Tag: corrections

St. Louis acts to address wrongful arrests

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The St. Louis Police Department has instituted a new mobile fingerprint identification system in its North, South and Central Area Stations, as well as at the St. Louis City Justice Center, to help avoid wrongful arrests, according to Chief Sam Dotson. The new fingerprint technology was put into the stations after a series in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last year maintaining that about 100 people had been arrested mistakenly over a seven-year period, serving a total of 2,000 days in jail.

Social media campaign by former Post-Dispatch writer alleges mistakes in series about mistakes

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BY WILLIAM H. FREIVOGEL / The “Jailed by Mistake” project published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this past fall had all of the earmarks of enterprising journalism in the public interest. By the time the project went to press Oct. 27, the Post-Dispatch reported that 100 people had been arrested in error over the past seven years and had spent a collective 2,000 days in jail. But in the months since publication, a former Post-Dispatch editorial writer who went to work for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay meticulously documented what he thinks were mistakes in the series about mistakes. The top Slay administration official, Eddie Roth, has gone about it in an unorthodox way: He has published a series of criticisms on his Facebook page that have run even longer than the original series.

Monumental muckups memorialized

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BY PAT LOUISE / When former New York Times Executive Editor Abraham “A.M.” Rosenthal died in May 2006, his obituary lauded his numerous accomplishments during his 56 years at the newspaper. He had won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting and led the paper through coverage of the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers. He also was credited as initiating the now industry standard practice of running corrections in a fixed spot for readers to find. The New York Times chose Page 2 for its corrections, and many newspapers followed. He and the Times began the practice in 1972.

Editor’s Note: Print media sets regrettable trend on corrections

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by William A. Babcock / My Paris correspondent had trouble walking, chewing gum and correctly using the English language. Heck, he didn’t even have to be meandering with a Dentyne wad in his mouth to muck up his mother tongue. I knew this, as I should, being his state­side editor. So imagine my great joy when I saw I’d be editing three Page 1 stories for the next day’s paper, and knowing that his would be the last one to arrive at my desk, and thus giving me a grand total of 10 minutes, tops, to edit his piece.