Summary
- The Marshall Project’s Cleveland branch is an experiment in reporting only on criminal justice in one city, and the Marshall Project has since expanded the model to Jackson, Mississippi, and St. Louis, Missouri.
- Since its creation in 2022, The Marshall Project – Cleveland has reported on jail deaths, license suspension rules and reform, bail reform, judicial misconduct, access to natural light in jail, new jail construction, and more.
- Phil Trexler, editor-in-chief of The Marshall Project-Cleveland, said that in Cleveland the criminal justice system is especially difficult to report on because public records are increasingly difficult to access.
Follow-Up Questions
- There was a lot of talk about sentencing transparency and about how different judges can give different sentences for the same offense. Are there jurisdictions with better rules about this?
- How can newsrooms like The Marshall Project present their very serious, long stories in a way that gets the attention of people who don’t typically read very serious, long stories?
- How successful has The Marshall Project been in Jackson, Mississippi, and St. Louis, Missouri?
The City Club of Cleveland welcomed three members of The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization focused on criminal justice, to talk about their work. The Marshall Project has a newsroom focused on Cleveland, where it has been working since 2022.
The three members of the panel were:
- Mark Puente – Investigative Reporter, The Marshall Project-Cleveland
- Phil Trexler – Editor-in-Chief, The Marshall Project-Cleveland
- Marlon A. Walker – Managing Editor, Local, The Marshall Project
The conversation
City Club of Cleveland CEO Dan Moulthrop moderated a conversation about how The Marshall Project – Cleveland began, its successes, its struggles, and how it relates to Cleveland’s media ecosystem.
You can find a complete recording of the discussion on the City Club of Cleveland’s website.
The Marshall Project launched in 2015. Named after legendary jurist Thurgood Marshall, it has gone on to garner some of journalism’s biggest prizes with its work focused exclusively on criminal justice. The Marshall Project – Cleveland launched in 2022 after the national group created Testify, an in-depth look at Cleveland’s court system. [Editor’s note: As part of the Testify project. Cleveland Documenters collaborated with The Marshall Project – Cleveland to learn what people in Cleveland wanted to know about judges.]
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Walker, who joined The Marshall Project to manage the local branches, said the initiative grew out of a desire to help hold local institutions accountable rather than only reporting on nationally relevant stories.
“The Marshall Project decided to pivot and add local news to its resume,” he said.
Puente and Trexler, both veteran journalists in the area, joined to form the Cleveland newsroom. They have since worked on stories about judicial misconduct, the impact of new laws, body cam footage rules, deaths in jail and more.
Puente said the thing he’s most proud of working on is license suspension laws, which allow judges to suspend people’s licenses over minor infractions and unpaid fees. His and others’ work has led to state-led reform of those laws.
“There has been some positive change for people in every part of Ohio,” Puente said.
Trexler said there were some differences in how The Marshall Project-Cleveland operates relative to other newsrooms. First, it works primarily on investigations, which can take weeks or months. That means they can focus on long-term stories and trends and be “relentless” in pursuing them, as he put it. Second, because it’s a nonprofit, The Marshall Project often shares its work with other newsrooms. This is opposed to the more traditional model of reporting, where multiple outlets are competing for the same stories.
The Q&A session
As is City Club custom, the audience, including some local judicial heavyweights, asked the panel a variety of questions.
- Former Ohio Supreme Court Justice Michael Donnelly asked about how The Marshall Project could address sentencing disparities between the various judges in the Cuyahoga Court of Common Pleas, where most criminal cases are heard. Trexler said he and others had tried to compile sentencing data for judges but ran into difficulty with Cuyahoga County turning over information.
- Pat Dillard asked about whether anything could be done about the Cuyahoga County jail keeping people for 12 days without charging them, and the panel agreed that more awareness was needed about the issue.
- Matthew Ahn of the Ohio Justice & Policy Center asked if The Marshall Project had influenced other newsrooms in the language they use to describe the justice system. The Marshall Project created a style guide for writing about criminal justice in 2021, and Walker said that other newsrooms often use it.
- Nina McLellan asked if The Marshall Project had created information about judges up for re-election. The panel pointed to the guide they worked on with Signal Cleveland to create a “baseball card,” as Trexler put it, for each judge running.
- Josephine Bullock asked about how The Marshall Project was using new digital media to connect with younger people. Walker said he was always trying to use graphics and TikTok to present stories in other ways.
- Marcia Egbert from The Gund Foundation (which helps fund The Marshall Project – Cleveland) asked about how the panel thought about themselves on the spectrum from advocates to journalists. Walker said his work was about journalism, and that any impact the work had beyond that was a bonus. “It’s not expected, but it’s lovely when it happens,” he said.
- Celeste Simcox of Motogo asked how challenging it was to gain access to the juvenile justice system. Trexler said that, like the rest of the system, it was very challenging.
These notes are by Documenter Andrew Kenneson.
If you believe anything in these notes is inaccurate, please email us at documenters@signalcleveland.org with “Correction Request” in the subject line.