AJC Investigations: Shining light on abuse of power

The story was shocking in so many ways.

Doctors were testing unapproved, experimental drugs on mental patients without family consent. The doctor leading the research project was being paid by drug firms.

But that wasn’t the only problem at Milledgeville State Hospital in 1959, when The Atlanta Constitution published a series of stories about conditions at what was then one of the world’s largest mental institutions.

One-fourth of the medical staff were recovering from or actively abusing alcohol or drugs, including several hired immediately after completing treatment at the hospital. Some doctors were drunk while on duty and were not fired.

The superintendent told a reporter that he’d rather hire doctors with better backgrounds but didn’t have the money for higher salaries.

The lack of funding also contributed to extreme staff shortages. Forty-eight doctors, not a psychiatrist among them, were expected to care for more than 12,000 institutionalized patients. At least one nurse performed major surgeries, and unqualified staff took X-rays and administered anesthesia.

The journalist who exposed these atrocities was Jack Nelson, a 29-year-old intrepid investigative reporter who regularly served up stories of corruption and misconduct to the Constitution’s readers.

Work like Nelson’s has long been a hallmark of journalism. For more than three centuries, newspaper readers have learned of abuses by the powerful through major exposes — Watergate, the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal, the My Lai massacre, the Tuskegee study that denied syphilis treatment to Black men.

One early investigator who became famous was Nellie Bly, hired by The New York World as a so-called “girl stunt reporter” in 1887. Her first assignment was to investigate conditions at a notorious New York mental asylum, so she pretended to be mentally ill and got herself committed.

Public reaction to her reporting was so strong that the asylum made reforms, and Bly’s articles were published as a book, “Ten Days in a Mad-House.” Her work and growing fame marked a turning point for both women journalists and investigative reporting.

Seven decades later, readers’ response to Nelson’s revelations about Milledgeville State Hospital also influenced policy. Initially, officials pushed back hard. When Nelson asked questions about surgery delays for a follow-up article, the hospital superintendent told him, “I don’t think that’s any of your business.” The state welfare chief said the Constitution had been “duped.” And representatives of the Fulton County Medical Society met with editors to protest Nelson’s reporting.

But the tide turned quickly as readers wrote letters to the editor and lawmakers and the broader public called for reform.

Gov. Ernest Vandiver appointed a committee to investigate. The committee confirmed Nelson’s findings and dug even deeper. That prompted a significant increase in funding for the hospital and led to an overhaul of its staff and its organization.

Nelson’s work earned him a Pulitzer Prize — then, as now, considered journalism’s highest honor. The category Nelson won, Local Reporting–Edition Time, was noteworthy because it recognized not just the quality of the work but how quickly it was produced. Nelson was a prolific investigative reporter, writing more than 60 front-page stories in 1959 alone.

Nelson’s probe into the Milledgeville hospital is just one of hundreds of investigations launched by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution — and its predecessors, the Constitution and the Journal — over the course of its 157-year history.

Like Nelson’s work, those investigations brought to light the injustices suffered by vulnerable people and revealed abuses of power by officials put in positions of trust.

The AJC serves the community in many ways, but few forms of journalism demand more persistence than investigative reporting. Journalists, empowered by the First Amendment to scrutinize government, can drive change when they reveal flaws in public institutions and hold officials accountable.

Though the printed newspaper will go away at the end of this month, the AJC’s investigations will not. Now, more than ever, innovations in the way such stories are reported and told will help the AJC thrive in the watchdog role that it has played for a century and a half.

Below is a small selection of the impactful investigations published during that time.

Shrouded in secrecy

In 1989, the AJC published Jane O. Hansen’s series “Suffer the Children,” which revealed abuse and neglect of children in the state’s child welfare system. It exposed horrific cases of 51 children dying while supposedly under the protection of the system, with officials offering few explanations or answers. “The deaths of these children …” Hansen wrote, “underscore a child welfare system that is shrouded in secrecy and structured to fail the children it is intended to protect.” The series helped spur changes, including laws that ensured more transparency and oversight, though some of the reforms didn’t stick and problems persist in child welfare. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Beginning in 2008, AJC reporters Heather Vogell and John Perry uncovered abnormally high standardized test scores in Atlanta Public Schools, revealing cheating driven by pressure to meet performance targets. Readers later learned that cheating methods included “changing parties,” where teachers gathered to erase wrong answers and replace them with correct ones. After a state investigation marked by interference from top APS leaders, nearly 180 employees were linked to cheating and 35 were indicted. Most took plea deals, and 11 were convicted after a lengthy trial; one was acquitted.

Imbalance of power

Because of the inherent imbalance of power between prisoners and guards and between police and suspects, Atlanta’s reporters have monitored policing and prisons for decades.

In recent years, reporters Carrie Teegardin and Danny Robbins have held the state Department of Corrections accountable with dozens of stories detailing prison corruption and violence. Despite attempts by officials to clamp down on information, the AJC revealed that drug rings were operating inside prisons; prisoners lay dead in cells for hours and, in some cases, days; and one prisoner arranged for “hits” on people on the outside. In early 2025, the state added about $600 million in new funding to address prison staffing shortages and security failures that contributed to violence, and more spending is anticipated.

The AJC and Channel 2 Action News have partnered on some investigations, including a 2015 analysis of police shootings. Reporters Brad Schrade, Jennifer Peebles and Jeff Ernsthausen, with Channel 2’s Jodie Fleischer, reviewed 171 shootings over five years and uncovered misconduct in some cases. They also found that no officer went to trial, aided by a special privilege that let accused police sit in on grand jury proceedings, hear all the evidence and make a statement that could not be challenged or cross-examined. No private citizen had that right, and after the series, lawmakers significantly curtailed the police privilege.

Railroad justice, freed innocents

AJC reporters have examined cases involving prisoners who made convincing claims of innocence and were later exonerated in court.

Reporter Bill Rankin, founder of the AJC’s popular “Breakdown” podcast, exposed flaws in the trial of Justin Chapman and its aftermath during Season 1, “Railroad Justice in a Railroad Town.” Accused and later convicted of arson and murder in Bremen, Chapman was ultimately freed a decade after the murder.

In Season 4, “Murder Below the Gnat Line,” Rankin uncovered information that supported Devonia Inman’s claims of innocence and strongly suggested another man had killed a Taco Bell manager in the South Georgia city of Adel. The podcast’s disclosure of that evidence contributed to Inman being freed after serving 23 years behind bars for a crime he always insisted he never committed.

Credit: Joshua Sharpe

Credit: Joshua Sharpe

Reporter Joshua Sharpe began examining the case against Dennis Perry three decades after the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain at Rising Daughter Baptist Church in South Georgia and 17 years after Perry was convicted. “Imperfect Alibi,” a 2020 narrative with an accompanying documentary, revealed that another suspect’s alibi was deeply flawed and that DNA from that suspect was linked to the murder scene. Perry was released from prison in 2020, and charges are now pending against the other suspect.

Dead voters, imprisoned officeholders

Cases of public figures and elected officials behaving badly have formed a large body of investigative work in Georgia. Many elected officials have spent time behind bars after the Atlanta newspapers revealed possible corruption.

Those held accountable include a DeKalb County commissioner who used a county-issued purchasing card for personal expenses and an Atlanta finance chief who prosecutors said improperly claimed travel reimbursements and used the authority of the city police department to buy a pair of custom-built machine guns unavailable to civilians.

One of Georgia’s most significant political corruption stories broke in 1947, when The Atlanta Journal’s George Goodwin uncovered evidence of voter fraud in Telfair County, including ballots cast in the name of dead people and nonresidents during the disputed 1946 governor’s race. The reporting came amid a complex dispute over who would succeed Eugene Talmadge, who died after being elected to a fourth term but before being sworn in. In 1948, Goodwin became the first Atlanta reporter to win a Pulitzer Prize.

“A new level of sophistication”

Modern computing introduced both added complexity and new tools for investigative reporting. Unlike Jack Nelson, whose investigations relied largely on human sources, modern investigators depend extensively on computerized government records.

Some AJC investigations, including the Atlanta schools cheating scandal, used technology so innovatively that they influenced the journalism industry and set new standards.

A 1988 AJC investigation of redlining in Atlanta’s Black neighborhoods by mortgage lenders won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for reporter Bill Dedman. “The Color of Money” revealed racially biased lending practices that meant white applicants received five times as many home loans as Black applicants of the same income. The project became a landmark in early data reporting, analyzing a massive federal loan dataset and linking it with U.S. Census demographics. The series prompted banking reforms and more than $70 million in loan commitments for prospective homeowners buying in Black neighborhoods.

Another investigation recognized for innovation was the AJC’s “Doctors and Sex Abuse,” which in 2016 revealed that doctors who sexually abused patients were often allowed to continue practicing. Regulators frequently treated the abuse as “boundary violations” to be addressed with education or therapy — sometimes at spalike centers offering amenities such as yoga and horseback riding — rather than as potential crimes. The project used computerized website scraping and machine learning to collect and analyze more than 100,000 medical board orders nationwide and flag the ones likely to involve sex abuse for reporter review. In awarding the series its prestigious Phil Meyer Award, Investigative Reporters and Editors said the AJC “took data analysis for a story to new levels of sophistication.” The series was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting.

In addition to newspaper archives, sources for this article included the Pulitzer Prizes website, a Feb. 18, 2015, Atlanta Magazine article by Doug Monroe about Central State Hospital (as the Milledgeville State Hospital came to be known) and Jack Nelson’s 2013 biography, “Scoop: The Evolution of a Southern Reporter.”

Shawn McIntosh supervised investigative reporting for most of her 22 years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She retired in March as a managing editor and head of standards.