Rose Thayer honored by Military Reporters & Editors
WASHINGTON — During its annual conference for journalists, Military Reporters & Editors presented awards to the winners of the 2025 MRE Journalism Contest. Stars and Stripes reporter Rose Thayer wins MRE’s Honorable Mention for Enterprise/Feature Reporting (Division 2) award.
Award Summary
Article: ‘Proving your innocence’: Veterans fight to clear their names for military crimes they did not commit, Stars and Stripes, published 3/4/2025.
Prize Category: Honorable Mention Enterprise-Feature Reporting / Division 2, Text journalism published in traditional print or online media.
Best work on a single topic containing numerous voices, creativity, sources of information/data or focused reporting that provides deeper context into a subject, in contrast to a typical news story, published by a news organization with fewer than 20 reporters.
Judges’ Comments:
Rose Thayer’s exceptional piece illuminates the injustice many military service personnel face because they have to prove their innocence, even if they’ve never been found guilty of wrongdoing. The story dives into the stories of several people who found they have criminal records following military investigations, even though they never faced any criminal charges. One former Army lawyer estimated a million service members and veterans could also have criminal records because of a Defense Department policy that orders military law enforcement to put a suspect’s name into the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database once agents have “credible information” that a crime occurred. Rose Thayer’s deep reporting and terrific storytelling expose a problem that needs a remedy.
Read the Winning Article
- ‘Proving your innocence’: Veterans fight to clear their names for military crimes they did not commit, Stars and Stripes (3/4/2025)
Journalist Biography
Rose Thayer
Rose L. Thayer is a print journalist based in Austin, Texas. She has covered military and veteran news in the western U.S. for Stars and Stripes since 2018.
Prior to Stars and Stripes, Rose worked as a reporter for the Killeen Daily Herald and a freelance journalist for publications including The Alcalde, Texas Highways and the Austin American-Statesman.
A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Rose has earned multiple journalism awards, including the 2024 Military Reporter & Editors award for Enterprise Reporting and the 2021 Society of Professional Journalists Washington Dateline Award, among others.