Well hey now, got us a bumper crop of content worth your time without mentioning the big ol’ manbaby in the White House. Yes, It Can Happen! And we’ll begin with not one, but two stories from VTDigger. It’s hard to imagine where we’d be without Digger, what with the decimation of the rest of our news media. So let’s celebrate the things Digger does well and encourage them to do more.

Official misconduct in the Fern Feather case. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but I want to shine a spotlight on Peter D’Auria’s deep dive into the prosecution of Seth Brunell for the murder of Fern Feather — a prosecution that ended with a defendant-friendly plea bargain triggered by police misconduct. D’Auria’s story chronicles all the ways in which this case was mishandled by police and prosecutors. You come away from it feeling mad as hell, and wondering if Feather’s gender identity played any role in how authorities screwed this thing up six ways from Sunday.

Exiting prison is a “bureaucratic morass.” In an example of the routine Statehouse coverage that no other media outlet provides, Digger’s Ethan Weinstein reported on a role-playing simulation of the process of exiting prison and re-entering society. The system “forces individuals to jump through hoops that many of us in this room would struggle through,” said none other than Corrections Commissioner Nicholas Deml, the person in charge of administering the system. I saw no other reports on this simulation which, in a just world, ought to trigger a thorough overhaul of a system that surely must contribute to high recidivism rates. Probably could also apply to social service programs designed without any input from those who have to jump through an obstacle course’s worth of officially-designed hoops to receive the help they need. “Lived experience,” anyone?

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