ABA Silver Gavel award winners include 'Making a Murderer' and book about same-sex marriage trial
Winners this year of the American Bar Association’s annual Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts include the popular Netflix television series Making a Murderer and a book about the groundbreaking federal lawsuit against Proposition 8, which sought to reverse a California Supreme Court decision that found a state constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial, by constitutional law professor Kenji Yoshino of New York University, melds his own personal experiences with what he describes in the book as “one of the most powerful civil rights trials in American history,” in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry, as a New York Times (reg. req.) book review notes.
Other winners of this year’s Silver Gavel awards are:
A series of online St. Louis Public Radio news stories, Law, Justice and the Death of Michael Brown, about what happened after a white police officer shot an unarmed African–American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri
On the Media: Bench Press, a radio program that delves into the workings of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Television documentary POV: Tough Love, which tells the personal stories of two troubled parents as they fight to regain custody of their children from the foster care system.
Honorable mentions went to Untrodden Ground: How Presidents Interpret the Constitution, a book by Harold Bruff; The Hunting Ground, a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses; and “Betrayed by the Badge,” an Associated Press investigation of sexual misconduct by law enforcement officers.
The Silver Gavel Awards will be presented to honorees by ABA President Paulette Brown on July 12 at a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
“The highly selective group of winners of the 2016 Silver Gavel Awards for Media and the Arts are the end result of a rigorous review by the American Bar Association,” said Maryland District Court Judge Pamila J. Brown, the chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Gavel Awards, in an ABA news release. “We congratulate all of the awardees for their extraordinary efforts to foster the American public’s understanding of law.”
Related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “‘Making a Murderer’ is among ABA Silver Gavel nominees”
