CalMatters took second place in 2026 for the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability, a national award judged by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications and announced each year at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
The winning work came from reporters Robert Lewis and Lauren Hepler. Their series, “License to Kill,” tracked what happens after a driver kills someone on a California road and the Department of Motor Vehicles has a chance to act. The short answer: almost nothing happens.
Lewis and Hepler documented that the DMV holds statutory authority to review drivers involved in fatal crashes and revoke their licenses. It doesn’t use that power much. Drivers with stacked DUI records, prior crashes, and escalating violations kept their licenses. Some of them killed again.
Building the investigation required serious work. California doesn’t have a centralized database of vehicular homicide cases. CalMatters created one from scratch, dispatching reporters to courthouses across all 58 counties and spending nearly $20,000 on public records requests. That’s not a rounding error for a nonprofit newsroom. The database they built covered more than just DMV failures. It traced how judges, prosecutors, police, elected officials, and court clerks each played a part in letting dangerous drivers stay behind the wheel with limited oversight from anyone.
The series didn’t file one story and walk away. It kept publishing as the response developed, and the response has been real. Close to 200 drivers who killed someone have had their driving privileges suspended or revoked since “License to Kill” started running. More than 30 counties have committed to reporting vehicular manslaughter convictions to the DMV, something that wasn’t happening consistently before. Legislation followed. A bipartisan group of Sacramento lawmakers announced what they called an unprecedented package targeting California’s roadway safety laws, with 11 bills introduced and many legislators citing CalMatters’ findings by name.
“The Capitol community is paying more attention to it because of the investigative reporting,” said Schultz. “And I think that’s a good thing.”
That’s the standard the Collier Prize is built around. It isn’t enough to expose a problem. The prize looks for accountability reporting that stays engaged, that watches whether government actually responds or just talks about responding. “License to Kill” did that. When lawmakers announced their package, the series was still tracking what happened next.
First place went to KARE 11 of Minneapolis for “Housing Hustle,” an investigation into Medicare fraud in Minnesota. Third place went to the joint Capital bureau of the Tampa Bay Times and Miami Herald for “Hope F.”
CalMatters’ second-place finish puts the outlet in the company of serious regional accountability operations. The Collier Prize has historically gone to larger legacy newsrooms with bigger staffs. Winning requires the kind of sustained, resource-heavy work that most outlets can’t sustain. The $20,000 in public records costs alone, spread across 58 counties, reflects a commitment most state government beats don’t see.
What Lewis and Hepler produced wasn’t just a document of institutional failure. It was a working tool. Lawmakers had something concrete to point to. County officials could see their jurisdictions named. Court clerks who hadn’t been reporting convictions to the DMV could see that gap made explicit in print. That kind of specificity is what separates accountability journalism from general criticism of government, and it’s what makes “License to Kill” the kind of project that actually shifts how agencies behave.
The $10 figure attached to some records requests in the series reflects how small the individual costs were, which makes the scale of 58 counties more striking, not less. Multiplied across courthouses statewide, those small fees added up to a database that didn’t exist before CalMatters decided to build it.
The series continues.