By Karen List
S.P. Sullivan (at right), class of 2010, investigative reporter for NJ.com and the Newark Star Ledger, waits outside NJ State Prison with Henrietta Washington, the mother of inmate Sean Washington, who was being released after his exoneration on a 1995 double murder charge.
The case was the subject of a two-part NJ Advance Media series in 2015 that chronicled the efforts of the Last Resort Exoneration Project, a legal group devoted to investigating wrongful convictions, to free Washington and another man. S.P.’s story about Washington’s release begins:
“Henrietta Washington waited for hours inside a white SUV parked just across the street from the brick walls, eyes fixed on a single brown door.
She’d already waited 25 years.”
Some of his other work includes an investigation into how New Jersey was bungling its response to COVID-19 behind bars and a story about Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration fighting in court to avoid compensating a man wrongly convicted of rape. After S.P.’s story, the state changed its mind.
"Being a journalist means having a license to ask impertinent questions of people in power, to use open records and transparency laws to force them to provide evidence and to give voice to the people hurt by the machinations of government and commerce. In the words of the late, great David Carr: 'I mean, it beats working.'"