Ken Armstrong, 2009 Chancellor Award Winner

An investigative reporter for more than 20 years

About the Winner

Ken Armstrong, a staff reporter at The Seattle Times, has written investigative stories for more than 20 years producing consistently remarkable work of depth and impact. His subjects have ranged from failures in the criminal justice system to illegally sealed court records, from Orwellian conditions in the Postal Service to a community’s complicity in protecting wayward athletes.

Armstrong previously worked at the Chicago Tribune, where his reporting shaped the national debate on the death penalty. He wrote a groundbreaking five-part series, “The Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois,” with Steve Mills that exposed fault lines radiating through the state’s system of capital punishment. Citing the Tribune series, Illinois Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions in January 2000. Three years later he emptied death row, commuting 164 death sentences to life in prison. Ryan also granted full pardons to four death row inmates based on innocence. Each had been profiled in the Tribune series.

In Chicago, Armstrong wrote five other criminal-justice series, usually with Mills or Maurice Possley, or both. These included investigations of prosecutorial misconduct, false confessions and problems in capital cases in Texas. Each project approached the subject comprehensively, rather than anecdotally. For example, he fashioned a set of queries that helped turn up 381 homicide convictions nationally that were overturned on appeal because prosecutors withheld exculpatory evidence or knowingly used false evidence.

Armstrong was a 2001 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton University in 2002. He is a four-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in the categories of public service, investigative, national and explanatory reporting. He has won the George Polk Award twice and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award three times.

He is the co-author of “Scoreboard, Baby,” a book about sports culture’s corruption of a community’s values, that will be published next year. Armstrong’s wife, Ramona Hattendorf, does volunteer work and is president of the PTA in Seattle. They live in the city with their two children, Emmett and Meghan.

Articles by Ken Armstrong

Part 1: "Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois," published in the Chicago Tribune, Nov. 14, 1999.

Part 1: "Trial & Error," published in the Chicago Tribune, Jan. 11, 1999.

Chapter 1: "Victory and Ruins," published in The Seattle Times, Jan. 27, 2008.

"School district ignored warnings, then silenced girls fondled by teacher," part of "Your Courts, Their Secrets" series, published in The Seattle Times, Oct. 22, 2006.