Judge first, ask questions later

“He’s so tainted that even when he was exon­er­ated, no one still wanted to really be iden­ti­fied with him,”

— Lin Wood,

Richard Jewell’s Attorney

“In their mad rush to ful­fill their own per­sonal agen­das, the FBI and the media almost destroyed me and my mother.”

— Richard Jewell

The 1996 Sum­mer Olympics were about half over on July 27. Spec­ta­tors, ath­letes and reporters were enjoy­ing a night out and review­ing the days’ events, con­gre­gat­ing on the 21-acre Cen­ten­nial Olympic Park and lis­ten­ing to a free con­cert there. Some­time after mid­night, a secu­rity guard noticed a sus­pi­cious bag and began to move peo­ple away from the area. The bomb squad was alerted. At 1:20 a.m., the largest pipe bomb in U.S. his­tory exploded, show­er­ing the area with shrap­nel. One woman was killed by the blast and a cam­era­man rush­ing to cover the explo­sion died of a heart attack. One hun­dred and eleven peo­ple were injured.

Within 24 hours, media atten­tion had focused on the secu­rity guard who had moved peo­ple away. Ini­tially raised up as a hero, word soon spread that the FBI had searched his home as part of their inves­ti­ga­tion and, in the eyes of tele­vi­sion reporters, he became the num­ber one sus­pect. Jay Leno called him the “Una-Doofus,” Time mag­a­zine dubbed him the “Una-Bubba” and two of the vic­tims of the bomb­ing, based solely on media reports, actu­ally filed law­suits against him. The prob­lem was that all of those peo­ple were act­ing solely on tiny bits of infor­ma­tion they had and Jew­ell actu­ally had acted heroically.

In Octo­ber of that year, U.S. Attor­ney Kent Alexan­der actu­ally sent a let­ter to Jew­ell for­mally pro­claim­ing that he was not a sus­pect. Years later, after three more bomb­ings, atten­tion focused on Eric Rudolph who was cap­tured in 2003 and was con­victed of the Cen­ten­nial Park bomb­ing. Jew­ell filed libel law­suits against NBC, the New York Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and CNN. He set­tled with NBC for $500,000 and with CNN and the Post for undis­closed amounts. His case against the Atlanta news­pa­per was still pend­ing when he died, at the age of 45, in 2007 from com­pli­ca­tions of heart dis­ease and diabetes.

Jewell’s case is not unique. The radio, tele­vi­sion and Inter­net eras are rife with exam­ples of cases that were tried in the court of pub­lic opin­ion long before they reached an actual court­room; Fatty Arbuckle, Rod­ney King, O.J. Simp­son, the Duke lacrosse team and many more. Many were ulti­mately acquit­ted, some were ulti­mately guilty but in all cases inves­ti­ga­tions were sig­nif­i­cantly impaired, tri­als made less fair and lives irrev­o­ca­bly altered by a pub­lic scrutiny based on par­tial fact and over­whelm­ing con­jec­ture– adjudged not by the total­ity of the facts after a thor­ough inves­ti­ga­tion but by what­ever bits and pieces of infor­ma­tion may be known publicly.

Dur­ing the Casey Anthony trial, I was fre­quently asked by peo­ple whether I thought she was guilty or not. I always answered the same way — that I had no idea whether she was guilty, because I was not privy to all of the evi­dence the inves­ti­ga­tors, attor­neys, judge and jury in her case had seen, and with­out hav­ing seen all of the evi­dence there was sim­ply no way I could make any judg­ment. Anthony’s case was suf­fer­ing from the “Nancy Grace” effect. So many talk­ing heads had made loud pro­nounce­ments about her “obvi­ous guilt” that the real­ity of the evi­dence in her case was immaterial.

Anthony and Simp­son may well have com­mit­ted the crimes for which they were charged and ulti­mately acquit­ted, but our legal sys­tem does not work on con­jec­ture and sup­po­si­tion and the juries that heard their cases con­cluded that there was not enough evi­dence to con­vict them.

Ulti­mately, that’s the jury’s job — to come to that con­clu­sion once it has all the facts before it. It is a good exer­cise of civic respon­si­bil­ity to hold pub­lic insti­tu­tions account­able to per­form­ing their respon­si­bil­i­ties hon­estly and com­pletely. It is a great pub­lic dis­ser­vice to usurp those duties into the pub­lic arena and charge, try and con­vict some­one in true vig­i­lante fash­ion. The lives of Richard Jew­ell and the Duke lacrosse play­ers ought to be proof enough of that.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and a for­mer assis­tant pros­e­cut­ing attorney.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Mar 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.