|
The reporting team:
Reporter Jason Brown and photographer Claudia B. Laws began a one-year investigation of how domestic violence is handled in Lafayette after the 2004 murder of Alicia Isaac.
They followed Isaac's family for a year to put a face on the problem. With her photography, Laws told the story of Kiiurstin, the daughter Alicia left behind, while Brown told the story of Alicia's mother, Betty, and how she faced overcoming grief.
They began compiling the arrest records in Lafayette Parish for an entire year and, with the help of Assistant Metro Editor Arnessa M. Garrett, they tracked those cases through the courts.
Brown teamed up with reporter Marsha Sills to tell the stories of the people who deal with domestic violence daily and what they thought could make the system work better.
How the arrest records were compiled:
The Lafayette Parish Correctional Center prints a list of every person booked into the jail each day. Those records contain the charges, along with the person's name, date of birth and address. The information from the arrest records was taken to both city and parish court, where each name was entered into the computer systems. The court records were checked over the course of the year to find the latest outcome of each case.
For the cases that could not be found in the court computer, a list was given to an assistant district attorney to determine which cases were refused and which were pending in parish court. After a public records request by The Daily Advertiser, the city prosecutor also provided that information. The arrests and their outcomes were entered into a database to provide an analysis of a year of domestic violence in Lafayette.
|
