In September 2008, National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Laura Sullivan had a chilling phone conversation. She had been working for six months on a story about two prisoners at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, who had been held in solitary confinement for 36 years. There were powerful indications they were not guilty of the crime that threw them into solitary. As her research phase came to a close, two critical interviews remained: the two men. She did not have the cooperation of the prison administration. Through their lawyer, however, Sullivan thought she had a good chance of reaching the two inmates.

But the phone call from the spokesperson at Angola—as the prison was commonly called—was as close to a threat as Sullivan, an experienced prisons reporter, had ever heard. Prison authorities, said the spokeswoman, were well aware that Sullivan was trying to contact the men. They could not legally prevent her from doing so. But as Sullivan knew, the two had recently moved from solitary into a 12-man cell. The spokeswoman wanted Sullivan to know that, should the prison discover she had successfully contacted them, the inmates would be returned to solitary confinement.

Since December 2004, Sullivan had covered police and prisons, the in-house name for her beat (though on the NPR website her area was referred to as “crime and punishment”). She had learned that it never paid to lie to prison directors about what she was reporting. This policy had won her a reputation as trustworthy and fair. In visits to prisons in half the states across the country for stories on such sensitive issues as overcrowding, elderly inmates, crime trends, and prison rape, she’d been given exceptional access.

So the warning from Angola prison came as a surprise. Sullivan was already deeply invested in the story. She did not want to walk away from it. On the other hand, she could not imagine causing the inmates further hardship.

Over several days, Sullivan and her editor weighed the matter. They had three central questions. One was about the story itself. How important were the voices of the two prisoners to the story? The second considered consequences: was this news story worth risking the possibility that the two inmates would be sent back into solitary confinement? Finally, what about Sullivan’s responsibility as a journalist? How could she not report what seemed an important story about a possible miscarriage of justice?