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Honors
Court secrecy stories commended
May 10, 2004
Daily Business Review staff reporter Dan Christensen received a national honor last week for his coverage of secrecy practices by the federal courts.
Christensen was one of four reporters selected as finalists in the first Michael Kelly Award, created by Atlantic Media Co. in memory of the editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine and National Journal. Kelly died last year while covering the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The first-place winner was Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, who won for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting from Iraq.
The awards were presented at a dinner on April 29 at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Shadid received a $25,000 prize, while Christensen and the other finalists each received $3,000.
In a series of articles last year, Christensen exposed how federal district and appellate judges in Miami and Atlanta imposed, without explicit statutory or policy authority, information blackouts that hid the existence of veiled cases.
The habeas corpus petition of an Algerian immigrant held for five months in a post-Sept. 11 roundup was sealed and wiped from the public record. The defendant in a narcotics trial was prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned in total secrecy.
The judges said Christensen’s reporting on the suppression of all public record of federal court cases in the U.S. District Court in Miami and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta was “a model of sharp instincts, courageous pursuit and fearless reporting.”
The judges also said that “in a period of new challenges to civil liberties and transparency in the wielding of state power, Dan Christensen has demonstrated the power of one committed reporter to unveil truth and forcefully illuminate an issue of high public interest.”
Other finalists included Palm Beach Post staff writer John Lantigua, who was honored for his courageous on-the-ground reporting about the desperate measures migrants go through to cross the border into the United States.
Tom Junod of Esquire and George Packer of the New Yorker were also named as finalists.
The panel of five journalist-judges was made up of Tom Ashbrook, host of National Public Radio’s “On Point;” Tim Funk, the Washington correspondent for the Charlotte Observer; Charles Green, editor of National Journal; Cullen Murphy, managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly; and Samantha Power, an author and lecturer at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
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