The Courts Beat
The Courts Beat Nate Gartrell flipped through a fat stack of pages. “I’m basically just looking for homicides,” he said. Every week, Gartrell, a thirty-one-year-old reporter for the East Bay Times, visits the records office of the Contra Costa County criminal courthouse in Northern California, where a young clerk greets him with a smile and two sets of documents. One lists all the defendants scheduled to appear in the coming days; the other contains police reports detailing recent arrests. In late October, the schedule alone was a hundred and sixty pages long—nearly five hundred defe...