Sometimes, for a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, you need to bang your computer with a screwdriver. That's what Melvin Claxton found out at the Virgin Islands Daily News. But this gets ahead of the tale. The newspaper won a 1995 Pulitzer for exposing how the criminal justice system failed to work in the Caribbean paradise. Police and prosecutors failed time and again to put criminals in jail. Most major crimes went unsolved. Claxton found rampant corruption and incompetence. Even when prosecutors did win convictions, criminals rarely did time in jail.
Claxton also used something government officials had ignored: a computer. His tabulations were startling. Fewer than five of every 100 violent crimes reported to police led to an arrest. Fewer than 10 of every 100 were even investigated. About two-fifths of all violent crime cases were dismissed before going to trial, often at the request of prosecutors. Fewer than a third of all convicted criminals went to prison. Claxton wove these facts into compelling stories that dramatized how the system failed in the U.S. territory. His series was rich with anecdotes and detail. But the computer analysis, he said, was the most important part. "It was the bottom line," the reporter said. The series began after a new editor, Lowe Davis, talked with Claxton about possible long-term projects. Claxton already knew of countless tales of police work gone wrong, how evidence got lost, how unqualified people got key police jobs.
To widen the scope of the story, Claxton began looking at the system itself. That included examining stacks of court records that tracked charges, disposition and sentences. The government system was in such disarray that officials could not recount how many rapes they prosecuted in 1994.
Claxton answered those questions by building his own spreadsheet. Claxton, an Antigua native, received his college degree in economics. He knew something about numbers and, he said, "I've always been a Mac buff and always keep my personal bills in the computer."
Paper records
With help from two interns, the reporter got paper records from the U.S. territorial courts in St. Thomas and St. Croix. In one case, because court clerks photocopied the wrong pages, he needed to revisit court files to make sure he got the right information.
Claxton used Excel to record more than 5,000 cases. The information included 10 columns - all the information kept in the court disposition listings. The records included a case number, the charges, the offender's sex, whether the case was decided by a judge or a jury, and what happened. The most useful information flowed from the last column, labeled "Dispositions." It was a collection of notes. It included notes like "Gov't not prepared for trial," "Dismissed by motion of the Government," and "Dismissed by the Government." In addition, the reporter gathered police records, including arrest logs. He had planned beforehand how to build the spreadsheets. "We decided what we are looking for, and what averages we would love to know." Those figures included the crime rate, the number of criminal court cases, and the percentage of convictions. Claxton typed in the records. "I sure would have loved for the government to have done this," he said. But few public records are computerized in the U.S. Territory. He had no choice if he wanted the story. Claxton worked on an old Macintosh SE30. It was the best computer at the newspaper. That's not saying much, considering what is in many big U.S. newsrooms. To make things worse, the computer kept crashing. The problem was a hard drive that got stuck when it should have been spinning around for data. "That was a dark side of the story," Claxton recalled. "It gave us some frightening moments." A repairman, after several failed attempts to fix it, offered sage advice: Take off the back panel and whack the hard drive with a screwdriver. He offered them a shiny screwdriver with a black, rubber handle. The solution was brutal, but got the job done. Just to make sure, Claxton printed out every day's work. The results were shocking - so unusual that Claxton recounted everything twice before discussing them with public officials. Police officers said they had no way to verify or dispute the findings. Judges and prosecutors, at first disbelieving, sought printouts for review. The calculations brought depth to the anecdotes. When he started the story, he said, "what we didn't have was the quantified numbers." But with those figures, the result "was a quantified rather than a subjective story." The newspaper has since replaced the troubled hard drive. Claxton kept it as a souvenir. The repairman got his screwdriver back. In December, Claxton left the newspaper to finish a true-crime book set in the Virgin Islands.