Mara Leveritt has covered crime, police, courts, and prisons in Arkansas for more than 30 years. In 1991, she broke the story about how plasma drawn from Arkansas prisoners was being sold on the international market, despite state officials’ awareness that inmates infected with HIV and hepatitis C were not being screened from the program. The program ended in 1994, but by then, more than 1,000 Canadians who suffered from hemophilia were infected with HIV from plasma traced to Arkansas prisons. Another 20,000 Canadians were infected with hepatitis C.
In 1995, Leveritt left newspaper reporting to dive more deeply into some other disturbing cases she’d covered. All remain unresolved.