I’m Nancy Mullane, an investigative journalist, writer and photographer. Over the past 30 years, I’ve produced feature radio stories for This American Life, National Public Radio, Marketplace, Latino USA, and the NPR affiliates KALW News and KQED in San Francisco. In 2012, I co-founded the podcast, Life of the Law and served as the project’s Executive Director/Producer through 2019. As a Member of the Board of the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists, I helped create and liaison with the San Quentin Satellite Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
As an investigative reporter and correspondent for NPR, I uncovered the Pentagon's under-reporting the number of soldiers going AWOL or Absent Without Leave during the war in Iraq; and for Marketplace, a for-profit business selling breast milk donated by mothers; and for the local NPR affiliate KALW, and was the first reporter in more than a decade to have exclusive access to men serving condemned sentences on California's Death Row. You can find links to most of my reporting on the Radio page of my website.
Then, in 2007, while on general assignment for NPR to produce a report on prisons in California, I made a key discovery that would redirect the focus of my reporting for the next ten years to what was happening in California prisons. In June of that year, I was given press clearance to go inside San Quentin State Prison in northern California. Behind the walls, I met a dozen men serving life sentences for murder convictions. Through my reporting, I also discovered that based on a California law passed in 1988, nearly all inmates convicted of murder who were found suitable for parole by the state's Board of Parole Hearings were having their "dates" of freedom reversed by the California’s governors.
In 2008, I was granted a Soros Justice Media Fellowship by the Open Society Foundations to investigate the 20 year impact of governor review and reversal of parole in California. My reporting led to a documentary report on This American Life. In 2010, the report, "Long Shot," was awarded a National Edward R. Murrow Award.
My first non-fiction book, Life After Murder: Five Men In Search of Redemption, was published in 2012 by PublicAffairs. In 2013 I was awarded the National Council on Crime and Delinquency’s, Media for a Just Society Book Award. And in 2014, Penal Reform International honored me with an international award for my reporting on individuals serving death sentences.
I live in San Francisco’s Richmond District with my partner Max, two big, lovable dogs, and am working on new projects.