Crimes that Catch our Fancy
Criminal cases surface that capture the long-term attention of media and public. Why some cases capture attention is a matter of conjecture. While frenzied media fed a voyeuristic public about the Scott Peterson case, others seemed to fade into unimportance.
On May 25, 2003, an Amber alert was issued in Salt Lake City after Kelley Lodmell abducted her infant granddaughter. Lodmell was arrested the following day at the Snake River in Idaho. The child has not been found. Kelly is charged with kidnap and murder. This case didn’t even make a ripple in newspapers or television news.
One sensational case involved film star Fatty Arbuckle This was due to an ambitious prosecutor and what is now called tabloid journalism. The case involved the alleged rape and subsequent death of Virginia Rappe in September, 1921. She died of peritonitis a few days after the alleged rape. Rumors abounded, and the prosecution maintained that Arbuckle had killed this young woman due to his obesity while raping her. Some in the press decried how this lost innocent was gone though these writers never knew or investigated the deceased, an adult woman. After two hung juries, Arbuckle was acquitted, but his career was destroyed.
The Susan Smith case caught the nation’s and the media’s attention and garnered a great deal of public sympathy. She was a young single mother who claimed that a black man took her children. When truth was known, the reaction of the gullible was to blame Smith for their own eagerness to believe such a story solely on its face.
The Scott Peterson case involved two attractive white Americans, It also involved sex outside of marriage and the innocent of an innocent soon-to-be mother wronged by a cad. Add to that, a high priced attorney; other media bound attorneys using this as a dominance encounter; and the opportunity for the press and television to provide their own kinds of voyeurism. Many Americans willingly lapped up this pap.
There are some issues of this case that concerns me. These issues are not unique to this case.
Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem commented that the trial was a show trial and the judges, while claiming themselves unbiased, tried to reshape the prosecution’s case to make it work. Arendt was convinced that Eichmann was guilty of atrocities and deserved execution for those. But, the trial was still a show trial. The prosecution gave Eichmann too much credit for the German atrocities and did not do good job addressing his involvement. Mediocre bureaucrats do not make for good theatre.
No matter how much we may want a person convicted, if the trial is flawed, the prosecution motivated by notoriety, and the press whipping up a frenzy, the flaws simply do not stop there. It all flows to other trials where prosecutions and judgments are again flawed, and now the innocent or the petty criminals are ground up for the sake of entertainment and for the glory of prosecutors.
by Brian McCorkle
in category Criminal Justice,Rants,Scott Peterson
