Cronkite student collaboration a finalist for Pulitzer Prize

Students and faculty in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University were recognized by the Pulitzer Prize Board earlier this month for a groundbreaking project they did in collaboration with professional journalists.

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at ASU was named a finalist in the Pulitzer Prizes 2025 investigative reporting category for the project “Lethal Restraint,” which ran in 2024. The Pulitzers, both finalists and award winners, were announced May 5.

Separately, two New America fellows were also honored by the Pulitzer judges, one as a winner, for their reporting on the effects of war. Read more about their stories below.

The “Lethal Restraint” project documented more than 1,000 people who died when police officers subdued them with methods intended to be nonlethal, such as Tasers and physical holds. Two dozen ASU students, along with Cronkite faculty members and professors of practice Maud Beelman and Lauren Mucciolo and Professor Sarah Cohen, collaborated with The Associated Press, Frontline and the Howard Center for Investigative Reporting at the University of Maryland.

Drawing on police records, autopsy reports, body-camera footage and interviews, the collaboration is the most expansive accounting of such deaths nationwide.

“These students are doing investigative journalism that's important, that's impactful,” Beelman said.

“They are contributing to the body of knowledge, and they are filling a hole that once used to be filled by working professional reporters. And I think that makes the future of investigative journalism look very bright from our perspective, because we see the talent that's now going into the pipeline.”

Beelman is the founding director and was the executive editor of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at ASU during the project. She is now the collaborations editor. Beelman, Mucciolo and Cohen, who is now retired, were credited as project editors for “Lethal Restraint.”

The work of the students and their professional colleagues led to real change. Last fall, crediting the project, the Police Executive Research Forum released new guidance to help reduce the risks of deaths from police restraint.

“That’s the kind of real-world impact this kind of reporting can have,” Beelman said.

Beelman was instrumental in getting the opportunity for the Cronkite students.

Before coming to ASU, she was the U.S. investigations editor for The Associated Press. In 2022, AP asked if the Howard Center at ASU would collaborate on a project that required an enormous amount of work.

Beelman made sure that the students would participate as full-fledged reporters and receive byline credit. Twenty-four students, most of them graduate students, cycled in and out of the project over two years, working on records requests, checking facts and conducting interviews.

Some of the students interviewed grieving family members of victims for the Frontline documentary that was part of the project, Mucciolo said.

“These are very difficult interviews to do,” she said, adding that family members often have little information about their loved one’s death.

“This provided validation for the families to have those interactions with our reporters. (And it) was the best kind of training on the ground you can have, to be able to handle those kinds of interviews with people who are experiencing trauma and when you're the lifeline, the last resort, for making any kind of sense of such a tragedy.”

The students ran into many roadblocks while trying to uncover these deaths. Brooke Manning, who graduated and now works for The Kyiv Independent, called a medical examiner in Nevada to get records and was told that the computer was unable to provide them. She later spoke to a different medical examiner who supplied the records, asked about the computer program used and then called back the other examiner to explain how to do it.

Nathan Collins worked on the project during the fall 2022 semester, before graduating with a master’s degree in investigative journalism that December. He made records requests and worked on the database.

“It was the perfect opportunity to get a lot of hands-on investigative work and to see how things are done at that level, because it was a top-tier investigations team,” he said.

He wrote two stories with Cronkite colleagues. One was about officers with violations on their records and the other was about the concept of “excited delirium” — when an agitated person is forcibly subdued by police officers.

“We wrote a story about the history of that phrase in policing and the disproportionate effect it has especially on young Black and brown men as an excuse or justification to have a pretty aggressive arrest or even as justification for a police officer killing someone in the field,” he said.

Collins is now the city hall reporter for KERA, the NPR station in Dallas, and uses the skills he learned working on the project every day, including persistence in records requests.

“It taught me a lot about emotional resilience when you're reporting on intense subjects, and that has been really valuable to me,” he said. “I also met some great mentors from the AP team who have guided me a lot.”

Taylor Stevens, who also worked on the project, graduated with a master’s degree in investigative journalism in December 2022 and stayed on as a contract worker for AP until the project's publication.

She helped to comb through news stories, depositions, medical examiners’ reports and case summaries to find as many incidents as possible of people dying after encountering “less lethal” police methods, such Tasers, bean bag guns, kicks, punches and prone positions. The team found 1,036 deaths.

“One thing that makes the project really unique is that this is a database that wasn’t just an aggregation of details from other news sources. It was all built on primary source materials, not just allegations and lawsuits,” said Stevens, who was one of the lead fact checkers.

“How did we know if police used this type of response? Is it an allegation, or is it on video? So we reviewed hundreds of hours of video to determine where this information came from.

“It’s not that often in your career you’ll get to spend that kind of time building that expertise on a topic — just really diving in and having it become your world for a very long time,” said Stevens, who was credited as an assistant project editor for “Lethal Restraint” and is now an investigative reporter at Fox 13 in Salt Lake City.

“I’m proud of everything we did to get it out there and to see the (Pulitzer) committee recognize the impact of the work and all of the time and thought that went into it.”

Two others in the ASU community were also honored by the Pulitzer judges.

Matthieu Aikins, a freelance journalist, won the Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for a story about how the U.S. failed in Afghanistan, and Anand Gopal, a New Yorker staff writer and assistant research professor with the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at ASU, was a feature writing finalist for a story about a Syrian detention camp. Both men were fellows at New America, a partner organization of ASU.

Both Aikins and Gopal started their journalism careers by living in Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East and learning the local languages.

Aikins, who was a New America fellow in 2017, is a freelance journalist who was part of a New York Times team recognized for “America’s Monster: How the U.S. Backed Kidnapping, Torture and Murder in Afghanistan.”

Aikins moved to Afghanistan in 2008 and, because he couldn’t afford translators, he became proficient in the local dialect Dari.

“My mother's Japanese, my father's European in origin, but I pass as a local in that part of the world, which made it much easier to get access to places that were getting harder to go to because of the increasing danger for Western journalists,” he said.

“It was a combination of the extraordinary access I was able to get because I was traveling on the ground, meeting people like drug traffickers, and the heightened level of interest there was in Afghanistan in 2009, when it was one of the top stories.”

Aikins collaborated with a New York Times team to produce a package of several stories, videos and photographs based on thousands of interviews. He says the Pulitzer was gratifying because the journalists worked on the project for many months, even after public interest had faded.

“We forget what happened to Afghans at our own peril,” he said.

Gopal, who also reported extensively from Afghanistan, was a finalist for “The Open-Air Prison for Isis Supporters — and Victims.” He became interested in global politics after Sept. 11, 2001, when he was a freshman in college and saw the twin towers fall.

“I felt like I couldn't really understand everything that was happening, and I needed to see it and understand it for myself. So I moved to Afghanistan and lived there for a few years," he said.

Gopal, a sociologist, had been working with an aid organization in Syria, giving him access to the harrowing Al-Hol refugee camp — an open-air holding area for 50,000 people, half of them children. Even today, many of the inhabitants have no connection to terrorism and yet cannot leave.

“I would talk to kids and I'd be amazed about how little they knew about what was happening outside and how little access they had to the basic elements of childhood that most of us have taken for granted,” he said.

Gopal knew some people in Syria who performed as clowns, so he decided to bring them into the camp to entertain the children. He had no intention of writing about it, but his editor and others encouraged him to shine a light on what was happening in Al-Hol.

When he heard that his story was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, Gopal thought about the editors and fact-checkers who helped him at The New Yorker.

“But then of course I was thinking also about the folks I got to know in the camp, whose stories have been made a little bit more accessible to people here in the U.S., and all the time they took out of their day to tell me their life story, to be vulnerable with me and to share some of the more difficult things they've had to experience. I'm definitely grateful for that,” Gopal said.

To achieve high-impact global journalism, Aikins and Gopal encourage young journalists to immerse themselves in another culture.

“There’s a way in which by reporting, by staying open to having your own views challenged, by being inquisitive and curious and delving into the research, you can become a kind of de facto expert in a field,” Gopal said.