Nieman Storyboard conducted a Q&A with Texas Monthly‘s Pamela Colloff on the story I blogged about here. It offers an engaging look at the process, in particular where Colloff talks about not writing a piece of advocacy — because it loses credibility and narrative tension. A couple of snippets:

When you start to veer into advocacy, you can do your subject a disservice. If you show the warts, if you show the problems, I think that makes the strengths of the story better anyway. The reader knows, hopefully, that you’re being candid and telling them all the facts that you know.

… I’ve never really thought this out before, but in a story where someone’s guilt or innocence is in the balance, to me if you told the story from the perspective of the defendant the whole way through, it would be as misleading as telling it from the perspective of the prosecutor the whole way through. You have to somehow have a perfect medium, if you can, though I doubt you can. You have to present things to the reader almost as if they are the jurors, in a sense, but with more information, often, than the jurors received in the actual case.

I always prefer a story that leaves it to the reader to draw an explicit conclusion about something so central as innocence or justice. That does not mean a story lacks a point of view, or on the other hand that the writer is sneaky about masking opinion in supposedly neutral language. It means the writer honestly presents the facts but honors the reader by not force-feeding a “what it all means” message in big block letters. Let me puzzle it out myself!

A p.s. to my earlier post about Tom Robbins’ Times Magazine piece on former Weather Underground radical Judith Clark: Robbins, in this Q&A with the magazine’s 6th Floor Blog, responds to a typically knee-jerk New York Post editorial calling Robbins’ story a “sick” “sob story” that’s simply an “undisguised plea for forgiveness.”

They’re wrong. It was a factual account of the rehabilitation, behind bars, of someone who was once so wrapped up in ideology that she became heedless of human life. People do change, and Judy Clark changed, to an extraordinary degree.

Robbins doesn’t just say that. He shows it, through his reporting and writing of a long feature that takes natural skepticism about Clark’s posture now and shows it to be real. In the comments attached to the blog post, one commenter asks what good would come of a meeting between Clark and the survivors of her victims.

How would turning their righteous anger into ambiguous uncertainty make their lives happier? My guess is it wouldn’t, that every new doubt would make them feel like they were betraying the people who died.

That’s a seemingly reasoned response, but its writer — like so many — assumes someone like Clark can never earn forgiveness, or that dialogue between criminal and victim can never help the victim. That’s just wrong, as I tried to show in this story.

Tom Robbins’ cover story in this coming Sunday’s Times Magazine confronts what, to me, is the most important and confounding question about criminal justice: the search for a just prison sentence. His narrative about Judith Clark, one of the militant leftists in the deadly Brink’s robbery of 1981 in Rockland County, N.Y., asks whether Clark, 30 years into a 75-year sentence, has earned clemency by her behavior in prison, and whether her sentence was disproportionately long.

Clark drove a getaway car in the robbery that left two police officers and two security guards shot, three of them fatally. Even the crime’s mastermind received a lighter sentence, and most of the conspirators are now free. Robbins, who remarkably knew Clark in high school and visited her many times in prison since 2006, traces Clark’s journey into radicalism and rage, and then to repentance and maturity. The writer implicitly but clearly answers “yes”  to his story’s main question: “Could anyone so stubborn and unrepentant really change?” But he doesn’t beat us over the head with his conclusion, and gives sensitive and fair exposure to the lasting damage Clark and her gang caused.

Does a debate as well-worn as this — punishment vs. rehabilitation; vengeance vs. forgiveness — serve any purpose? No doubt it does, judging from the voluminous and thoughtful reader comments already attached to this story — and based on our collective failure to come to consensus on such a fundamental issue.

Despite Fortune‘s dreary new strategy of giving every issue a theme, Roger Parloff managed to find a home for this compelling tale of greed and deceit. Any story that manages to weave in the words “a manipulative, litigious snake” works for me!

When I covered cops and courts for daily newspapers, I viewed magazine writers with disdain. We in-the-trenches types dug up facts and broke stories incrementally. Sure, we could churn out the occasional Big Sunday Story, with its mind-numbing length and mound of facts (often produced in the off-hours when another daily deadline wasn’t looming). After we had collected the evidence, the fancy-pants magazine writers would swoop in, steal our work, and act as though they had done all that original reporting themselves. Mostly, I thought, it was just pretty words; a clip job (a story compiled from others’ news clips).

I’ve long since come to treasure good magazine narratives about crime. No matter how original — and, of course, the more the better — they synthesize and explain in ways that are far more compelling than the typical news story. Many magazines do it well, including some of my favorites: The New Yorker, GQ, Rolling Stone, New York, Esquire, Vanity Fair. All it takes is a glance at Byliner’s crime-story archive to confirm the vibrancy of the genre. Even the Times Magazine, indifferent for so long to crime stories, is finally giving them their narrative due. But none can equal Texas Monthly for its sheer commitment to the form.

I was privileged to serve as a judge in the reporting category for the 2010 City and Regional Magazine Association awards, when Texas Monthly took three of five finalist slots (and won, for Michael Hall’s “Across the Line,” a dissection of an out-of-control sex-crime prosecution). Last year, Pamela Colloff was a National Magazine Award finalist for the two-part series (“Innocence Lost” and “Innocence Found”) on a wrongful conviction that contributed to the state’s decision to free Anthony Graves after 18 years.

Now Colloff has done it again. In “Hannah and Andrew,” in the magazine’s January issue, she presents as clear an example as I have found of the difference between fact and assumption — the true measure of reporting in the public interest. Anger over a child’s death fueled a presumption of guilt, but thanks to a meticulous and even-handed examination of the evidence, Colloff shows convincingly that a foster mother’s life-without-parole sentence is unjustified and unjust. Now if only the state’s notoriously stubborn prosecutors and judiciary would listen — and remember that criminal justice, like Texas Monthly‘s journalism, should be about a search for truth rather than about winning or blind vengeance.