When Jessica Black was 16 years old, she told a story to North Carolina police detectives that helped convict five friends of murder. Decades later, she’s still trying to correct the record. Matthew Bremner’s feature for Financial Times is a brisk tick-tock of efforts by Black and her incarcerated friends to overturn criminal convictions they claim were built on disturbing intimidation tactics.

The investigators do not accept these firm denials. To them, they seem likely to be the initial stories of a group of boys who know more than they are saying. As officers move in and out of interview rooms, carrying information from one interrogation to the next, the pressure intensifies. They tell the teenagers that their friends are already telling their side of it, that they should too. Under North Carolina law in 2002, police are permitted to exaggerate, even to suggest they have evidence they do not possess. There is no rule requiring a parent or other adult to be present while 14- and 15-year-olds are questioned. For most of their time in these rooms, the five boys are alone. When I interviewed him in late 2025, Tolliver told me that a detective asked him to hold out his arm. “That’s the vein,” he told him. “This is where the lethal injection would go.”

Every adult who purports to care about a free press should read at least one story about the frustrating hurdles and bad-faith nitpicking confronted by student journalists (and their advisors). Earlier this year, a young reporter for the Redwood High School Bark found a few local references in the US Department of Justice’s public files concerning Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Soon, the high school faced legal threats, and administrators grew concerned that students had published inaccurate information. Ara Rosenthal tells the story of the steady, diligent young journalists who weathered the worries and pressures of the adults around them—and kept their story intact.