Jerry Mitchell

The stories of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell have helped put four Klansmen and a serial killer behind bars. His stories have also helped free two people from death row, exposed injustices and corruption, prompting investigations and reforms as well as the firings of boards and officials. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a longtime member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, and a winner of more than 30 other national awards, including a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant.
His memoir for Simon & Schuster, Race Against Time, details how some of the nation’s most notorious murders, including the 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers and the KKK’s 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, came to be punished decades later. The New York Times made it an Editors’ Pick, and NPR selected it as a Best Book of the Year.
After working for three decades for the statewide Clarion-Ledger, Mitchell founded the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit that exposes injustices and abuses and raises up the next generation of investigative reporters. Since summer 2022, the nonprofit, now a part of Mississippi Today, has been working on a project with The New York Times. A team of young investigative reporters, Ilyssa Daly, Brian Howey and Nate Rosenfield, have worked with Mitchell on a series that exposed allegations of sheriffs and their deputies sexually abusing women they arrested or jailed, torturing suspects, planting evidence and filing false charges. After the Goon Squad story ran, Justice Department lawyers arrived in Mississippi to interview victims. Some state officials and lawmakers are now pushing to change laws to make sheriffs more accountable.