Positivity: RIP, Pete Shellem
I never met Pete Shellem. I hadn’t heard of him until reading his obituary last week through a link on the blog of New York criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield. But I wish I’d had a drink with the guy.
In an age when journalism has been inflicted not only by ballyhooed budget woes and challenges from new media, but also a glut of dubious trend stories, horserace political coverage, and endless navel-gazing about the state of the profession, Shellem merely freed four wrongly convicted people from prison in a period of 10 years with his reporting. Oh, and in the 1990s he also brought down a Pennsylvania state attorney general in a mail fraud investigation. Today that fallen attorney general, Ernie Preate, Jr., has only praise for Shellem. Shellem died unexpectedly last week at age 49.
Described by a former colleague in a 2007 American Journalism Review profile as a “B-movie reporter—you know, a chain-smoking tough guy who meets his sources in bars and operates around the edges,” Shellem spent two decades covering the courts for the Harrisburg Patriot-News. In the accounts of his passing, he’s described by colleagues and friends as the sort of reporter who read court transcripts, trial briefs, and lab reports for fun, whose office was filled with phone numbers scrawled on bar napkins and letters from desperate convicts proclaiming their innocence. Between filing stories about murder trials and covering day-to-day court operations, Shellem developed and worked sources in Pennsylvania’s criminal justice system. He also developed an eye for spotting irregularities in police reports, crime lab reports, witness statements, and other court documents. That’s when he started helping innocent people get out of jail. ….
Go here for the rest of Randy Balko’s November 2 tribute at Reason.
Shellem’s Patriot-News obit is here.
