Joseph Shapiro
Joseph Shapiro is a NPR News Investigations correspondent.
Shapiro's major investigative stories include his reports on the way rising court fines and fees create an unequal system of justice for the poor and the rise of "modern day debtors' prisons," the failure of colleges and universities to punish for on-campus sexual assaults, the epidemic of sexual assault of people with intellectual disabilities, the problems with solitary confinement, the inadequacy of civil rights laws designed to get the elderly and people with disabilities out of nursing homes, and the little-known profits involved in the production of medical products from donated human cadavers.
His "Child Cases" series, reported with PBS Frontline and ProPublica, found two dozen cases in the U.S. and Canada where parents and caregivers were charged with killing children, but the charges were later reversed or dropped. Since that series, a Texas man who was the focus of one story was released from prison. And in California, a woman who was the subject of another story had her sentence commuted.
Shapiro joined NPR in November 2001 and spent eight years covering health, aging, disability, and children's and family issues on the Science Desk. He reported on the health issues of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and helped start NPR's 2005 Impact of War series with reporting from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the National Naval Medical Center. He covered stories from Hurricane Katrina to the debate over overhauling the nation's health care system.
Before coming to NPR, Shapiro spent 19 years at U.S. News & World Report, as a Senior Writer on social policy and served as the magazine's Rome bureau chief, White House correspondent, and congressional reporter.
Among honors for his investigative journalism, Shapiro has received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, George Foster Peabody Award, George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Award, Edward R. Murrow Award, Sigma Delta Chi, IRE, Dart, Ruderman, and Gracie awards, and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Award.
Shapiro is the author of the award-winning book NO PITY: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (Random House/Three Rivers Press), which is widely read in disability studies classes.
Shapiro studied long-term care and end-of-life issues as a participant in the yearlong 1997 Kaiser Media Fellowship in Health program. In 1990, he explored the changing world of people with disabilities as an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow.
Shapiro attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Carleton College. He's a native of Washington, DC, and lives there now with his family.
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The vast majority of people, including soldiers, with PTSD, depression or other mental illness are not violent. Psychiatrists doubt the latest shooting at Fort Hood could have been predicted.
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The former dental surgeon went to prison for a long-running scheme to obtain human bodies and then harvest their tissue for sale. He admitted guilt in 2008 and was sentenced to up to 58 years in prison. He died Sunday of cancer. -
With the death of a possible suspect in one notorious case, activists are weighing the FBI's efforts to tackle cases from the 1950s and '60s. Some are calling for a congressional hearing to see whether the FBI has done enough investigating.
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A white off-duty constable shot and killed a paraplegic black man in Fayette, Miss., in 1965. Despite new witnesses who have memories of what happened that day, there's still not enough evidence to say whether Jasper Burchfield's claim of self-defense is true. -
When President Obama signs an updated version of the Violence Against Women Act on Thursday afternoon, the law will include new requirements for how colleges and universities handle allegations of sexual assault.
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Zach Sayne, who died this month at age 25 in Alabama, never made it home to Georgia where his mother hoped he would be cared for. The story of why she couldn't move him there shows the bureaucratic traps, underfunding and lack of choices that plague state Medicaid programs. -
Kristian Aspelin had one thing in his favor: enough money to pay for medical experts. The experts were able to convince prosecutors that his infant son's death was an accident. -
Spinal Elements, a small and growing company, had long made plates, screws and other technology used in spinal surgeries. But its new Hero Allograft was the first product it ever made from the tissue — in this case the bones — of a donated human cadaver. -
Connecticut's state Appellate Court ordered a new trial for Richard Lapointe, saying prosecutors wrongly withheld potentially important evidence. Lapointe, who has brain damage, confessed in 1989 that he stabbed, raped and killed his wife's 88-year-old grandmother two years earlier. His supporters believe he falsely confessed to murder.
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South African Oscar Pistorius failed in his attempt to win the 100-meter sprint and regain his title as the world's fastest amputee, losing to Great Britain's Jonnie Peacock. American Richard Browne, 21, of Jackson, Miss., won the silver medal.