April 27th, 2014 – 6:55pm
Philly.com
By Emily Babay
Leroy “Beyah” Edney was 11 the first time he got locked up.
Edney was at a Philadelphia rec center when an argument with another kid turned violent. It didn’t turn out so well for the other kid. Edney spent six months at a juvenile detention center as a result. A few years later, he began stealing cash from supermarkets. He worked his way up to robbing banks and stores at gunpoint.
“My appetite got bigger and bigger,” Edney says.
Edney, now 56, has served half his life in prison – 28 years to be exact. He’s determined not to go back and works seasonally now as an artist at that same rec center in Overbrook. Edney has no employer benefits but recently obtained health insurance.
Edney was released for the last time in 2008, making him one of the more than 85,000 inmates released from Pennsylvania state prisons between that year and 2012, the most recent data available.
That number is growing: More than 19,000 Pennsylvania inmates were released in 2012 alone — nearly twice the number from a decade earlier. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey and across the country, the number of people incarcerated has been leveling off in recent years, after decades of steep increases. And the number of federal inmates could soon fall further, under new plans to ease sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
Thousands of former prisoners are back on the streets in cities like Philadelphia. They are trying to readjust, find jobs, and just stay out of trouble. For many, it hasn’t proved easy.
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Read more: enterprise, Philly.com, writing
April 7th, 2014 – 6:48pm
Philly.com
By Brian X. McCrone and Emily Babay
The City of Philadelphia has spent nearly $900 million in overtime during the past five years, partly as a strategy to keep costs down by hiring fewer full-time workers. But a Philly.com analysis shows the strategy is driving up pension payments to thousands of employees.
Overtime has allowed unionized municipal employees to boost their yearly pay and to inflate, or “spike,” their pensions at a time when the city pension fund is less than half funded, according to the examination of 167,000 payroll records from the calendar years 2009 through 2013. The records were obtained from the city through a request using Pennsylvania’s Right to Know law.
Through overtime pay, a single employee can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional retirement income. Pensions are based on an employee’s three highest years of pay, excluding workers in the police and fire departments.
Many city employees are logging almost superhuman amounts of hours, year after year, the analysis found. City officials say they look at departments’ overall overtime spending, though there appears to be little or no study of its short- or long-term effects on municipal finances.
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February 10th, 2014 – 6:43pm
Philly.com
By Emily Babay
Eric Birnbaum stayed late at his Bucks County office on Feb. 10, 2009. As usual, he was one of the last out the door, leaving with law partner Terry Goldberg about 8:30 p.m. The two childhood friends were used to working late into the night together.
Divorced with college-age daughters, Birnbaum walked into the dark on the mild winter night, climbed into his car and drove five miles to the Northeast Philadelphia home he shared with his long-haired dachshund, Oscar. He planned to walk and feed Oscar, then eat his own dinner, his normal evening routine.
In short, it was a typical night for Eric Birnbaum. And it was the last night of his life. Continue reading »
Read more: crime, enterprise, Philly.com, writing
June 18th, 2013 – 7:17pm
I researched new projects planned as part of Philadelphia’s developing trail network to create this gallery, which included information about 17 of the trails’ locations, lengths and status. Click the photo to see the full gallery on Philly.com.
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Read more: enterprise, multimedia and social media, Philly.com
May 7th, 2013 – 7:22pm
After three Ohio women were rescued after spending roughly a decade in captivity, I looked at the cases of Philadelphians who had also gone missing as children and remained so 10 or more years later. I researched the cases, obtained their photos and wrote the captions. Click the photo to see the gallery on Philly.com
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Read more: enterprise, multimedia and social media, Philly.com
September 18th, 2011 – 5:23pm
The Washington Examiner
By Emily Babay
The methods they use to get drugs into the United States range from soup packets to suitcases to their own bodies. But many drug smugglers nabbed at local airports have at least one thing in common: They say they turned to the drug trade because of financial hardships.
In court papers, attorneys for drug couriers cite myriad economic woes that befell their clients, leading them to work as drug mules to recoup lost funds. A few of their stories:
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Read more: courts, crime, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
September 18th, 2011 – 5:21pm
The Washington Examiner
By Emily Babay
These weren’t clams you’d want to serve on the dinner table. The juice boxes weren’t what you’d put in your child’s lunch box. The soup wasn’t what you’d use to nurse yourself back to health. And the statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph definitely weren’t fit for a church.
They’re all methods used by drug smugglers trying to get their contraband into the United States through Washington-area airports, sending couriers on flights with cocaine-stuffed clams, soup packets and statues, or with stomachs full of ingested heroin pellets.
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Read more: courts, crime, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing
June 19th, 2011 – 5:05pm
The Washington Examiner
By Emily Babay
Three years after a government report uncovered that abuse of domestic workers by diplomats was more pervasive than expected, officials and advocates say progress is being made in preventing such cases.
A Government Accountability Office study found 42 likely trafficking cases between 2000 and 2008. Since then, programs have been set up to inform diplomats’ domestic workers about human trafficking before they arrive in the United States and better track abuse allegations.
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June 17th, 2011 – 5:03pm
The Washington Examiner
By Emily Babay
A maid or nanny alleges that her employer has raped her, taken her passport, made her shovel snow in shorts, refused to pay her or beat her unconscious.
In most cases, this is what would happen next: Police would investigate. If the allegations were true, the employer would face criminal charges and a potential civil lawsuit for emotional and monetary damages.
Unless the employer is a diplomat.
All of those allegations have been made against high-level foreign officials in Washington in recent years. They foreshadowed the sexual assault accusations from a New York hotel maid facing Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now the former chief of the International Monetary Fund. But unlike Strauss-Kahn, D.C.-area diplomats have largely escaped criminal courtrooms and serious consequences.
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Read more: courts, enterprise, Uncategorized, Washington Examiner, writing
March 21st, 2011 – 8:15pm
The Washington Examiner
By Emily Babay
Amanda J. Snell was a 20-year-old Navy intelligence specialist and a youth minister at an Alexandria church when she was found dead in her Henderson Hall barracks room in Arlington in July 2009.
More than a year and half later, prosecutors are preparing to charge a former Marine corporal with a violent past in her death, according to Snell’s mother and a law enforcement source.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia says it plans to charge Jorge A. Torrez in the case, Snell’s mother, Cynthia, told The Washington Examiner.
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Read more: courts, enterprise, Washington Examiner, writing