Frances Robles is an award-winning criminal justice reporter for the New York Times who has covered South Florida, the Caribbean and Latin America for two decades. In 2013, she spent several months covering police misconduct and wrongful convictions before heading to Florida to be a national and foreign correspondent.
Her investigation into the shoddy detective work of a Brooklyn homicide detective led 10 murder convictions to be overturned and won a 2014 George Polk award. Her coverage of the 2014 border crisis changed the national conversation of the critical topic. She covered the crisis in Ferguson, the ebola outbreak in Dallas and historic policy changes in Cuba.
She previously worked at at the Miami Herald, where her coverage ranged from Hugo Chavez's cancer, baseball in Santo Domingo to the plight of critically ill children in quake-ravaged Haiti. She's covered government collapses in four countries, a civil war and specializes in social justice issues. Robles spent six years covering Cuba, including Fidel Castro's resignation and the government's transition to his brother, Raúl.
Prior to becoming the Miami Herald's lead reporter on the Trayvon Martin case, she was based in both Nicaragua and Bogotá, Colombia. Her first job was covering suburban schools for the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. Robles contributed to two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams and was a finalist for two more. A native New Yorker who graduated from NYU, she was a 2004-2005 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
MIAMI - The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials. The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - With a brisk clap of his hands, Michel Martelly summed up the first steps he would take if he ever left the music business and became the president of Haiti.
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - Anthony O. Castellanos disappeared from his gang-ridden neighborhood on the eastern edge of Honduras's most dangerous city, so his younger brother, Kenneth, hopped on his green bicycle to search for him, starting his hunt at a notorious gang hangout known as the "crazy house."
SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras - After a decade apart, 13-year-old Robin Tulio was finally heading to the border to be with his mother. A maid, living illegally in Baltimore, she had decided the time was right to smuggle her son into the United States.
An investigation into the work of a Brooklyn homicide detective, who was accused of fabricating confessions and witnesses.
The Brooklyn district attorney's office will ask a judge to vacate the murder convictions of three half-brothers whose trials relied on questionable evidence produced by a now discredited homicide detective, several lawyers close to the cases said.
"You got it right; I was there," two phrases that pop up over and over again in Detective Scarcella's confessions.
The streetlights were bright at the Kingsborough Houses, so even though it was about 4 a.m., one of the two off-duty correction officers sitting in the parked Volvo said he got a good look at the two men who rode up on bicycles. It was the summer of 1991 in Crown Heights, and the officers, Robert E.
A look at the long road faced by inmates who wish to prove they were railroaded by a rogue detective.
MIAMI - In an unexpected echo of the refugee crisis from two decades ago, a rising tide of Cubans in rickety, cobbled-together boats is fleeing the island and showing up in the waters off Florida. Leonardo Heredia, a 24-year-old Cuban baker, for example, tried and failed to reach the shores of Florida eight times.
FERGUSON, Mo. - Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a police officer, sparking protests around the nation, was shot at least six times, including twice in the head, a preliminary private autopsy performed on Sunday found.
FERGUSON, Mo. - On the early afternoon of Feb. 28, 2013, Officer Darren Wilson answered a police call of a suspicious vehicle where, the police said, the occupants might have been making a drug transaction. After a struggle, Officer Wilson subdued the suspect and grabbed his car keys before help arrived, the police said.
EL PARAÍSO, Guatemala - The smugglers advertised on the radio as spring bloomed into summer: "Do you want to live better? Come with me." Cecilia, a restless wisp of a girl, heard the pitch and ached to go.
WESLEY CHAPEL, Fla. - There's a sticker on the door of the Grove 16 Theater just outside Tampa: no weapons. Curtis J. Reeves Jr. must have walked right past it on Jan. 13 when he went to a matinee with his wife, carrying a .380 handgun.
Senator Menendez used his influence to help an old generous friend
Anjélica Castillo liked to ask questions. She was chatty and a little headstrong for a 4-year-old. She took swipes at her little sister, and so the adult cousins who were supposed to care for the girls sometimes tied Anjélica to a chair. Frustrated, they thought about sending her to Mexico to live with other relatives.
MIAMI - Lawyers gawked from office windows last month when a BMW S.U.V. swiped a parked police cruiser in the parking lot of a courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, then slammed into a gate over and over again. A judge was at the wheel. As lawyers used smartphones to snap pictures of the morning spectacle, Judge Lynn D.
How a Wrongful Conviction Sheds Light on a Brooklyn Tragedy
How faulty cameras allowed shootings to go on unfettered at the Liberty Square Housing complex
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A prisoner with a long ponytail and dark glasses took seeds out of a small clear plastic bag and sprinkled them on a spit of land surrounded by gravel and razor wire.
An in-depth look at drug-fueled corruption in Honduras
Organized crime syndicates have taken advantage of a loophole in the law to steal high-end luxury vehicles -- by renting them first.