Washington, DC (Aug. 7, 2026) – The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) presented the Champion of Justice Award to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King at a reception during their Annual Meeting in St. Petersburg, FL. Champion of Justice Awards are bestowed upon those individuals who – through legislative, journalistic, philanthropic, or humanitarian pursuits – have staunchly preserved or defended the constitutional rights of individuals in the United States and have endeavored to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime.
Gilbert King is the author of Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida, and he’s the host and producer of Bone Valley, a multi-part narrative podcast about the wrongful conviction of Leo Schofield. King is also the author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, a New York Times bestseller which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2013. King has written about race, civil rights, and the death penalty for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. His earlier books include The Execution of Willie Francis (2008), and Beneath a Ruthless Sun (2018).
"I'm profoundly grateful to NACDL for this recognition," said Gilbert King. "I've spent my career using narrative to shine a light on cases where the justice system is still being tested — where storytelling and legal advocacy work together toward the same end. The criminal defense bar defends the Constitution when it's least popular to do so, and sometimes a story is the last thing standing between a person and a permanent injustice."
“Gilbert King doesn’t write comfortable history,” said Barry Scheck, Co-Founder of the Innocence Project. “He writes the history that got buried, the cases the system wanted forgotten, the men it was willing to sacrifice to protect a lie. In Devil in the Grove, he took us back to Lake County Florida in 1949. He showed us four Black men falsely accused of rape, a sheriff willing to kill them and keep it quiet, and a young NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall who walked into that courtroom anyway. That book won the Pulitzer Prize. It didn’t win for being safe, it won for being true. And he didn’t stop there. In Bone Valley, he turned that same relentless, unflinching eye on a wrongful conviction closer to our time, proving once again that the machinery that destroys innocent lives is not a relic, it’s still running.”
Contacts
Jessie Diamond, Deputy Director, Public Affairs and Communications, (202) 465-7647 or jdiamond@nacdl.org
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is the preeminent organization advancing the mission of the criminal defense bar to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime or wrongdoing. A professional bar association founded in 1958, NACDL's many thousands of direct members in 28 countries – and 90 state, provincial and local affiliate organizations totaling up to 40,000 attorneys – include private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, military defense counsel, law professors and judges committed to preserving fairness and promoting a rational and humane criminal legal system.
