Gene Miller - Pulitzer Prizes

Pulitzer Prizes

Over the decades Miller would cover or edit coverage for a wide swath of historic stories, but it was his pursuit of four flawed murder convictions that established his legacy. His efforts twice won him a Pulitzer.

Miller won the first Pulitzer in 1967 for separate investigations into the cases of Joe Shea and Mary Katherin Hampton, each innocent people who had been falsely convicted of murder who were freed thanks to his reporting.

In 1976, Miller won again after writings stories that freed two black Death Row inmates, Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who had been condemned to die in 1963 for the murders of two white gas station attendants in Port St. Joe, Florida. They had nothing to do with the crime, but police had beaten false confessions from them.

After learning that a third man had confessed to the crime, Miller spent eight years writing stories about the case and then wrote a book about it, "Invitation to a Lynching." In 1975, Miller sent the galleys to his book to then-Florida attorney general Robert Shevin and then-Florida Governor Reubin Askew. Askew granted the men clemency. Miller's suddenly obsolete book was a bomb, but he said he didn't care - he had written it for only one reader, Askew.

Miller, who left a vivid and stylishly choppy imprint on the stories he edited, was the editor for two more Pulitzer wins at the Miami Herald: Edna Buchanan in 1986 and Sydney Freedberg in 1991.