Mara Leveritt Author of Devils Knot on The Radio Deadly Show

Michale speaks to Mara Leveritt

Mara Leveritt works as a newspapaer and Web reporter in Arkansas, focusing mostly on the criminal justice system. She has won numerous awards for investigative reporting, and in 1994 was named Arkansas Journalist of the Year.

Her book, THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS, published in 1998, examines the still-unsolved murders of two Arkansas teenagers and the drug-related corruption that abscured the case. It won Arkansas’s Booker Worthen Prize.

In 2002, Simon and Schuster published DEVIL’S KNOT, Leveritts examination of the legal irregularities that followed the sensational murders of three eight year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. Acting on the deeply flawed confession of a minor, police arrested three local teenagers, now known as the West Memphis 3, and charged them with the crime. Prosecutors said the teens had killed the younger boyys as part of an occult ritual. One of the three was sentenced to death, the two others to life in prison. Leveritt considers the case as much a travesty-and as important to American history-as the Salem witch trials.

Library Journal “highly recommended” Devil’s Knot, which it called “an indictment of a culture and legal system.” The Toronto Globe Mail observed that, “In the best tradiotion of crime journalism,” Leveritt exposed a case that “has become a Gordian knot for U.S. justice and the nation’s sense of its freedoms.” In 2003, Leveritt was awarded a second Booker Worthen Prize. Leveritt opposes the death penalty, in part to her familiarity with faults in the legal system. In 1999 she was named Arkansas Abolitionist of the Year. While she is often labeled a true-crime writer, she stresses that, more than bloody ones, she is intersted in crimes by public officials.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radiodeadly/2011/09/20/devils-knot