Mara Leveritt
Author | Little Rock, Arkansas, USA |
Website
Mara Leveritt, a contributing editor to the Arkansas Times and past Arkansas Journalist of the Year, has written three nonfiction books about crime and public corruption and she is working on a fourth. She has reported for almost three decades on police, courts and prisons.
Leveritt is the author of The Boys on .... more
Mara Leveritt, a contributing editor to the Arkansas Times and past Arkansas Journalist of the Year, has written three nonfiction books about crime and public corruption and she is working on a fourth. She has reported for almost three decades on police, courts and prisons.
Leveritt is the author of The Boys on the Tracks (1998, St. Martin's Press), about murder and prosecutorial corruption in Saline County, Devil's Knot (2002, Atria), about the deeply problematic trials of the teenagers who became known as the West Memphis Three, and Dark Spell (to be released in June 2014, Bird Call Press), about Jason Baldwin's post-conviction ordeal. The first two of these were awarded Arkansas's prestigious Booker Worthen Prize. A feature film based on Devil's Knot, starring Colin Firth and Reese Witherspoon, premiered in Little Rock on May 3, 2014.
In 2012, Leveritt was awarded a Laman Fellowship to continue work on Justice Knot, her trilogy about the West Memphis case and the questions it raises about the adequacy of judicial processes in the U.S. That year, the Southeast Region of the American Board of Trial Advocates named her its Journalist of the Year, "in recognition of her years of unbiased reporting of the facts and legal arguments in many high-profile court proceedings and her persistent efforts to explain to the public the reasoning underlying sometimes controversial court decisions."
In 2011, Leveritt sued the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct over the office’s policy of threatening persons who reported complaints against attorneys with prosecution for contempt of court if they disclosed their complaints publicly. Leveritt’s federal civil rights lawsuit contended that this restraint violated the nation’s First Amendment. A year later, the state settled the case by agreeing to end the practice. In May 2014, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock awarded Leveritt an honorary doctorate of humane letters.