{"id":863,"date":"2012-03-23T11:00:48","date_gmt":"2012-03-23T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/03\/23\/dahlia-lithwick-notable-narrative-bennett-barbour-interview\/"},"modified":"2024-03-04T18:58:03","modified_gmt":"2024-03-04T18:58:03","slug":"dahlia-lithwick-notable-narrative-bennett-barbour-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/03\/23\/dahlia-lithwick-notable-narrative-bennett-barbour-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Dahlia Lithwick on long-form, sob stories and the Supreme Court"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n In this week\u2019s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look<\/a> at how Dahlia Lithwick\u2019s story on a wrongful conviction used one person\u2019s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. The piece, which followed the exoneration of Bennett Barbour, is right up Lithwick\u2019s alley. As a senior editor at Slate, she writes the \u201cSupreme Court Dispatches\u201d\u00a0and \u201cJurisprudence\u201d\u00a0columns, and she edited <\/em>\u201cThe Best American Legal Writing of 2009.\u201d<\/em>

We\u2019re glad we caught up with Lithwick by phone this week \u2013\u00a0in addition to talking with us about her story, she had interesting news about the future of long-form journalism at Slate. In the following excerpts from our conversation, she talks about that news, the value of a good editor, and what rising journalists should do to save the field and get a job like hers.<\/em>

How did you find out about Bennett Barbour\u2019s wrongful conviction?<\/strong>

Two ways \u2013 first from the folks at the Innocence Project here in Charlottesville. I\u2019ve written about some of their work before, so I\u2019m always in touch with Deirdre (Enright)\u00a0there to know what\u2019s going on in the Innocence Project world. And then also, unrelatedly, Brandon Garrett, the law professor I cite in the story, sent me an email saying, \u201cWow, you should take a look at what\u2019s going on with the DNA testing in Virginia.\u201d So this actually came in stereo, where both he and Deirdre were responding to the Frank Green piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch<\/a>.

Did you debate with yourself on whether the story should focus on Bennett Barbour, the exonerated man, or Jonathan Sheldon, the attorney who is on a mission to get the names of the innocent?<\/strong>

\"\"<\/a>Well, I kind of wanted to do both. I spoke to Barbour, and it\u2019s just such a completely heartbreaking thing to talk to him, because he really is very, very sick, and he did lose this new marriage. He had this baby daughter; his life was wrecked by this. As I was writing at the end of the week two weeks ago, he was sent back into the hospital. This guy\u2019s life is so shattered by what\u2019s gone on.

And then at the same time, when I started talking to the Innocence Project folks, they said, \u201cThis guy John Sheldon is amazing. What he\u2019s done really is sort of the pivot here.\u201d And then I spoke to him several times and started emailing with him, and I think I realized that the part of the story that is an amazing new twist is that this guy singlehandedly took on DFS\u00a0and has made it his crusade to get word to these folks.

You spend time on both of them, but you open and close with Barbour. Did you ever sit down and tease out exactly how you planned to structure the story?<\/strong>

I give huge credit to Will Dobson at Slate, who edited this story. By the time I turned it over, it was probably 1,000 words longer than it ended up, and I was very invested. And Will, more than anyone, sat down over the weekend with it, so I really can\u2019t take credit for the final draft. The structure looked a lot different after his last edit. He really helped me bring it back to Barbour at the end.

Can you talk about how what you turned in was different than the final product?<\/strong>

When I turned in the draft \u2013 there were a lot of drafts. This is longer, quite a bit longer than the typical Slate form. The ordinary turn of events at Slate is that you file something at noon and it goes up at 4\u00a0\u2013 and this is not that kind of piece. So this was a big departure for me, in terms of really taking two weeks to write a piece instead of five hours. As the drafts went along, Will was really pushing, \u201cGo back and talk to the Innocence Project people. Go back and ask Sheldon about this.\u201d This was a real lesson for me in how you can take two weeks to write a piece and have it come out really significantly better reported.

I\u2019m not slamming on Slate\u2019s ordinary style. We are trying to be quick and to pivot fast. But for me going back and getting the second and third interviews with people made a huge difference. And at every turn, Will was saying, \u201cWait, wait, wait. Go back and ask this, too. Wait a minute \u2013 he defended the D.C. sniper? Just wait a minute.\u201d

It went up on a Monday, but we had planned to run it the Friday before. We were trying to get a photograph of Barbour, and I got word that he was back in the hospital. You start to have that sinking feeling, understanding that the guy is really, really ill. And I think it was Will who rejiggered it so that the last paragraph went back to Barbour. It was almost completely a function of being reminded that there\u2019s a person in the middle of this who\u2019s very sick.

We get a lot of details about Barbour in passing, but you didn\u2019t expand on his life \u2013 what he\u2019s done since he got out, the details of the relationship with his daughter. Was that an attempt to streamline the story, or was it even a deliberate choice? <\/strong>

I give huge credit to Frank Green who wrote these pieces on Barbour for the Times-Dispatch, because he had done a lot of that reporting. So what I was trying do was to take three steps back and look at the legal <\/em>story. And I think the local NPR affiliate had also done a really good interview with Barbour, where they talked about how he was a chef and he became a good cook in prison.

There was a lot of great color that felt to me like it had already been reported. So I wanted to talk to the crime lab, and I wanted to talk to Sheldon, who hadn\u2019t really been a central part of the story before. There was a feeling that this other material about Barbour, while hugely important, wasn\u2019t as necessary for me. I wanted to tell the legal story. Some of that stuff felt like it would have been making this piece even longer, and what I really wanted to do was to get to how the system got set up and how it\u2019s failing.

America\u2019s courts are your beat. Do you have an overarching goal when writing stories about them?<\/strong>

Yes, I do. Sometimes I think that court reporting is so mystified, it becomes a form of science reporting, where it\u2019s this obscure thing in which we have to spend a lot of time explaining the physics and how things work. My own sense of it is that this can\u2019t<\/em> be the way we talk about the courts, because the courts impact every single aspect of our lives. Things like eyewitness identifications that go wrong affect every single one of us. We pay millions of dollars into a criminal justice system that I think is fundamentally broken.

A lot of the overarching goal from the beginning has been to try to be an ambassador or a translator between the very lofty, and I think jargon-y,\u00a0language of the court system and the average American, who is hugely interested but sometimes feels like the meaning has been obfuscated. So I try really, really hard, particularly in some of these criminal justice cases. Think of Thompson v. Connick<\/a>, a big Supreme Court case also involving someone who was exonerated. People care so desperately about this, but you need to strip away the patina that this is too hard to understand, and really try to formulate it in ways that are interesting and also urgent, so that people can come to realize, \u201cOh my God, this is what we are doing in this country, and this is why it matters.\u201d

That sounds awfully high self-regarding, but the objective is to do for court reporting what really good political reporters do, which is to say, \u201cThis seems like it\u2019s way off in the ether, but it\u2019s actually affecting every part of your day-to-day life.\u201d

You also recently had a long piece in the New Yorker, <\/strong>a book review<\/strong><\/a>. Are you planning to do more long pieces?<\/strong>

I\u2019m probably not the best person to talk about it, because I think it\u2019s happening at the editorial level, but I think Slate is really rethinking its view of long-form writing. We have tended to say for many years that people just click off at 1,400 or 1,500 words on the Web. It turns out that that\u2019s not true.

We had in fact thought because it\u2019s so un-Slatey to run a 3,000-word piece on Barbour, we had thought that maybe we would break this story into two pieces over two days. But it was a piece that wanted to be one long piece, so we just put it up.

I think that editorially Slate is going to try to challenge the idea that folks simply can\u2019t read X number of words on the Web, because we\u2019re seeing in a lot of ways that that is no longer true, if it was ever true at all. It may have just been an assumption we all made at the beginning of Internet writing that was wrong.

I do think, certainly at Slate, that we\u2019re going to see more long-form pieces. We all did those Fresca projects<\/a>. And while the Fresca idea is just flat-out brilliant \u2013 to get out of your wheelhouse and do something you\u2019ve never done \u2013 it was dominated by the idea we had to do three 1,400-word reported pieces because that\u2019s what people read. I think the new Frescas are going to be a lot longer, and that\u2019s a good thing. I think we had some mistaken assumptions about how readers read Slate.

Hopefully you\u2019ll see more of it from me, but I think you\u2019ll really see more of it from Slate. And as we think through what Web reporting is going to do, the idea that it all has to be quick and bloggy\u00a0and newsy and that we leave long-form reporting to other sources, I think it\u2019s going to start to go in the other direction, and that\u2019s a great thing. Both the New Yorker piece and the Slate piece really benefited from going back and forth four or five times with an editor. Holy cow, it really is humbling how much better a piece can be when two people are working crazy hard on it.

How do you think of balancing human stories of people whose lives have been changed by judicial decisions with educating your readers about the history and process of the courts? Do you have ways you think about the language?<\/strong>

Those of us who went to law school and then turned to legal writing, we just get so bogged down with the jargon. We really have this notion that if we use all this jargon we used in drafting briefs, that it\u2019s somehow better, and that really long sentences are really good because they seem to be good in the law. I do think you have to do this dual project of draining a lot of the legal, what looks like loftiness but what is in fact kind of wordiness, out of your writing. That is really a hard thing to unlearn after law school \u2013 that more words isn\u2019t better.

At the same moment you\u2019re draining it out, there\u2019s a real secret shame in legal writing of passionately caring about something, about making it urgent and important. There\u2019s that dispassionate distance that you learn really works when you\u2019re drafting memos or documents for court, because judges read things differently. But the American public desperately cares if an innocent man is in jail for many years. They desperately care if Garner and Lawrence weren\u2019t having sex. These things matter.

It\u2019s a little bit of unlearning what you thought made legal writing important with a capital \u201cI\u201d and then relearning that fostering these connections and creating a sense that if something is unjust, it\u2019s okay to say it\u2019s unjust.

I come at this largely as a Supreme Court reporter. When people walk into the Court, they\u2019re always surprised that the plaintiff has fallen out of the case. You\u2019re lucky if they\u2019re sitting in the courtroom; more often than not, they\u2019re not there. If they are in the courtroom, nobody references them, nobody pays attention to this person whose whole life for five years has been this case. They evaporate into very highfalutin\u2019 talk about the Dormant Commerce Clause, or whatever we\u2019re talking about.

I think the trick is to loop them back in. I\u2019m lucky \u2013 I come out of this tradition. Nina Totenberg is all about that, Adam Liptak, Joan Biskupic. There\u2019s a whole host of court reporters who have very much dedicated their writing to the idea of \u201cHey, meet the person at the center of the case, who you won\u2019t hear about for the next two hours.\u201d

When you\u2019re paying attention to making it human, do you ever worry about veering into melodrama?<\/strong>

Yeah, that goes back to that shame. Lawyers aren\u2019t supposed to care about personal details, and \u00a0they\u2019re not supposed to tell sob stories. Justice Scalia is always the first person to say, \u201cIf the opinion starts, \u2018Little Mary Jane was walking back from school,\u2019 you know where this is going.\u201d It is a yank at the heart strings, but I think it\u2019s important to realize that the Supreme Court justices deploy that all the time. We like to pretend we\u2019re dispassionate automatons, but even at the Supreme Court level, we constantly dip in and out of the language of real life and real people. What you do depends on which ends you\u2019re trying to serve.

It\u2019s incredibly important to remember to remember that what all courts have to do at some level is disaggregate the human drama from the rule that they\u2019re going to create going forward, and that little Mary Jane walking home from school only goes so far in solving workable problems for the future. But for my purposes, a story is always the best way in, the best way to get a reader to care, to find something familiar.

In a deep way, that\u2019s what the Lawrence case, that book review, was about, the concentric circles that become doctrine. It does no one any good to start a case from the dry, dry legal rule and hope that people will become passionately engaged. I think you have to walk that line, between not manipulating your readers but helping them understand that this could have been them. That Bennett Barbour could have been them. That Lawrence and Garner could have been them. The courts touch every single part of our lives, and yet we think they\u2019re out in the stratosphere doing God\u2019s work.

Is there anything else we should know that we wouldn\u2019t from reading the piece?<\/strong>

One of the heartbreaking trends in the media right now is the demise of the local court reporter, the local crime reporter, folks who used to sit around courthouses and watch every single trial. At the most local, basic level, this beat is disappearing around the country. Thank God for Frank Green, who is doing this in Virginia.

When young reporters call me and ask, \u201cHow do I get a legal job?\u201d my advice is to do almost exactly what I\u2019ve done with this Barbour story. Find an amazing story that gets sloughed away as a local story, and tell it.

What we have come to think of as legal reporting is really crime reporting, some fantastic crime story. But that\u2019s sort of cable news driving this beat. I think that this beat needs to be driven by amazing young reporters who are obsessed with the law and who realize that every single day in every courthouse are incredible stories that we need to go back to telling, even if that means sitting in on some trial in Winnetka and figuring out why this has implications around the country. I think this is a form we need to bring back, because it does no good to report only big national crime stories and think that we are monitoring our courts.

*Photo of Dahlia Lithwick by John Looney<\/em><\/em>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week\u2019s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look at how Dahlia Lithwick\u2019s story on a wrongful conviction used one person\u2019s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. The piece, which followed the exoneration of Bennett Barbour, is right up Lithwick\u2019s alley. As a senior editor at Slate, she writes the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"topics":[],"authors":[24],"issue":[],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-narrative-news","authors-andrea-pitzer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDahlia Lithwick on long-form, sob stories and the Supreme Court - Nieman Storyboard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2012\/03\/23\/dahlia-lithwick-notable-narrative-bennett-barbour-interview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dahlia Lithwick on long-form, sob stories and the Supreme Court - Nieman Storyboard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In this week\u2019s Notable Narrative, we took a semi-quantitative look at how Dahlia Lithwick\u2019s story on a wrongful conviction used one person\u2019s experience as a narrative thread to present a bigger problem. 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