Migoya graduated from City University of New York in 1988 with a Bachelor’s Degree in journalism and communications. Most journalists, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, have a Bachelor’s Degree in journalism, english or another related field, and make an average of $43,490 a year. Migoya began working for the Denver Post in 1982, when he had not yet graduated from university.
He was able to write his first big story for the first joint paper between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. This piece was Migoya’s first major investigative work, and it was on police use of tasers.
“Police were using them as implements of torture and obedience, rather than persuasion or an alternative to shooting. They were having fun with them,” said Migoya.
The story forced Migoya and the Denver Post to think outside the box to uncover the horrific use of tasers by Colorado police.
“The problem was that use of force reports, at that time, were not available under the open records act,” said Migoya. “And that was a bit of a problem for us. The police department wouldn’t give them to us.”
They were able to get around this by asking for the names of people that a taser had been used on, which was not protected.
“We took that list and ran it against felony arrests, and there were some and that’s ok, somebody had a gun and they used a taser. But what I was more curious about was we asked them to give us a list of people that they used it on who had been charged with a misdemeanor.”
With that list, they went to City Hall to the General Sessions Room, which is where they [the police] keep all the tickets for misdemeanors.
“So, I sat there and looked up each name on their little computer, and found the ticket. Now on the back of each ticket, the police officer has to write a narrative of what happened,” said Migoya.
With this information, they created a database with officer names and methods of force.
“We found out that they were using these things [tasers] as implements of obedience. So rather than a threat, somebody has got a knife, somebody has got a gun, if you told somebody to put their hands behind their back and they wouldn’t listen to you, they give you a zap,” said Migoya. “They were using it as a method of compliance.”
Through further research, Migoya and the Denver Post found that tasers were built to shock a person through heavy coats in the wintertime without leaving a mark. They discovered that police knew this and used tasers much more frequently in the winter.
“There was a way to hit you with this stuff and zap you with it, and no way for you to ever prove that they did it,” said Migoya.
Migoya’s article, titled “Police Tasers set to stun”, is still referenced today on many websites, citing the excessive use of force by police. After the article’s release, the Denver police and other Colorado departments completely changed their use of force protocols.
Migoya would later move on to the Belleville News-Democrat after working for several other news organizations in between. He remembers his time in Belleville very fondly, during which he won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (IRE) for an article exposing a teacher drug ring in Belleville.
“I did an investigation and outed 104 teachers in the East St. Louis school system, who were all involved in a big drug ring. Including this one guy who was forcing kids to go out and buy his crack, and threaten them with failing grades if they didn’t,” said Migoya. “After I wrote the story, we were in the courthouse. I was covering the case, and he comes up to me in the hallway, and he comes right up to me and puts a finger in my face and says ‘You did this to me’ and I just let him hang it there for a second, and I remember stopping and saying ‘No, Mr. Sanders. I did not do this to you. You did this to you. I just wrote about it.’”
He would later move to the Detroit Free Press, where he would work for five years as a reporter. In his time there, he exposed horrific fire code violations in schools that, thanks to his article, were fixed through increased funding from the city.
“It turned out there were fire violations in the schools that weren’t being attended to,” said Migoya. “Doors not opening at all, schools with absolutely no functioning fire alarms, smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and they knew it.”
Now back at the Denver Post for 21 years, Migoya has been able to write many groundbreaking stories about problems in Denver. In his series “Shrouded Justice,” Migoya has exposed thousands of “suppressed” court cases that have disappeared from public records.
“They had messed up big time. It was a computer glitch that they had from 10 years ago, that they had never bothered to fix, that a suppressed case would suddenly disappear [from the record],” said Migoya. “In Colorado, you could be arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced without anyone ever knowing how, who, why, when, or where”
This article has allowed for much-needed stabilization in the Denver justice system. Migoya’s work in general has helped countless people and has exposed numerous problems in society and government across America. His work proves the importance of investigative reporting.
“You try to do good stories,” said Migoya. “You try to get them to change policy to change, that’s what investigative reporting is about. It’s not about getting a flashy headline or getting somebody into trouble. We look for public policy issues and systemic problems.”
The MFJS Reporter -- Winter 2020 T-R 