Despite how much time all of us spend online, it’s rare that we get to peek into someone else’s experience of the digital world and how it influences their behavior. That’s exactly what Chronicle investigative reporter Neena Satija and developer Amelia Winger were able to do in their December 2024 story, “Inside Daniel Perry’s phone, a digital trail that led to a murder conviction and extraordinary pardon.”
Perry, a former Army Sergeant from Dallas, became a flashpoint in national politics when he fatally shot an armed Black Lives Matter protester in July 2020. He made headlines again three years later when an Austin jury convicted him of murder, and then again the following year when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made the extraordinary decision to pardon him.
The Chronicle wanted to understand both Perry’s motivations and those of the governor when overturning his conviction. Some of the text messages and social media posts that prosecutors extracted from his phone had already been reported in the media, but Satija wanted to go deeper. So she obtained thousands of pages of Perry’s digital correspondence by combing through court records and filing public records requests. She also talked to many of Perry’s friends and colleagues who corresponded with him in the months before the killing.
Rather than reporting on the findings in the form of a traditional journalism narrative, Satija and Winger chose to let the contents of Perry’s phone speak for themselves, presenting the story as a custom digital display that showed dozens of the same messages and posts from Perry’s phone that had been available both to Austin prosecutors and Abbott-appointed members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles – but which led each of those groups to come to very different conclusions about Perry’s culpability. The messages and posts unfold in a guided timeline format with annotations that include crucial context about news events from the time and comments from people who corresponded with Perry.
The result was a riveting portrait of a man in crisis who was deeply influenced by the digital world around him – the only one available in the spring of 2020, as the pandemic lockdown set in – and who contemplated getting involved in a strikingly similar scenario to the one that landed him behind bars.
