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The 2015 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Public Service
For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalistic resources, including the use of stories, editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or other visual material, a gold medal.

The Post and Courier, by The Post and Courier

For "Till Death Do Us Part," a riveting series that probed why South Carolina is among the deadliest states in the union for women and put the issue of what to do about it on the state's agenda.
Mike Pride, Lee Bollinger and Post and Courier staff

Mike Pride, Pulitzer Prize Administrator (left), and Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University (second from left), present the 2015 Public Service Prize to Jennifer Berry Hawes, Natalie Caula Hauff, Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith and Mitch Pugh (left to right) of The Post and Courier.

Winning Work

August 20, 2014

Lexington County unit strives to break the cycle of violence 

By Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes and Natalie Caula Hoff
 
LEXINGTON — Cpl. Steve Gamble watched from a second-floor window in the old county courthouse as people charged with criminal domestic violence arrived to attend hearings on their cases.
 
The Lexington County sheriff’s deputy waited to see who might show up with a wife, girlfriend or ex-lover they had been ordered to stay away from. It didn’t take long.
 
A man soon walked in with the woman he’d been accused of assaulting. Big mistake. He’d been barred from contacting her as a condition of bail.
 
When Gamble confronted him at the front door, the man told the deputy he and the woman just happened to arrive at the same time. It didn’t work, and the man soon admitted she drove him to the courthouse.
 
Later that morning, Gamble detailed this story for the judge, who was not amused. The judge pronounced the man guilty of contempt and ordered him jailed for 20 days.
 
As the bailiffs handcuffed the stunned man and led him from the courtroom, he turned to the judge and pleaded, “Your honor! Please! Please!” That got him nowhere.
 
Nicole Howland, Lexington County’s criminal domestic abuse prosecutor, said zero tolerance for abusers who violate the terms of their bonds is just one of the steps necessary to make them realize law enforcement and the courts take the crime very seriously.
 
“It’s the only way to deal with domestic abusers. Domestic violence is all about accountability.”
 
Howland is a key member of what the state Attorney General’s Office considers to be the finest criminal domestic violence unit in the state.
 
The unit has a no-tolerance approach that focuses on jailing batterers or putting them in a 26-week counseling session designed to curb their abusive behavior. Failure to successfully complete the sessions will land the abuser in jail.
 
People often mistake domestic violence for anger management problems, but it’s not, Howland said. Abusers are calculating and manipulative. To outsiders they can seem charming and fabulous. But at home they “use violence because it works.” With counseling, and the threat of a swift jail sentence, they can be taught not to use it, she said.
 
The Lexington County Sheriff Department’s special criminal domestic violence unit started in 1999 with a federal grant. It coordinates the efforts of the court, prosecutors, law enforcement, mental health workers and victim advocates. The goal is to increase the safety of victims and hold abusers accountable.
 
One of the tools employed is a “lethality assessment” to help determine when greater intervention, such as separation, counseling or jail, is needed because of an abuser’s escalating threat of deadly violence. The indicators include killing animals, forced sex, bite marks and strangulation.
 
Domestic killings used to account for four out of every five homicides, but now the department can go a year at a time without any, Howland said. And, she said, it’s rare for a killing to occur if the criminal domestic violence unit has had any dealings with the couple.
 
Last year, the Sheriff’s Department saw no cases of domestic homicide. The department’s success may even have some spillover impact in the county’s other police jurisdictions. All together, the county experienced an average of two domestic homicides
a year since 2005.
 
A study conducted four years after the unit started also found results. Researchers from the University of Florida and the University of South Carolina found that the department’s arrests increased 10 percent and the odds of recidivism dropped by half.
 
The operation was so successful that when the initial federal grant ran out in 2002, the Sheriff’s Department absorbed much of the cost to keep it in operation. The unit currently operates on a $221,213 budget.
 
The system works because everyone involved is focused on dealing with the crime, the abuser and the victim. It builds experience, knowledge and collaborative capability, Howland said.
 
She is based at the Sheriff’s Department, working with two dedicated investigators and a full-time victim advocate. When cases go to Lexington’s criminal domestic violence court, the judge can call on advocates and mental health counselors to get victims the help they need. Sheriff’s Cpl. Gamble worked as a road deputy for eight years before joining the unit wanting to help put a dent in domestic violence. “I want to break the cycle,” he said. “I know some are alive today because of us.”
January 23, 2015

Jan. 23, 2015

To the judges for the Pulitzer Prize for public service:

On Jan. 13, South Carolina’s attorney general joined powerful lawmakers, prosecutors and police in a “call to action” to enact long-needed reform to the state’s domestic violence laws. The goal: to end the bloodshed that has made the state one of the nation’s deadliest for women.

“This is the year we will make a difference,” House Speaker Jay Lucas told a crowd that packed the Statehouse Rotunda. “This is the year we finally will pass a comprehensive bill.”

His words came just six months after a dozen reform bills on domestic violence died in the Legislature for lack of action, unable to muster enough interest to warrant up-or-down votes. This had been the fate of such bills for a decade.

What was the difference between this year and the past 10 years? In August, The Post and Courier published a five-part series, “Till Death Do Us Part,” which shamed lawmakers into action by exposing South Carolina as a state where more than 300 women had died in a decade’s time while its leaders did little to stem the violence. It’s a state where domestic abusers face a maximum of 30 days behind bars for brutalizing a wife or girlfriend but up to five years in prison for cruelty to a dog.

The series revealed numerous failings, including limited police training, inadequate laws, a lack of punishment, insufficient education for judges, a dearth of victim support and traditional beliefs about the sanctity of marriage that keep victims locked in the cycle of abuse. These factors combine in a corrosive stew that has made South Carolina one of the deadliest states in the nation for women at the hands of men since rankings began 17 years ago. The state topped the list three times and never fell from the deadliest 10.

From the beginning of our reporting, we worked to show domestic violence was not a problem isolated to a particular group or economic class. We took care to highlight victims and stories that demonstrated domestic abuse was a societal problem, cutting across all walks of life and generations.

We also realized there could be no foundation for change without understanding. So we worked to counter misconceptions about why victims stay with their abusers and why batterers brutalize the ones they love. We took pains to explain the many factors – generational, cultural, economic, psychological – that drive abuse, and the hurdles many women face in order to leave destructive relationships.

Reporting on the series began in September 2013 when the Violence Police Center in Washington, D.C., ranked South Carolina No. 1 in the nation in the rate of women killed by men. We formed a team of four reporters to take a deep look at why this was so and what could be done to reduce the carnage.

With computer training, financial assistance and advice from the Center for Investigative Reporting, the team compiled the first-ever database of those killed over the past decade, using police reports, court records, criminal rap sheets and other documents to plot the locations of killings, determine what had happened and look for commonalities and trends. We also studied conviction rates and plea deals, something our state judicial system does not track.

We knew some might question our findings or challenge the conclusions reached, so we took a position of utter transparency. Online, we linked every fact and statistic in the stories to the studies, reports and other source material from which they were derived. We made our database available to readers to check our methodology and run their own calculations. We did the same with court records and other electronic data we used. The result: We did not receive a single complaint about the accuracy or fairness of our report.

To the contrary, “Till Death Do Us Part” already has prompted swift and potentially sweeping action to curb our state’s staggering death toll from domestic violence. Both chambers of the Legislature quickly moved to draft comprehensive reforms to the state’s domestic violence laws that include tougher penalties and a firearms ban on convicted abusers. Legislators have fast-tracked these bills and have pledged to see them through to up-ordown votes.

Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has pledged support for the gun ban, and announced in December that she would form a statewide task force to work on curbing the state’s culture of abuse. Haley said she would formally create the taskforce by the end of this month. The state’s attorney general pledged to put more prosecutors in the field to handle domestic violence cases, and authorities in the Charleston area formed the state’s first domestic violence fatality review team to look for ways to prevent future killings.

The newspaper has written more than 40 follow-up stories to keep the issue before the public and lawmakers. Our entry package includes some of these follow-up stories as supplemental material to show the impact of the series on lawmakers and the public. The actual PDF entry includes a page showing thumbnails of the way the stories were presented in the newspaper followed by pages in two-column format for reading.

We nominate “Till Death Do Us Part” and reporters Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Hawes and Natalie Caula Hauff for the Pulitzer Prize for a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper.

Sincerely,

Mitch Pugh

Executive Editor

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Public Service in 2015:

The Boston Globe

For its stories, videos, photos and graphics exposing a poorly regulated, profit-driven housing system that subjected thousands of college students in Boston to unsafe, and even deadly, conditions.

The Wall Street Journal

For "Deadly Medicine," a stellar reporting project that documented the significant cancer risk to women of a common surgery and prompted a change in the prescribed medical treatment.

The Jury

Scott Kraft(Chair )

deputy managing editor

Rebecca Blumenstein

deputy editor-in-chief

Robin Fields

managing editor

Martin Gottlieb

editor

Josh Meyer

director of education and outreach, National Security Journalism Initiative

Sandy Sugawara

managing editor

Rene Sanchez

editor and senior vice president

Winners in Public Service

2014

The Guardian US

For its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.
2013

Sun Sentinel

For its well documented investigation of off-duty police officers who recklessly speed and endanger the lives of citizens, leading to disciplinary action and other steps to curtail a deadly hazard.
2012

The Philadelphia Inquirer

For its exploration of pervasive violence in the city's schools, using powerful print narratives and videos to illuminate crimes committed by children against children and to stir reforms to improve safety for teachers and students.
2011

Los Angeles Times

For its exposure of corruption in the small California city of Bell where officials tapped the treasury to pay themselves exorbitant salaries, resulting in arrests and reforms.
See All Public Service

2015 Prize Winners

Fiction

Anthony Doerr

An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Music

Julia Wolfe

A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Drama

Stephen Adly Guirgis

A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
Biography

David I. Kertzer

An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.
See All 2015 Winners