Friday, May 04, 2012

Editor and reporter who brought down corrupt rural sheriff to be featured on '60 Minutes'

Samantha Swindler and Adam Sulfridge, former managing editor and current reporter at the Times-Tribune in Corbin, Ky., whose stories about corrupt sheriff Lawrence Hodge led to his conviction and imprisonment, will be featured Sunday on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes." Swindler's work won her the 2010 Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, tenacity and integrity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.


"The way Sulfridge and Swindler got to Hodge was a painstaking investigation into all the arrests he had made," a press release about the episode says. "They uncovered a pattern of cases involving guns and drugs in which suspicious deals were cut and sentences drastically reduced; the defendants’ lawyer in nearly all the cases was a friend of the sheriff’s. In most of the cases, Hodge was taking cash and or drugs from the criminals in exchange for the deals. The result was an explosive series of stories and eventually, Hodge’s arrest."

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