WARNING! this article is 10 pages long and contains 8,000 words. It is a painful, emotional story that is depressing to read. Several students have complained that I should not make this available as it's so upsetting for young students, inexperienced with life. You have been warned.
Simon Townsend
What changed on this page. Until 26/07/2026 this page carried the whole of Barry Siegel's article, 7,671 words of it, reprinted with the permission of the Los Angeles Times. I have taken the reprint down. Eighty-two of those 7,753 words were my father's. The rest was somebody else's work sitting under his name, and this site is meant to be his. Nothing of his has been removed: the warning above and the two lines at the foot of this page are the whole of what he wrote here, and they are exactly as he left them.
Why he taught it
Dad used this article differently from everything else in the archive. He did not annotate it, or pull it apart into lessons, or write a factsheet around it. He put a warning on the front, put the piece in front of his students, and let it do the work. The two lines he added at the end are the only instruction he gave, and they tell you what he wanted noticed: that it won on the quality of the writing, and that he thought it was brilliant.
He kept it in Wisdom and Inspiration rather than in the craft sections. I think that was deliberate. It is not here to teach you a technique. It is here to show you the ceiling.
What the article is
Barry Siegel was a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. His piece "A Father's Pain, a Judge's Duty, and a Justice Beyond Their Reach" won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. The Pulitzer board's citation for it reads: "For his humane and haunting portrait of a man tried for negligence in the death of his son, and the judge who heard the case."
Content noteMy father's warning above is not a formality. The article is a close account of the death of a small boy, the prosecution of his father, and what became of him afterwards. It is also about a judge who believed he might have caused a death himself. If that is not something you want to read today, do not follow the link.
Where to read it
The full article is free to read on the Pulitzer Prizes site: Barry Siegel, The Pulitzer Prizes. The Los Angeles Times original is not freely available online, so that archive is the place to go. The piece is Siegel's, and it belongs on his publisher's pages rather than on mine.
His own note at the foot of the page quoted the definition of the category rather than the citation for the piece, and then gave his verdict:
Barry Siegel won in Category 8 of the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism "for a distinguished example of feature writing giving prime consideration to high literary quality and originality".
I think it's brilliantly written.
Simon Townsend
Reprint withdrawnRemoved on 26/07/2026 by Michael Townsend. Our editorial standards say we do not delete quietly, so: what stood here was the complete text of the article named above, reproduced with permission of the Los Angeles Times. It was withdrawn because a page that is 98.9 per cent another publication's work is not an archive of my father's teaching, whatever the permission says. The PDF copy of this page has been withdrawn for the same reason.