The State Bar of Texas honored winners of the 2013 Texas Gavel Awards on Friday during the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas’s annual conference in Austin.
The winners are:
• Craig Malisow of the Houston Press for “Blood Money,” in the print-major metro category. “Blood Money” is an in-depth look at the case of more than 200 soldiers who sued a military contractor for their exposure to toxic chemicals in Iraq.
• Emma Perez-Treviño of the Valley Morning Star for “Corruption,” in the print-nonmetro category. “Corruption” is a series of reports documenting a web of connections, indictments, and convictions in the Cameron County judiciary and legal system.
• Brandi Grissom, Justin Dehn, and Ryan Murphy of The Texas Tribune for “Errors in Judgment,” in the online-only category. In “Errors in Judgment,” the Tribune reviewed court records in each of the more than 80 overturned Texas convictions between 1989 and 2011 and found that nearly a quarter of the cases involved prosecutorial error that contributed to the wrong outcome.
The Texas Gavel Awards are sponsored each year by the State Bar of Texas Public Affairs Committee and judged by out-of-state journalists and editors, legal reporting experts, attorneys with journalism backgrounds, and members of academia. Journalists play an important role in educating the public about the legal system, and the Texas Gavel Awards honor those efforts.
To read the winning stories and learn more about the winners, visit texasbar.com/gavelawardwinners.
Pictured, from left, are State Bar of Texas Board of Directors chair Cindy Tisdale, Perez-Treviño, Malisow, Dehn, and Rudy England, the chair of the State Bar of Texas Public Affairs Committee.