Suspected of What?

This morning's newspapers across the country carried the same front-page story, using, no doubt, some variation of the headlines I saw in the L.A. Times--"Suspect in Court Killings Caught"--and the Santa Barbara News-Press--"Murder rampage suspect gives up". It's a story that zipped straight to the top of our "My Gawd!" meters, when it hit on Friday, and pegged there until the next day when we heard that this menace had been captured. Though it was still morning in Atlanta when Brian Gene Nichols surrendered, the print media had until their evening deadlines to put together a sensible sequence of events for folks to consume with their Sunday morning coffee.

In transit from jail to his rape trial in downtown Atlanta Friday morning, Nichols over-powered his armed escort, dashed upstairs to the courtroom, fatally shot the judge and a court reporter, left the court house, killing a sheriff's deputy on the street, carjacked a vehicle, pistol-whipping its owner, and fled the scene. A second stolen vehicle, found 20 miles to the northeast where Nichols was captured, belonged to a Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who was found shot to death at the site of a home he was building for himself and his wife. Nichols still had the agent's pistol and badge with him when he surrendered.

The country is more than shocked. We're starting to wonder if our world has any place left that's off-limits for sudden violence and psychopaths venting their rage. Still sickened by last week's story of the judge in Chicago whose husband and mother were executed by a former litigant in the judge's courtroom, we now realize that even our legal system cannot defend itself from the scum it tries to protect the rest of us from.

Doesn't it just add to the insanity, then, to insist on referring to someone like Brian Nichols as a "suspect"? What do we suspect he has done? We KNOW all too well what he's done, and it isn't pretty. The media and law enforcement, though, are now obligated to refer him as a "suspect" and his actions as "alleged" behavior.

To give him the benefit and respect of legal pleasantries doesn't substantiate the principle of due process; instead, it mocks the notion of fairness with facetious application. You don't have to be an English teacher to understand that the term "suspect" descends from the idea of suspicion. But what is the essence of suspicion? Any dictionary you select will define the idea in terms of doubt and uncertainty. The first definition from Dictionary.com calls it "the act of suspecting something, especially something wrong, on little evidence or without proof." It can be used to indicate "a minute amount or slight indication; a trace." And the punctilious use of "alleged" just reinforces this bizarre level of denial. In some cases there is no element of doubt or need for further proof.

So does our legal system and the press need to subvert language itself to ensure a fair trial? This man is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination or the English language, a "susepct." He is a known killer. This misguided sense of fairness and suspension of judgment could, in fact, be responsible for the whole tragic mess. Nichols was able to over-power his armed escort because it is illegal in that jurisdiction to bring a defendant into court wearing handcuffs, lest the jury get the impression that he is a dangerous fellow.

This is a guy who held his girlfriend tied up for three days while he raped her repeatedly and snacked on goodies he'd brought for the occasion in a cool box. God forbid that he should not enjoy all the rights and respect of the unconvicted. The question is, how can you convict someone who kills the judge, the court reporter, and everyone else in uniform in the vacinity of the courtroom? Isn't such a man perpetually "innocent until proven guilty"?

And how about Jesse James Hollywood? He's been on the lam for over four years, enjoying life in a pretty little coastal town near Rio de Janeiro. He's a "suspect," too, even though after individual trials of his four accomplices, there is no one on earth who doubts that he was the petty gangster behind the killing of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz in August 2000--not even his parents who were wiring him $1,200 a month to live on. But now that he's been captured and returned to jail, the press and the public must refer to him as a suspect, someone with a trace of evidence against him, someone we must treat fairly and suspend judgment of until a jury agrees that he is a kidnapper and murderer.

I'm not suggesting that we abandon the basic tenets of due process and a fair trial, but I do believe we actually chisel away at those principles when we ignore reality, when we deny what we know is true and stand behind sweet-sounding ideals stretched and contorted to absurd lengths, all the while pasting over the resulting folly with debased language. We honor those principles when we apply them consistently and sensibly, but we damage them when we forget that blind Mother Justice is a metaphor. She doesn't hold a defendent's skin color or place in society against him, but sometimes the evidence piled up in those scales weighs so obviously and so heavily in one direction that we turn a blind eye very much at our own peril.