On wrongful convictions and chaotic youth prisons, local reporting vital | Theodore Decker
This column contains a discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a behavioral health crisis, you can call the national Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-8255/TALK (1-888-628-9454 for Spanish speakers)
This time of year I find myself thinking often about a friend of mine, who died 13 years ago yesterday.
I've worked with many fine reporters through my 30 years in print journalism. Pete Shellem of The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was the finest.
He was a courts reporter with a knack for sniffing out wrongful convictions. In Pete's obituary in The New York Times, renowned criminal defense lawyer Barry Scheck called him "a one-man journalism innocence project."
I've written about Pete several times, usually in the context of seeking help if you're having suicidal thoughts, or to reflect on the importance of local journalism. Today's column falls in the latter category.
In thinking about Pete recently, I Google searched the name of a man he had written about named Barry Laughman.
Barry was sentenced to life in prison for the 1987 murder and rape of his elderly relative, Edna Laughman, in rural Pennsylvania. He was released in 2003, after 16 years behind bars.
The news that I stumbled across just recently had broken last summer, when Pennsylvania State Police announced they had arrested another relative and charged him in Edna Laughman's death. The arrest came after advanced DNA testing linked this new suspect to the murder.
Authorities were puffing out their chests about this break in the case.
"Today, nearly 34 years later, due to advances in genetic genealogy and the hard work by the members of the Pennsylvania State Police and other partners, we're here to announce an arrest in this investigation," said Lt. Mark A. Magyar.
Reading that, and similarly self-congratulatory remarks, I darn near blew a gasket.
Why? Because as much as state police in Pennsylvania would love to change the narrative surrounding the death of Edna Laughman, here's what really happened.
The same agency now taking credit for solving this case was directly responsible for a gross miscarriage of justice that led to the incarceration of an innocent man and the long-unsolved murder of the 85-year-old victim.
State police and prosecutors secured the conviction of Barry Laughman, a man with a significant intellectual disability, through a rotten stew of coercion, junk science and investigative tunnel vision. Tangled up in this investigation was an egomaniacal investigator who fancied himself Columbo and a discredited state police chemist with a track record of fudging crucial evidence.
They ignored or deliberately twisted evidence that pointed to Barry Laughman's innocence and later attacked Pete's reporting when he called them out on it.
It doesn't stop there. Key DNA evidence in the case was lost, and it was Pete who tracked it down to the freezer of a Pennsylvania State University professor who was teaching in Leipzig, Germany. The professor had held onto it, but nobody ever came calling – until Pete, that is.
That evidence ultimately exonerated Barry.
I am not casting aspersions on the work done by the current cast of Pennsylvania State Police in the past few years to identify and charge Chris Speelman, another relative and former neighbor of Edna Laughman who is now accused of her murder, rape and robbery.
But the reality is this: if Pete Shellem hadn't started poking around, the Pennsylvania state police would almost certainly not have been looking for the true killer. They had no reason to; they were sure they already had him locked up. Their own employees had railroaded him.
The Pennsylvania State Police don't get to claim 'hero' in the case of Edna Laughman.
For years after Pete died, I dwelled on the reporting void that he left behind, on the wrongfully convicted inmates who unquestionably remain incarcerated in Pennsylvania because Pete wasn't around to listen to them.
In more-recent years though, I've tried to stay positive, to look for Pete's spirit in new reporting.
As the date of his death approached again this year, I didn't have to hunt long or hard.
Her digging has revealed that staffing shortages, chronic violence, and widespread mismanagement have thrown the state's juvenile prison system into chaos, putting youths and prison staff alike in sometimes grave danger.
More:'I'm not dropping this.' Wife of guard assaulted in Ohio youth prison blames the state
The state of local journalism these days is precarious, marked by declining readership, layoffs and economic setbacks, many that are self-inflicted. Morale, to put it mildly, could be better.
But the sort of work that Pete did, that Laura and others do, matters. If you agree, it might be nice to drop Laura an email and tell her so.
Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.
tdecker@dispatch.com
@Theodore_Decker
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Just-exposed youth prison system troubles show local reporting matters
