"I keep getting sucked back in." Pamela Colloff on wrongful convictions and forensic science
The ProPublica and New York Times Magazine reporter discusses investigating junk science, building trust with sources, and adapting longform journalism for the digital age
When Pamela Colloff wrote about a Texas death row inmate named Anthony Graves for Texas Monthly in 2010, she had already established herself as one of the country's premier magazine writers. But after her story helped secure Graves' freedom following 18 years behind bars, it opened her eyes to journalism's potential for impact. "Once that door opened," she tells Depth Perception from her home in Austin, Texas, "that was something I became very interested in doing more of."
Today, Colloff works at ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, where she investigates wrongful convictions and flawed forensic science. Her work, which includes deep dives into bloodstain-pattern analysis and jailhouse informants, has garnered numerous accolades — including National Magazine Awards and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism — while exposing systemic problems in the criminal justice system.
In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Colloff about choosing which cases to investigate, adapting her writing style for shrinking attention spans, and why she keeps “getting sucked back in" to wrongful conviction stories despite trying to move on. —Parker Molloy
What drew you to investigating flaws in forensic science and wrongful convictions?
I've always been a very nosy person. When I was still a teenager and realized that if you called yourself a reporter, you could basically ask anyone, including strangers, the questions that you wanted to know. I thought that was pretty great. I’ve always, since I was little, been interested in writing. And the thing I’ve always loved about nonfiction is that you’re given the characters and the broad story arc, and your job is to figure out how to tell the story.
I started out at Texas Monthly, and so much of what was going on when I was starting out here in Texas was about criminal justice. You can’t live here without that just being in the fabric of things. Like in 2000, which was just as George Bush was ending his time as governor and about to become president, there were 40 people executed in Texas that year. Last year, there were five. I was coming up at a time when that was something that was very much in the news.
In 2010, I wrote a story about a man named Anthony Graves, who had been on Texas's death row for 18 years. The story raised a lot of questions about his case, and by highlighting the work of his amazing attorney, Nicole Casarez, that ended up turning Anthony's case around, and he was subsequently freed and exonerated.
How do you choose which potential wrongful conviction cases to investigate?
I keep trying not to write about wrongful convictions, and then I keep getting sucked back in. And I've tried to get at the issues I’m interested in in different ways. I wrote a story at Texas Monthly in 2014 about a woman who had worked for the prison system as a public information officer. And one of her job responsibilities was to attend executions. And so she had attended close to 300 executions just in the course of doing her job.
My story was about the death penalty: this huge, enormous subject. But by telescoping it through her own experience, I was able to get at this larger issue through this very intimate, particular story of one mom, one woman who’s dropping her daughter off at school before she goes to her prison job.That, to me, is the template.
Your recent piece explores how shaken baby syndrome diagnoses persist despite evolving scientific understanding. What surprised you most while reporting this story?
When I was working on a story last summer about an old shaken baby conviction, I started a Google alert just so I could know everything that was going on. And what I saw was that every day — I mean literally every day — I was getting multiple stories about parents in the present day being convicted of the same thing. So that was the first surprise. It’s been rebranded under this new name, “abusive head trauma,” but it’s basically the same diagnosis, and parents are being prosecuted for it all over the country.
The big surprise actually came out after it was published. I have never in more than two decades of doing this received as much mail as I have on that story. I got emails from all over the country from parents who were in the midst of either losing custody of their children or were facing criminal charges or both because of this diagnosis. A lot of them were sending me pictures of their children. A lot of them were pleading with me to help them in some way. I knew that this was a problem — it’s why I wanted to write about it — but I had no idea the breadth of it. That was really shocking and continues to feel really shocking.
You’ve written about bloodstain-pattern analysis and other forensic science issues. How has that shaped your reporting?
I did a big project in 2018 on bloodstain pattern analysis. The expert witness in the case I was writing about had had one week of training, and that made him, at the time this trial took place in the ’80s, an expert witness in bloodstain-pattern analysis. So I actually went and took the same class, taught by the same outfit at a police station in rural Oklahoma, so that I had the same training as the “expert witness” in the case.
What was so fascinating about that was it demystified not just bloodstain-pattern analysis in particular, but it allowed me to have the courage — I don't know, arrogance — to look at other types of forensic testimony. Because what I learned from that weeklong class is each of these specialties has its own sort of lexicon that the specialists speak in. If you're not schooled in that, it seems incredibly complex and dense and impossible to understand. And only the experts can understand it. But what I found with both bloodstain-pattern analysis and then even with the language surrounding shaken baby syndrome is that it's really important to pierce that veil and learn the lexicon, to understand what these experts are saying, and figure out, are they really experts? Can any of this be peer-reviewed? What are the error rates for these things? Is this just one person's word versus another?
The National Magazine Awards salute Long Lead
Last week, the American Society of Magazine Editors named Long Lead a two-time National Magazine Award finalist for Home of the Brave, our multimedia feature on LA's endemic unhoused veterans crisis. We are honored by the nominations.
Seventy news outlets received National Magazine Award nominations this year. Just 14 received two nods. Long Lead is proud to be included among them. For more information on the awards, including details about the other great pieces of journalism honored, click here.
Also, later this week, the National Press Foundation will present Long Lead with the Wounded Warrior Project Award for Excellence in Coverage of Veterans at the organization’s annual awards dinner in Washington, DC. “They were in a class by themselves,” NPF judges said. “They elevated their storytelling in a way that is so compelling.”
Reported across several years, Home of the Brave chronicles a centuries-spanning land war between the U.S. government, local forces, and generations of vets seeking support, justice, and a place to call home. Last fall a judge ruled in favor of the vets, ordering the VA to build thousands more housing units. The government has defied the order, and after the wildfires, the homeless veteran crisis is now a catastrophe — an avoidable one with a massive property sitting underutilized for its intended purpose. Long Lead will continue reporting on this crisis until the courts decide these veterans’ fate. Subscribe to the Home of the Brave newsletter to follow the latest news on their case.
How do you build trust with families while maintaining journalistic independence?
Before I spend time on the ground with a family or with an individual, I want to have done exhaustive research. It doesn’t mean that when I go to meet with them, I don’t have a gazillion questions or doubts or a lot of unresolved issues. It just means that I’ve really done my homework and I’m as prepared as possible to know what I’m walking into and to not be seduced by someone’s charm or someone’s charisma. That doesn’t mean that always works or that that's a foolproof plan, but that’s always what I try to do.
For the story I wrote in December, when I sat down with the Flannerys in their home, I had watched every piece of bodycam footage in that case. I had read every possible word — there was quite a long court record — every police report, every medical record I could get my hands on.
In this era of shrinking attention spans, how do you draw readers into longform stories?
I am haunted by this every day. And partially because I see how much my attention span has shifted. I've been working on a book for the past couple of years. A book is roughly 100,000 words long, and I feel like we're fighting right now to get people to read 3,000-word articles.
Because I read almost exclusively on my phone now, I think about that a lot when I’m writing. I write shorter paragraphs than I used to write because I think about how much can fit on a screen. As a reader, if I pull up a story and there’s no paragraph break in the text that appears on my screen, that’s a little off-putting. I’m always, always thinking about length and pacing. I feel like every sentence I’m fighting to keep the reader with me. Nothing can be extraneous.
With the metrics we have now where you can see literally how many seconds people spend reading your story, it’s impossible to not think about these things. The one place where I take comfort is that while readership may fall off after 3,000 words, it comes back up at like the 8,500-, 9,000-word length. I think what that means is that if you have a story that can justify that kind of length and it’s told well, there’s still a hunger for that kind of storytelling.
“I've always been a very nosy person. When I was still a teenager and realized that if you called yourself a reporter, you could basically ask anyone, including strangers, the questions that you wanted to know. I thought that was pretty great.” — Pamela Colloff
What's the best journalistic advice you've ever received?
Some of my favorite advice came from a Texas Monthly writer whose work I love, Skip Hollandsworth. Skip’s advice for interviews was, instead of walking in having read everything and nodding along to everything the person’s saying and trying to show them how well-versed you are in everything, to just be as open as possible and say, “Can you explain that to me like I’m a kindergartner?” To ask these really, really basic questions.
He also read a draft of one of my stories where I had leaned really heavily on quotes to make the points I wanted to make. He told me to rewrite the story, taking all of the quotes out. He said, “You can stick a few key quotes back in later, but I want you to take all the quotes out so that you can really embody your voice and say what you’re trying to say.” That helped me more with storytelling than anything.
What's the worst career advice you've ever received?
I remember this meeting I had with an editor-in-chief in the ’90s, when I was starting out. That editor told me magazines are dead. The internet’s here, magazines are dead. No one wants magazine-type stories anymore. Everything has to be these shorter, quicker things.
All these years later, obviously the landscape looks very different in the magazine world. So I’m not going to say there haven’t been seismic changes, but at the end of the day, I think everyone still really wants a great story. And I think if the story, if it’s the right story and if it’s told well, people will spend the time with it. And that no matter what form things take in the years to come — I don’t even think we can imagine what they are yet — at their core, it will always still be that really compelling narrative.
Further reading from Pamela Colloff
“He Dialed 911 to Save His Baby. Then His Children Were Taken Away.” (ProPublica/The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 29, 2024)
“He Was Sente to Prison for Killing His Baby. What if He Didn’t Do It?” (ProPublica/The New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2024)
“How This Con Man’s Wild Testimony Sent Dozens to Jail, and 4 to Death Row” (ProPublica/The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 4, 2019)
“The Witness” (Texas Monthly, September 2014)
“Innocence Lost” (Texas Monthly, October 2010)