The life-changing and life-saving stories stand out

Asked to search across my 40-year career in newspapers for an indelible, poignant memory, my mind immediately went to two Dispatch series that continue to deliver profound positive effects for Ohioans.

The first was “Test of Convictions,” a series about Ohio’s woeful collection, retention and use of DNA evidence in criminal cases.

Reporters Mike Wagner and Geoff Dutton spent all of the year 2007 traveling the state, visiting courthouse record files and most of the state’s prisons to talk with imprisoned people.

The Dispatch published the series in 2008, and it revealed a system in which prosecutors ignored court orders for testing, judges rejected inmates without following the law, and evidence was routinely lost or destroyed before it could be tested.

Across the past 13 years, seven men have been exonerated or released from prison because DNA testing that resulted from this series showed the men did not commit the crimes for which they had been convicted.

I cannot think of a greater public service than helping right wrongs such as those. One man had been in prison for 30 years for a crime he didn’t commit.

Let that sink in: He was locked up for 30 years.

The Dispatch reviewed the 313 cases of inmates who requested DNA testing at the time and found:

● Evidence had been lost or destroyed nearly two-thirds of the time when prosecutors agreed to search for it. Ohio did not require evidence to be catalogued and saved, as 22 states did at the time.

● Even when evidence was available, the applications for testing typically went nowhere. Judges didn’t bother rejecting the requests in 53 cases; they simply ignored them.

● Ohio law requires judges to cite a reason when they reject a DNA test. Nearly a third of the time, they didn’t. Many rulings were one-sentence denials.

● Even in cases in which a judge granted testing, the inmate’s odds of actually receiving a test still were no better than a coin toss. The Dispatch discovered 13 cases in which testing hadn’t been done more than a year after a judge approved it – in some cases, more than two years.

● Tests had been done in only 14 cases since a 2003 law allowed inmates to apply. Two resulted in exonerations. Seven confirmed guilt. The others were inconclusive.

In addition to helping free seven men, the series also resulted in a number of law changes designed to help ensure better collection, retention and use of DNA evidence.

Wagner wrote the most recent story in this ongoing series in September of this year.

A DNA test shows that a Canton man’s DNA doesn’t match the sample

from a rape kit in his 1996 criminal case, and yet, he can’t get a hearing to clear his name.

The story showed that even with the law changes, the justice system remains resistant to efforts by those who are wrongly convicted to reclaim their lives.

The long tail of this story exists because of a journalistic trait embodied by Wagner, a tenacious reporter who won’t let something like this go.

He has written story after story as men are released from prison or new cases develop. Thirteen years is a long time to stick with a story, but a public service such as this one is worth chasing for as long as it takes to make sure justice is carried out.

The second indelible memory is from 2015, when we published a series about suicide – a topic one editor said no one would talk with us about. In fact, people couldn’t stop talking about a cause of death that is 100% preventable and remains at crisis levels today.

Wagner worked on that series, too, along with Lori Kurtzman and Jill Riepenhoff.

They spent nine months examining the deaths of thousands of our children, mothers, fathers, grandparents and friends since 2000.

The newspaper studied 15 years’ worth of Ohio death records and scrutinized more than 1,500 coroners’ investigative reports on suicides in nine counties that represent a cross-section of the state.

The findings from those records reported in the “Silent Suffering” series were stark:

From 2000 to 2015, more than 20,000 people had died by suicide in Ohio – nearly triple the number of homicide victims.

More than 80% of those who took their own lives were male. Middle-age men, ages 45 to 64, accounted for nearly a quarter of all suicides.

The youngest victims were just 8 years old – and there were three of them.

Even though the state’s suicide rate dropped in 2014 to its lowest point in more than a decade, it still accounted for 10.8 deaths per 100,000 people. That meant that more than three Ohioans died by suicide every day. And this isn’t an issue just for Ohio. It’s a national problem.

And it remains a national problem. I was reminded of this last week when Terry Demio, a reporter with our sister news organization, The Cincinnati Enquirer, wrote that the phone number 988 is to become the new National Suicide Prevention Lifeline in July 2022.

The three-digit help line is being paid for with $280 million in federal funding, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use Dr. Miriam Delphinrittmon, who announced it last week.

The new number will offer help by voice, text and chat, officials said. Until the service is up, the officials stressed, the national suicide prevention line remains: 800-273-8255.

Our hope is that a combination of such services and continued conversation will help save lives. People will talk about it if given the opportunity.

As we prepared for a public forum The Dispatch hosted after publishing the Silent Suffering series – on a cold, snowy, Monday night in December – I watched in amazement from the back of the room.

The hall with seats for more than 300 quickly filled to capacity with people who wanted to talk about a subject some said no one would want to talk about.

A young woman approached me and introduced herself as someone who had recently started up a conversation with me on Twitter. She was not surprised by the turnout, because she knew personally what it meant to be there.

“I just want you to know that what you all wrote saved my life,” she said.

That’s journalism with impact, and it’s a memory I will carry with me always.

Alan D. Miller is editor of The Dispatch. amiller@dispatch.com @dispatcheditor