Who We Are
PAMELA CYTRYNBAUM
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| Professor Pamela Cytrynbaum (right) talks with Sister Helen Prejean, bestselling author of The Death of Innocents and Dead Man Walking, during the Brandeis Day of Innocence, March 22, 2006. |
From September 2005 to June 2007, Pamela Cytrynbaum was the Associate Director of the Brandeis Institute for Investigative Journalism. She spent the 2005-2006 academic year helping us to explore the creation of an Innocence Project at Brandeis, which she helped us to launch in the 2006-2007 academic year. During this time, she helped to oversee the investigation into the case of a
In 2004 she co-taught the capstone Investigative Journalism course in Northwestern University’s nationally-acclaimed Medill Innocence Project, where she also served as program assistant.
She brought to Brandeis nearly a decade of teaching journalism as a visiting assistant professor or instructor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Oregon State University, and the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, along with 12 years' experience as a newspaper reporter and freelancer for many of the nation’s largest metropolitan dailies. As a teacher she pushes her students to explore the larger system bearing down on the people whose lives flash and burn through the news cycles. As a reporter her work often focused on the criminal justice system, narrating to life the stories of human beings, “falling through the cracks,” and exposing the broken justice system through which they slid.
Teaching and learning at the Medill Innocence Project
The Medill Innocence Project has been recognized internationally for its pioneering investigative work in righting wrongful convictions. Prof. David Protess and his teams of undergraduate journalism students have contributed to the release of nine innocent men from death row in
Ms. Cytrynbaum returned to Medill in 2004 to co-teach the class, entitled “Investigative Journalism,” with Prof. Protess, and to coordinate the Innocence Project. Besides bringing the cases into the Project, she did her own reporting, and worked with Prof. Protess conducting weekly strategy seminars with students in the Project. She and Prof. Protess used role playing to teach investigative interviewing techniques, including the “human lie-detector test”; challenged them to find points of empathy and connection with sources; pushed students to debate the ethical and safety dilemmas inherent in their work; taught them how to memorialize their findings; and helped them process the tremendous emotional roller coaster suffered by those involved in this work.
As an undergraduate journalism student nearly 20 years ago, Ms. Cytrynbaum took the Investigative Reporting class taught by Prof. David Protess, the nationally-acclaimed investigative journalist and teacher who went on to become known as “Moses” to death row inmates nationwide.
Ms. Cytrynbaum also contributed to the efforts of Prof. Protess to tackle the particularly egregious case of Maurice Carter, who spent 28 years in a
Investigative Highlights
Reporting resulted in the release of an innocent man from a life sentence, while exposing how the law itself convicts
Ms. Cytrynbaum’s work as a reporter offered her a front-row seat to the ghastly circus of a wrongful conviction in real time. At the (
Exposed how the system fails women, children, and people of color
Ms. Cytrynbaum chronicled the case of a battered woman who, despite doing “everything right,” was fatally shot outside the courthouse where she sought protection yet again. In a series of front-page stories for the Times-Picayune, Ms. Cytrynbaum chronicled the myriad ways one woman tried to save her own life. In “Cries For Help: How the system failed Sharyn Q. Mayer,” she developed a detailed chronology of every effort the victim made to follow the rules, including documenting her husband’s abuse, calling police, filing reports, seeing counselors, getting restraining orders, and finally, spending the last few months of her life foretelling her death. Bearing posthumous witness to her brutal marriage, she wrote a letter to police: “In the event of my death, my childrens’ or any of my family members, Moses Hunter Mayer is guilty.” He was convicted.
In “Blame: Anseman case slipped through cracks,” Ms. Cytrynbaum exposed the malfeasance and incompetence of state child protection workers who reported a starving baby “small, but not sick looking” just weeks before she died a skeleton—a 13-month-old weighing less than a newborn. Using agency reports documenting 99 contacts with the family, she described the failure of the state to protect the weakest of us. The series of articles resulted in an investigation by the district attorney into the caseworkers and the agency.
Her work on these stories led to public outcries, investigations into the several state agencies, and the release of a wrongfully convicted man.
She was also part of an award-winning investigative team that wrote a series of stories after combing through thousands of complaints against
Reported on a wide range of injustices
While in college Ms. Cytrynbaum interned at the Miami Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, and U.S. News & World Report. After graduating from college, she interned at the Washington Post and then served nearly two years as a news assistant in the Writing Program at the New York Times. She was always drawn to criminal justice stories, and no matter her beat, ended up at numerous crime scenes and court houses. After leaving
Other affiliations
In addition to her teaching experience, Ms. Cytrynbaum served for four years as the internship coordinator for the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. She was director of the Snowden Internship Program and coordinator of the UO Minority High School Journalism Summer Workshop. She continues to write for magazines and newspapers as a freelancer. She is a member of JAWS, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, National Council of Teachers of English, National Association of Women Writers, and the Oregon Education Association.
She is a graduate of