Gazette senior investigative reporter Chris Osher has been awarded the prestigious George Polk Award for his work in exposing Colorado’s dysfunctional and dangerous family court system.

The annual national awards, among the most respected in journalism, were announced Monday in New York. This is the first Polk Award ever awarded to The Gazette.

Also honored for her work in the series was former Denver Gazette reporter Julia Cardi, who is now an investigative reporter for the Detroit News.

In their work, Osher and Cardi documented how judges repeatedly put children in peril by returning them to abusive parents. As the articles disclosed, four Colorado children were killed by fathers who then committed suicide within a period of two months, including three-year-old Sophia Berry, a little girl who loved playing in her grandmother’s garden and drawing hearts and roses.

4 recent murders: Colorado’s troubled family court system ignores children in peril

The mothers of the murdered children all pleaded for help, but judges overseeing their child custody disputes either rejected their pleas or, in the case of Sophia, never ruled on motions raising allegations of child sex abuse against the father who murdered her.

The series highlighted the role in often bitter custody disputes played by so-called “parental evaluators,” experts appointed by judges to sort out difficult facts and make recommendations to the court. It’s a system in which the evaluators can charge tens of thousands of dollars for their work — with the bill going not to the court, but to the family. Osher and Cardi highlighted cases in which the evaluators were incompetent or corrupt or both.

Colorado’s parenting evaluation industry profits as bitter child custody cases thrown into chaos

“We are very pleased to see this important work by Chris and Julia honored by the George Polk Awards,” said Gazette Executive Editor Vince Bzdek. “We have also been gratified by the response of state officials and others who are striving to make reforms to Colorado’s governance of family court as a result of their work.”

“My fellow judges join me in pointing out that we received nearly 500 entries and so it was quite an accomplishment for yours to rise to the top,” John Darnton, the curator of the Polk Awards, wrote in an email to Osher.

The response to the work, ongoing by Osher, has been dramatic. During the 2023 legislative sessions, new laws were passed to increase scrutiny on the qualifications of the evaluators. Legislators barred judges from restricting the custody of a parent who is competent, protective, and not abusive solely to improve a relationship with the other parent. A new law also prohibits what has been determined to be “kook science” reunification treatment.

As a result of The Gazette’s reporting, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office is conducting a criminal investigation into one parental evaluator who falsified her qualifications and whose opinions in custody cases have been both damaging and widely discredited. Lawmakers are promising tougher measures to rein in Colorado’s dysfunctional family court system in the ongoing 2024 legislative system.

Federal lawsuit: Parental alienation theory, collusion jailed Colorado mom for year

“These are meaningful results that are important to Colorado families and to Colorado children in difficult circumstances,” said Bzdek. “This kind of accountability is a core function of what we do.” Osher is part of a three-person investigative team, Colorado Watch, that reports for both the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Denver Gazette.

This is the 75th anniversary of the George Polk Awards, which will be bestowed at ceremonies in April in New York. “This prestigious honor focuses on the intrepid, bold, and influential work of the reporters themselves, placing a premium on investigative work that is original, resourceful, and thought-provoking,” according to the organization.

Among past Polk laureates are journalism greats Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, and many others.

Other recipients of the 2023 awards include the New York Times, ProPublica, Reuters, CBS News, the New Yorker, VICE News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and Streetsblog NYC.

Five of the recipients won for coverage of the Israel/Gaza and Russia/Ukraine wars. 

Revelatory reporting on the business practices of Elon Musk, the questionable ethics of U. S, Supreme Court justices and an insidious approach to dealing with relatives of individuals killed by police were among 14 awards in 13 categories, according to a press release. Two of the other winners exposed dangerously faulty medical devices while others unearthed a lucrative trade in temporary license plates from phony car dealerships and uncovered the illegal arrest and detention of hundreds of children in rural Tennessee.

The Sydney Schanberg Prize in long-form journalism went to a veteran conflict reporter who embedded himself with rival gang lords to examine the total breakdown of civic life in Haiti.

The citation for The Gazette’s work said this: “The State Reporting award goes to Chris Osher and Julia Cardi of The Gazette of Colorado Springs for exposing the heartbreaking consequences of a family court system that relied on the advice of unqualified and incompetent parental evaluators to return young children to abusive fathers, leading to four deaths in a two-month period. Their reporting has led to changes in state law curbing the use of such discredited theories as “parental alienation” in determining custody and has prompted an ongoing criminal investigation by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.”