John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

   

Readers of The Crime Report select a Canadian whistleblower who went public with a scathing critique of the U.S. government’s $9 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase as the 2014 Criminal Justice Newsmaker of the Year.

New York, NY December 17, 2014 — The readers of The Crime Report, who include many of the country’s most influential criminal justice specialists, have chosen Alayne Fleischmann as the 2014 Criminal Justice Newsmaker of the Year. Fleischmann’s bombshell disclosures in a November Rolling Stone magazine story, about attempts by her former bosses at JPMorgan Chase to cover up evidence of fraud and corporate malfeasance, re-focused public attention on the flawed business culture that had contributed to the worst financial meltdown in modern U.S. history.

Fleischmann, revealing her role as a whistleblower who helped the Department of Justice (DOJ) win a $9 billion civil settlement against JPMorgan Chase, was equally scathing of what she said was the government’s failure to pursue a criminal case against the company—claiming that her information was used as little more than a bargaining chip. The result, she told TCR Deputy Managing Editor Graham Kates in an interview accompanying today’s story, is that many of the vaunted financial reforms instituted following the crisis have lost traction.

“The way the DOJ deals with (these things) is to say, ‘We’ll just hide the facts, so no one knows that this happened,’ which obviously makes things worse,” Fleischmann told Kates. “If something is too big to fail or too big to prosecute, then it’s simply too big to exist.”

The full story and interview are published today in The Crime Report.

In a close second choice for Newsmaker of the Year, TCR readers chose Leslie McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr., the parents of the 18-year-old killed by a police bullet in Ferguson, Mo. on August 9, who used the tragedy of their son’s death to campaign for changes in police practices across the country.

CONTACT:
Graham Kates, Deputy Managing Editor 607-240-1124, graham@thecrimereport.org 
Stephen Handelman, Executive Editor, 212-873-5593, shandel@ix.netcom.com

About The Crime Report: The Crime Report (TCR) is the nation’s most comprehensive news service covering the diverse challenges and issues of 21st century criminal justice in the U.S. and abroad. Staffed by working journalists in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, it is published daily through the year by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. TCR’s prizewinning coverage includes investigative reports by the some of the nation’s most accomplished reporters; analysis, blogs and commentary by leading criminologists, practitioners, law enforcement/corrections professionals, and legal experts; reports on new and cutting-edge research; and daily summaries of the most important criminal justice news, issues and developments covered by the national and international press.