BND wins National Headliner Award, named finalist for IRE award

The Belleville News-Democrat won a National Headliner Award for its series on rape prosecutions in Southern Illinois.

The series, “Violation of Trust,” by BND reporters George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer, took first place in the category “News series in daily newspapers with a circulation up to 100,000.”

The series also was named a finalist by the group Investigative Reporters & Editors in the Innovation in Investigative Reporting category.

The series, which was published in February 2015, reported that 70 percent of people charged with rape and other sex crimes in the 32 southernmost counties of Illinois are never prosecuted, and of those who are, 95 percent never get prison time.

In addition, a series called “Irradiated” by McClatchy Newspapers came in third place in the Investigative Reporting category. The series reported on the human toll of America’s nuclear weapons industry and the government’s failure to compensate victims. News-Democrat reporter Mike Fitzgerald was among the reporters who worked on that series.

The BND also won National Headliner Awards in 2007 for a series about child deaths in the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and in 2013 for a series about deaths of disabled adults under the watch of the Illinois Department of Health and Human Services. Both series were investigated and written by Hundsdorfer and Pawlaczyk.

This story was originally published April 8, 2016 at 5:34 PM with the headline "BND wins National Headliner Award, named finalist for IRE award."