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| Baltimore City Circuit Court This August, I began working as an intern for Baltimore Witness, a journalism website that reports on the rates of violent crime in the city and criminal trials in the Baltimore City Circuit Court. As a history major who happens to have a passion for exposing the reality of true crime, I jumped at the opportunity to begin working weekly as a reporting intern this Fall. The main components of the internship are sitting in on court cases as a member of the press and diligently recording the events of each proceeding or jury trial. The next step is inputting the case into the Baltimore Witness database, to ensure the crime statistics the publication is gathering are accurate. Finally, I write daily articles on each case that I cover from an unbiased and impartial perspective. Each piece is published on the official website and is posted to social media outlets to promote journalism on lesser known cases and proceedings in Baltimore City. This has been my first venture into the judicial world and into the field of journalism, so I found myself having to justify how this internship has any relevance to the field of history. I argue that reporting on the criminal justice system in one of the most infamous cities in the country is incredibly relevant to public history. So much of history and the discourse of social science is based on the veracity of ones research and the accuracy of data, as well as the establishment of a sound methodology when it comes to sourcing material. The stakes of my research, and all of the research done here at Baltimore Witness by its editors, data analysts, and reporters, are pretty high. Baltimore Witness is often one of the only, if not the only, publications present during an average day of hearings at both of the circuit court houses. It's our responsibility to promote unprejudiced work and handle cases with care. Through my analysis of the murder trials I cover and my hands-on exploration of crime statistics, I'm starting to gain a better understanding of the legal factors and historical precedent that have been set within the Maryland judicial and penal systems. Just last week, I was able to get a bird's eye view into the wildly popular Adnan Syed case when his infamous 1999 murder conviction was overturned. That same week, I was the sole reporter in the courtroom on multiple murder trials that had not received the same degree of attention from the public. The sociological factors that inform crime also inform which defendants get press coverage, thus reinforcing historical archetypes regarding race, gender, crime, and society as a whole. I've found it immensely rewarding to report on unknown cases and to develop a better understanding of the mechanisms within the flawed justice system through a more nuanced lens. My aim here, in addition to accurate reporting, is to learn more about how crime data and news has been collected and disseminated over time to the civilians of Baltimore. My work with Ashleigh Joplin, the senior editor at Baltimore Witness, has also taught me how to develop a more intersection and interdisciplinary approach regarding my work as an intern and how I can apply this experience to my research as history student at UMBC. At the moment, I'm developing a framework for a research project about crime and gender through my work with the organization and the data points I can reference within the archives of the website. This way I'll be able to compare and juxtapose my sources to show how elements of crime have shifted over the past few decades. Below are a few of the articles I've written over the past month based on my court reporting: |
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