October 29, 2007
Lyon College News Bureau
Author and journalist Mara Leveritt
to speak at Lyon College Nov. 6
A newspaper and Web reporter in Arkansas focusing mostly on the criminal justice system is slated to speak at Lyon College on Nov. 6 at 7:30 p.m. in Nucor Auditorium.
Mara Leveritt is a contributing editor for the Arkansas Times, and she's won numerous awards for investigative reporting. 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 obscured the case. It won Arkansas' Booker Worthen Prize.
In 2002, Simon and Schuster published Devil's Knot, Leveritt's examination of the legal irregularities that followed the sensational murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark. Three teenagers, known as the "West Memphis Three," were convicted without any physical evidence and the case continues to attract widespread attention.
The Library Journal called Devil’s Knot “an indictment of a culture and legal system.” The Toronto Globe and Mail observed that, “In the best tradition 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. She opposes the death penalty, in part due 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 interested in crimes by public officials.
Mara Leveritt