Snedden Lecture: Chicago Tribune’s Maurice Possley

Submitted by Charles Fedullo
Phone: (907) 474-7995
09/07/05

Maurice Possley, Chicago Tribune criminal justice reporter, will present, "Criminal Justice: A Flawed System?" Wednesday, Sept. 14, at 7 p.m. at the Noel Wien Library Auditorium.

In addition to spending most of the week of Sept. 12-16 in classes and meeting with students in the UAF journalism department, Possley will also make a presentation to UAF students on Tuesday, Sept. 13, from 9:45-11:15 a.m. in Schaible Auditorium.

Possley, who covered the trials of the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and 2001 for work with other Tribune reporters on prosecutorial misconduct and the death penalty. Their reporting was cited by former Illinois Gov. George Ryan as playing a significant role in his decision to empty Death Row in 2003 by commuting all death sentences in Illinois.

In 2004, Possley and other Tribune reporters received the Thurgood Marshall Journalism award from the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., for reporting on the death penalty.

Possley has received numerous other awards for his reporting, including a Worth Bingham Prize, National Headliner Award and Scripps Howard Award. He has appeared on radio and television as a legal commentator, including National Public Radio, Good Morning America and Court TV. He is co-author of a book about a Chicago mob hitman and the witness against him, entitled Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth and The Brown’s Chicken Massacre, a book about a mass murder in Palatine, Ill.

His visit is part of the Snedden Guest Lecture Series hosted by the University of Alaska Fairbanks journalism department. The series is made possible by a generous endowment from Helen Snedden in honor of her late husband, former Fairbanks Daily News-Miner publisher and journalist C.W. Snedden.