The election has drawn international attention as a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies, and a test of the strength of an anti-immigration party, Alternative for Germany (AfD).

We plan to monitor other elections, including the midterm elections in the U.S. In the U.S., information about politicians’ use of online ads is especially sparse because of loopholes in the campaign finance laws that allow candidates to report fewer details about their online advertising than about other types of advertising.

We are working with three news outlets in Germany — Spiegel Online, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Tagesschau. They will ask their readers to install our tool, and will use it themselves to monitor ads during the election.

The tool is a small piece of software that users can add to their web browser (Chrome). When users log into Facebook, the tool will collect the ads displayed on the user’s news feed and guess which ones are political based on an algorithm built by ProPublica.

One benefit for interested users is that the tool will show them Facebook political ads that weren’t aimed at their demographic group, and that they wouldn’t ordinarily see.

The tool does not collect any personally identifiable information, and we will not know which ads are shown to which user. The political ads that we collect will be contributed to a public database that will allow the public to see them all.

Facebook gives users more information about why a particular ad is targeted to them than other online platforms provide to their customers. Our tool will also collect that targeting information provided by Facebook, which may help illuminate what viewership the ads are trying to reach.

After the U.S. presidential election, Facebook launched its own transparency efforts. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has rolled out a series of initiatives to tackle fake news on its site. And although it doesn’t fact-check ads, Facebook does require advertisers to comply with the law, which includes prohibitions against deceptive advertising. This week Facebook said it had shut down the “inauthentic accounts” affiliated with Russia that had placed ads during the 2016 election cycle and is taking steps to prevent similar accounts from popping up in the future.

Still, more can be done to hold politicians, PACs and others accountable for the messages they spread online. We hope that by monitoring political advertising on Facebook, we can increase the transparency and accountability of elections around the world.

Please join us!

by Joaquin Sapien

In the 1960s, New York began to clear out its scandal-ridden psychiatric hospitals. In their place, a new system emerged. Thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers moved into “adult homes,” large apartment complexes concentrated mostly in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. The homes were meant to provide a safer, more humane alternative to the hospitals; they were closer to where many of the patients lived, and promised modest psychiatric care and other services.

But decades later, that grand vision had devolved into something that looked more like a nightmare.

In 2001, New York Times metro reporter Cliff Levy spent a year investigating conditions of the homes. He found that more than 1,000 people died in a six-year period. Some threw themselves off of rooftops. Others succumbed to extreme heat, only to be found days later, decomposing in fetid rooms. He found that the homes were often staffed by unqualified workers paid a pittance to look after a population in desperate need.

Today, Cliff is a deputy managing editor at the Times. He has joined us on this episode of The Breakthrough to discuss the 2001 series, “Broken Homes.”

He describes how he developed his own novel way of obtaining records of deaths in the facilities, and how he tracked down former workers who detailed schemes invented by the home’s operators to maximize profits. He tells us how he made cold call after cold call to reach the relatives of dead residents.

“It’s exhausting, and it’s really depressing,” Levy said in describing the effort. “And you ask yourself, like, ‘Maybe I’m just wasting my time.’ But then, at some point, you reach someone.”

The stories helped prompt a class-action lawsuit, which led to a federal court order requiring New York state’s Department of Health to move as many as 4,000 mentally ill residents into their own apartments, where they can live more independently with individualized services.

ProPublica is now examining that transition and the effort to improve conditions at the homes. Thus far, the state’s progress has been slow and controversial:

Earlier this summer, we reported that the Department of Health is behind in its deadlines to move the residents. We learned that a federal judge has accused the state of trying to evade the regulations at the heart of his order by colluding with industry. We spent parts of several weeks at a home called Oceanview Manor in Coney Island, where residents wander around outside the facility drinking malt liquor, begging for change and eating from garbage cans, looking ill and unkempt. Workers seemed outmatched, and the home’s owners declined to be interviewed.

We are looking to continue our reporting on this subject.

Listen to this podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud or Stitcher.

by Andrew Revkin

The disinformation and falsehoods that can accompany breaking news online — involving terror attacks or national elections — have become a familiar plague in recent years. Big weather stories, it now seems clear, are not immune.

On Twitter, Facebook and a handful of other venues, hundreds of thousands of people in recent days have clicked or shared items with headlines warning that Hurricane Irma was poised to become a Category 6 storm (on the five-level Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity) that “could wipe entire cities off the map.”

The fact-checking website Snopes made quick work of debunking that claim. Still, the National Weather Service felt moved to post warnings about fake forecasts.

Meanwhile, Conservative News Today posted a Facebook Live video of a bus being toppled by Irma and a ship in enormous seas said to be carrying “hurricane chasers” heading into Irma. Neither was true. With help from social media, ProPublica tracked the original video of the endangered ship back to January 2013; it was shot in a terrible storm 60 miles or so off the coast of Portugal.

Over the last two weeks, there have also been a host of simplistic proclamations online about the role of human-driven climate change in Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey, both overstating and discounting it. As Irma approaches Florida, the issues with sifting fake and real news become more consequential.

With all that in mind, ProPublica reached out to Jane Lytvynenko, a Toronto-based journalist who’s been covering misinformation and disinformation for BuzzFeed since November and previously covered the media for Canadaland. On Wednesday, Lytvynenko posted what has become a running, and growing, list of Hurricane Irma fakery and disinformation.

Here’s a condensed and edited version of our brief chat, followed by some reliable sources of information on Irma and other extreme storms.

Did you move to BuzzFeed specifically to cover mis/disinformation?

I did. We look at online mis/disinformation and how it spreads. 

Does the flow of misinformation around weather events or climate change seem different in some ways to that around other breaking news?

In some ways, misinformation around weather is a little different. We see a lot of people share old photos or images seemingly by accident, without malice or a political agenda. During Harvey, many of the hyper-partisan and fake news sites that post false information were quiet during the first couple of days. That’s not the case during terror attacks or political events, for example. In those cases, the spin and misinformation come very quickly and each side tends to settle on a few key messages. 

At the same time, what unites misinformation around weather and politics is emotion. If you scroll through fake news headlines, you’ll see that most of them want to inflame a sense of anger or injustice. Sometimes that means trash-talking a politician, other times that means playing on racial tensions. During Harvey, for example, we saw stories about Black Lives Matter blocking emergency crews from entering the city. BLM was actually helping hurricane victims, but the fake news went viral because it inflamed people’s emotions and biases. 

Do you feel like you’re whistling in a Category 6 windstorm? In other words, do you feel it’s useful to attempt this?

Sometimes. With individual debunk posts, it’s unlikely that the person spreading misinformation will see me refuting it. At the same time, it’s an opportunity to teach the audience what to look for and how to identify misleading information. People appreciate having one go-to place in times of crisis. It’s good to see people use our posts to actively call out misinformation. That means some people still care about having a grip on reality. 

Have you been fooled? I have, twice that I know of. The first time came in 2015, when I was writing a post hurriedly on the Nepal earthquake and included an embedded YouTube video of a sloshing hotel swimming pool that turned out to be from a previous Mexican quake. The second came August 27, when I joined those retweeting an image of planes submerged on a flooded runway — which of course turned out to be a bootlegged photo visualization of the impacts of sea-level rise from a 2013 Climate Central article. I was quickly rebuked.

I haven’t gotten fooled recently, but that’s because my trust levels are so low. If I read an article on an unfamiliar website, I immediately start checking for clues of it being fake — was the image stolen, was it registered recently, is it only masquerading as a legitimate source? My friends make fun of me for it, but it means I keep the fakes out of my feed. 

What drives you to pursue this as a beat?

Misinformation can be dangerous. During a hurricane, misinformation can clog official messages from getting through. Sometimes it sways attitudes and public opinion. If people don’t know who to trust, they’ll put more faith in their own biases and that can be dangerous. 

Who do you see, if anyone, as the competition on this beat?

This is a tough question because the field of misinformation is so wide. We’ve seen other mainstream publications start debunk roundups like ours, which is really great. But when it comes to the big projects (like this study we recently published) we’re unique because we dedicate reporters to uncovering online misinformation trends. Some of us do nothing else. 

For those eager to sift reality from belief-affirming fantasy, there’s plenty of accurate online guidance on hurricanes and other meteorological hazards. On Wednesday, CrowdTangle, a company making platforms for news organizations or others tracking social media, created a dashboard with the social media flow from trustworthy sources on hurricanes.

The first stop, of course, is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center for guidance on current storms (including through its @NHC_Atlantic Twitter feed) and long-term patterns. The federal Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory posted an invaluable primer earlier this year on hurricanes and global warming.

To put current tropical storms in historical context, Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University is one of the top experts. On Wednesday, he posted a summary of Irma superlatives including the remarkable fact that this Atlantic Ocean giant had, as of Wednesday night, already become the extreme-wind endurance champion for such storms, maintaining winds of 185 miles per hour for 33 hours.

This roundly beat 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan in the Pacific, the previous record holder, which held such destructive velocities for 24 hours.

by Scott Klein and Ryann Grochowski Jones

It’s no secret that we like math at ProPublica. Our data team creates its own statistical models, drawing insights that support — and help guide — reporting done in more traditional ways. We feel strongly that investing in quantitative methods can help a newsroom find stories that would otherwise go unreported.

We have four full-time data journalists, as well as a team of developer-journalists and a wider newsroom that’s full of very nerdy reporters. But despite a wide range of talents and expertise, we often find ourselves in quantitative conundrums that we need help to understand and untangle.

That’s why today we’re announcing a new group of advisers who will help us solve our thorniest problems and do data journalism at the highest possible level. These four people will help us develop methodologies, answer practical questions, introduce us to other domain experts and be another set of eyes on the white papers we write to explain our work.

They have diverse backgrounds and an array of areas of expertise. We’re incredibly excited to introduce them.

Miguel Hernán is the Kolokotrones professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He also teaches courses at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His research focuses on what works best for treating and preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease and HIV. Hernán received his M.D. from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and an M.P.H, Dr.P.H. and M.S. from Harvard.

Charles Lang is a visiting assistant professor in learning analytics at Columbia University’s Teachers College. He researches student learning through predictive analytics and graphical models. He received his Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as a B.S. in biochemistry and B.A. in political science from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Heather Lynch is an associate professor of ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University. Her work as an ecologist involves using quantitative analysis and data collection methods to research the effect climate change and fishing has had on the Antarctic penguin population. She holds a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard, an M.A. in physics from Harvard and an A.B. in physics from Princeton.

M. Marit Rehavi is an assistant professor of economics at the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Rehavi researches influences on the decision-making process in medicine, politics and law by exploring and analyzing large datasets. She received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.Sc. in economics and economic history from the London School of Economics and an A.B. in economics from Harvard.

Our hope is that these experts will work both individually and as a group to help guide the in-depth data analyses that we’re known for. This is the first time we’re attempting such an advisory group (in fact, it might be the first time any newsroom has done this), so it’s going to be a bit of an experiment. We’re thrilled to see what comes of it.

por Hannah Dreier

Este verano, Edwin, un hombre de Kansas City, recibió una llamada de funcionarios de inmigración que le informaron que habían recogido a su sobrino en la frontera sur. Querían liberar al adolescente y entregarlo a su cuidado. Por esto, Edwin fue al internet y compró una cama.

Más tarde en esa semana fue contactado nuevamente, esta vez por un detective de la Oficina de Inmigración y Aduanas, quien tocó a su puerta. El agente le dio una carta a Edwin que decía que necesitaba ir a la sede principal para una entrevista sobre tres delitos federales: conspiración, fraude de visas, y contrabando de personas.

A través del país, personas como Edwin que han acogido a parientes indocumentados están siendo arrasados por lo que ICE llama una represión contra los guardianes que pagan a los contrabandistas humanos.

Más de 400 personas fueron arrestadas en el transcurso de dos meses este verano, como parte del nuevo enfoque. Otros aún siguen esquivando las entrevistas de ICE, han aceptado pasar por los procedimientos de deportación, o se han dado a la fuga. Algunos de los afectados admiten que pagaron a los “coyotes” para reunirlos con sus hijos menores. Pero muchos son daños colaterales: Personas que estaban en la casa cuando ICE llegó, o parientes que acordaron recibir a adolescentes después de que viajaron solos a los Estados Unidos.

“El mensaje queda claro: No apoyen a nadie si están aquí de manera ilegal, o tendrán problemas”, dijo Claude Arnold, un agente especial de ICE jubilado quien apoya la nueva ley. “La idea es tener un efecto disuasorio, por lo tanto, cuando un adolescente dice: ‘Tío, puedo pagar mi propio viaje, ¿puedo quedarme con ustedes?’ el tío va a decir ‘No, de ninguna manera’”.

Edwin, quien pidió que no se mencionara su apellido debido a posibles cargos penales pendientes, ha vivido en los Estados Unidos por más de 15 años y dice que nunca le pagó a nadie para ayudar a su sobrino a cruzar la frontera. Señala que ha hecho todo de manera legal desde que emigró desde El Salvador a Missouri en el 2001. Apenas entró, consiguió un trabajo en una tintorería y obtuvo Estatus de Protección Temporal, que le permite vivir y trabajar en los Estados Unidos mientras mantenga un récord criminal limpio. Él no sigue las noticias y no sabía que se estaba arriesgando a ser deportado por aceptar recibir a su sobrino. Pero dijo que no le habría importado, ya que él no podía haberle negado la ayuda al hijo de su hermana.

“Mi sobrino esta grande y él toma sus propias decisiones. Todo el mundo hace su propio camino. Pero él es mi familia y es mi deber ayudarlo”, dijo Edwin.

Wilbur, el sobrino de Edwin, vivió en Kansas City con Estatus de Protección Temporal cuando era niño, pero sus padres decidieron llevarlo de regreso a El Salvador cuando tenía seis años. Él dijo que tomó la decisión de regresar a los Estados Unidos después de graduarse de la escuela secundaria esta primavera, porque se sentía amenazado por las pandillas. Wilbur tomó un bus a través de Guatemala, viajó a través de México en una camioneta pickup, y cruzó la frontera de Texas en la parte de atrás del remolque de un tractor un mes antes de cumplir 18 años. Fue capturado casi inmediatamente por los oficiales estadounidenses.

Alrededor del 90 por ciento de los menores detenidos en la frontera sur se entregan finalmente a un miembro de la familia. Es un sistema diseñado para liberar al estado de tener que cuidar a los niños y permitir a los jóvenes vivir en viviendas normales mientras sus solicitudes de asilo y visa se procesan a través de los tribunales.

Bajo la orden del Presidente Barack Obama, ICE fue instruido a no perseguir a los adultos que venía a reclamar parientes, incluso si ellos estaban en los Estados Unidos ilegalmente. A los guardianes se les dijo que no tenía razón alguna para temer revelarse a las autoridades. Bajo el presidente Donald Trump, esa política se ha reversado.

Los funcionarios de la administración de Donald Trump dicen que es menos un cambio de política que un retorno sensato a la aplicación de las leyes de inmigración. En un memorándum enviado en febrero, el entonces Secretario de Seguridad Nacional, John F. Kelly, dijo que aunque todas las leyes de inmigración deberían ser obligatorias, es especialmente importante ir tras la gente involucrada “directa o indirectamente” en el contrabando humano, porque el viaje al norte puede ser muy peligroso para los niños.

“Independientemente de los deseos de reunificación familiar, o de las condiciones en otros países, el contrabando o el tráfico de niños extranjeros es intolerable”, escribió.

Edwin se sintió desconcertado cuando un detective de inmigración se apareció en su puerta una mañana en julio, y se sintió aún mucho más confundido por la carta en la que le pide ir a la sede de ICE la semana siguiente para hablar sobre los delitos relacionados con el tráfico humano.

Debido a que Edwin tiene un estatus protegido, pudo tomar la carta y continuar con su día. Para las personas que se encuentran de manera ilegal en el país, las cosas han sido muy distintas.

Una pareja que vivía en Nuevo Mexico huyó del estado después de que los agentes del ICE se aparecieron en agosto, preguntando por un sobrino que habían recibido recientemente. Ellos le dijeron a su abogado que ni siquiera sabían que el joven en la escuela secundaria estaba en camino desde Guatemala.

En Tennessee, dos agentes del ICE llegaron con pistolas y chalecos antibalas a arrestar a una madre que se escondió en su casa móvil. La madre dijo que ella no tenía ni idea de que su hija de 16 años estaba en camino desde Honduras. Los agentes abandonaron el sitio cuando los vecinos comenzaron a tomar fotos.

El Servicio Luterano de Inmigración y Refugiados, el cual tiene un contrato con el gobierno de los EE.UU. para ayudar a unir a los menores no acompañados con sus familiares, ha visto casos en los últimos meses de primos y medio hermanos detenidos en a la ofensiva. En junio, tres miembros de una sola familia en Missouri que habían estado trabajando con la agencia fueron puestos en proceso de deportación después de que ICE les preguntó sobre el tráfico de indocumentados.

En total, más de 400 personas fueron detenidas entre finales de junio y finales de agosto, como parte de lo que ICE describe como una oleada de implementación para reforzar la estrategia de ir trás de los guardianes. La gran mayoría de esas 400 personas fueron acusadas de violaciones de leyes de inmigración, no de delitos relacionados con el tráfico de indocumentados.

En julio, un grupo de miembros demócratas del Congreso pidieron a ICE obtener detalles sobre el cambio de enfoque, pero aún no han recibido ninguna respuesta.

Por ahora, Edwin está ignorando su citación. Dijo que cuando él no compareció ante la sede de ICE, un agente respondió yendo a la tintorería donde trabaja para revisar sus documentos de empleo. Él está esperando que el agente pierda interés, pero ya no sabe que suponer.

“He estado aquí más de una década y nunca he tenido ningún problema con los oficiales. Ahora, está cambiando todo”, dijo. “Ahora, todo es peligroso”.