Carrie Johnson
Carrie Johnson is NPR's National Justice Correspondent.
She covers a wide variety of stories about justice issues, law enforcement, and legal affairs for NPR's flagship programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Johnson regularly appears on the NPR Politics Podcast.
Prior to coming to NPR in 2010, Johnson worked at the Washington Post for 10 years. Earlier in her career, she wrote about courts for the weekly publication Legal Times.
Her work has been honored with awards from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, the Society for Professional Journalists, and SABEW. She served as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University from 2019-2020. In 2021, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers honored Johnson with a rarely-bestowed Champion of Justice award for her journalism work.
She has been a finalist for the Loeb Award for financial journalism and for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news for team coverage of the massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.
Johnson is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Benedictine University in Illinois. She sits on the advisory board for the Center for Journalism Ethics at UW-M and the Historical Society of the D.C. Circuit.
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The DOJ has sued the entire federal district court in Maryland over an order that puts a temporary hold on deportations, intensifying a confrontation between the Trump administration and the courts. -
The Supreme Court releases opinion on birthright citizenship and other cases. NPR's Steve Inskeep, Carrie Johnson, and Nina Totenberg analyze the decisions.
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The confirmation of the president's former personal lawyer Emil Bove to an appellate judgeship could be fairly smooth, as Wednesday's hearing included no critical words from Senate Republicans. -
President Trump's nominee to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is a current Justice Department official. That's drawing fresh attention to controversies inside the department.
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The accusations from a veteran government lawyer add to broader concern about the Trump administration's repeated clashes with the judiciary. -
The race became a microcosm for the clashes and pressures on the American legal system this year, in part because one of the two top candidates is the younger brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi. -
Federal judges have stood as checks on Trump's power — but law clerks say behind closed doors, some created toxic, fear-driven workplaces where speaking out could end a career. -
In this series, NPR takes readers and listeners behind the news and explains how we do our journalism. Here, correspondent Carrie Johnson talks about her investigation into the power dynamics between federal judges and their staffs, for this week's Reporter's Notebook.
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The White House said it's reached deals with nine law firms to provide about $1 billion in pro bono services. But the details of those agreements remain murky. -
Recent critiques of judges from the Trump administration have prompted fears the Marshals could be caught in the middle of a power struggle and forced to yank security for judges.
