Duke and the Public Jury
The Chicago Tribune ran an interesting editorial last week by Rick Maese, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun. It got me thinking about the way the attorneys on both sides of the Duke lacrosse rape case are handling the media, as well as how the media is covering the story. This has been the best example I can think of, in recent memory, of a trial being played out in the news media - in the court of public opinion. Not the Michael Jackson case, the Laci Peterson case or the Natalie Holloway case has played out in the public in quite the way this current trial has.
It seems as though every shred of evidence is brought to the public via a slick press conference, as though we were all assigned to be judge, and the media eats it up. Hearing the defense attorneys make their case, I can’t help but think it sounds like opening arguments. Maybe I don’t watch enough court TV, or maybe this really is a different kind of case. Each side is jumping at the opportunity to get their story out first. In the beginning, the prosecution was more reluctant, but with the increasing visibility of the defense and its media-intelligent attorneys, the prosecution is more often looking like it is on the defensive. Maese said it best:
Taken singularly, every day has brought a different knee-jerk judgment. The evidence-of-the-day always is compelling and, lacking context, always damning.How many of us rushed to verdict after the initial allegation? Did your opinion change when defense attorneys began poking holes? Change again when the e-mail was released last week? (There was mention of hiring strippers again. “I plan on killing [them] as soon as the[y] walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off,” the e-mail read. Amazingly, it became even more depraved from there.)And did your opinion change again this week when authorities revealed DNA tests didn’t implicate a single one of the 46 players who were tested?Or when the prosecutor vowed that the “case is not going away.”
