FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 2, 2026
Contact: [email protected]
San Rafael, Calif. – Today the First Amendment Coalition announced the winners of its 2025 Free Speech and Open Government Award. They are Ashley McBride and Callie Rhoades of The Oaklandside; Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, and Ricardo “Raoul” Poole of “The Alabama Solution” documentary film; and Brian Howey, Jerry Mitchell, Mukta Joshi, Nate Rosenfield, Najib Aminy, and Steph Quinn of Mississippi Today in collaboration with The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.
“This year’s winners truly embody the best of journalism and free expression. Their courage and tenacity uncovered critical stories that demanded to be told,” said FAC Executive Director David Snyder. “Last year saw relentless attacks on journalists and the media from our government and others, but these winners show good reason for optimism about the future of free expression and a free press.”
Ashley McBride and Callie Rhoades of The Oaklandside’s series of articles explored the lead contamination crisis at the Oakland Unified School District schools. McBride and Rhoades filed dozens of Public Records Act requests over an 11-month period to learn what led to the crisis, whether the problem was actually fixed, and if the 34,000 students at 43 at-risk schools were safe. Their investigation found that students and teachers were drinking from contaminated water sources for months after contamination was discovered; remediation was incomplete after lead was first detected at a high school in 2017; and even quick fixes such as marking unsafe water fountains and bringing in filtered water stations failed to keep students safe.
Following McBride and Rhoades’ investigation, the district has committed to several transparency reforms, including notifying school communities of lab test reports within 72 hours; creating a public dashboard online that summarizes test results; and establishing an automatic system that notifies school leaders about new test results. The school board allocated $20.5 million for lead abatement efforts. As of October 2025, most Oakland schools’ water has met safety thresholds.
Robert Earl Council, Melvin Ray, and Ricardo “Raoul” Poole of The Alabama Solution, a documentary that is the culmination of a six-year investigation of the corruption, neglect, and violence inside the Alabama State Prison system. Council, Ray, and Poole are incarcerees who used cell phones to document footage of the prison from the inside. The producers submitted Alabama Open Records Act requests for details about in-custody deaths to create a database of Alabama prison deaths from 2019–2024 for journalists, family, attorneys, and anyone else to use as a resource. They found that over 1,300 individuals had died in custody since 2019, with 470 of those deaths confirmed from preventable causes such as drug overdose, suicide, and officer brutality. Through this research, they found drug-related deaths, fueled by an officer-driven drug trade inside the prison, increased tenfold over five years, making it the leading cause of death inside the prisons.
The film weaves years of public records work and interviews by the producers and researchers with the first-person footage from Council, Ray, and Poole to create a devastating and harrowing picture of a prison system that appeared to operate with impunity. Since the film’s release, scrutiny of the Alabama Department of Corrections has increased, and the film has drawn attention to the country’s treatment of incarcerated individuals’ human rights.
Brian Howey, Jerry Mitchell, Mukta Joshi, Nate Rosenfield, and Steph Quinn of Mississippi Today, in collaboration with The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, filed hundreds of public records requests to investigate brutality and torture of incarcerees in county custody, one sheriff’s alleged theft of county resources and use of inmate labor on his family farm, the misuse of tasers, and a suspicious jail death. In addition to a print series, the team also produced two radio hours with the support of Reveal producer Najib Aminy.
The Taser investigation alone was a monumental amount of work: the team grappled with law enforcement agencies for a year to secure the release of Taser logs. Once cross-checked against police reports, their research revealed officers’ use of Tasers was dangerous and ineffective. The reporting resulted in changes to sheriff departments’ Taser use policies, and two bills in the state legislature to restrict Taser use.
The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is investigating the reported instance of torturing one incarceree; the Mississippi State Auditor launched an investigation into the sheriff who put jail incarcerees to work on his family farm; and the U.S. Department of Justice will continue its ongoing investigation of the sheriff’s department (one of two probes DOJ has kept open during the Trump administration).
Disclosure: FAC represented Howey in a lawsuit against the City of Fresno in 2023.
This year’s honorees were selected by the FAC Awards Committee, composed of Snyder; FAC board members Juliette Williams and Janice Gin; and Board of Special Advisors members Dick Rogers.
The First Amendment Coalition’s annual Free Speech and Open Government Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the advancement of free expression or the people’s right to know about their government.