Death Row Challenges Hurt by Newsroom Cuts

The huge cuts in newsroom staff around the country may have inadvertently condemned some innocent prisoners to death, the New York Times reports. Lawyers complain that many of the investigative journalists who would have once hotly pursued a story about a wrongly accused Death Row inmate aren't working any more. Overworked reporters who remain are less inclined to take stories that require plenty of legwork.

Stories that were being written three years ago that supplemented the legal work undertaken by innocence projects are just not appearing, said the director of Florida's Innocence Project. The cuts have also hit anti-death penalty campaigns seeking to exonerate prisoners who have already been executed.
(More Innocence Project stories.)