High-profile cases became a staple of media interest and exploitation soon after the introduction of newspapers. In contemporary society, television and Internet reporting broadcast live coverage, expert analysis, and commentary on these cases on a daily basis, including live coverage of court proceedings in many jurisdictions.
Media coverage of high-profile cases has raised serious ethical questions not only about the effects of such coverage on the trial system but also whether intense media analysis might unduly influence juries that are not sequestered, that is, juries that have access to the media. Media analysis of ongoing criminal trials rarely raise issues of innocence, preferring to argue for the guilt of the accused. Legal systems based upon the adversarial model necessarily require the marshaling of resources of both the state and the defendant(s) in order to attempt to win a favorable decision.
While trials, in an ideal form, are a search for the truth, the reality is that those individuals who are able to afford the best legal representation and the most prestigious expert witnesses are often in a position to emerge with either an acquittal or at least a decision with the least possible negative consequences. A key ethical question that confronts those working within the criminal justice system and those subject to it is the ethicality of justice predicated upon the resources available to either side. When the accused can “buy” a positive decision it causes persons to question the fairness and impartiality of the justice system. Should the wealthy be subject to a different standard of legal accountability than those with less financial capacity? Is justice simply sold to the highest bidder? These are important questions that can serve to undermine the administration of justice and public faith in the justice system and are often evident in high-profile cases.
Western systems of law are ideally charged with ignoring the social attributes of individuals who come before the court. Social attributes include class, status, and the social background of an individual. Ideally, all persons should be equal before the law, with a fundamental right to due process and a fair trial. Legal systems should operate to ensure that, whether a defendant is a pauper (poor person) or royalty, they appear as equal legal subjects in the justice system. Like the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, the right to be represented is a limited right and directly bears upon the inequality inherent in current criminal justice procedures. The poor and uneducated make up the vast majority of those who inhabit prisons in Western society, while the rich and well-to-do appear largely, although not in all cases, able to escape or ameliorate the consequences of their illegal deeds through access to more expert legal representation.
The Trial of Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century
Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were the sons of wealthy parents in Chicago. On May 21, 1924, Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old boy, disappeared while walking home from school. Later that day his parents received a telephone call. The male voice on the telephone informed them that their son had been kidnapped and warned them to cooperate and not contact police. The next morning a special delivery letter demanded $10,000 in cash and indicated Mr. Franks was to follow instructions for its delivery. However, before Franks could deliver the ransom he received a call to inform him that his son was deceased. He had been killed by a blow to the head from a chisel and suffocated. His face and body had hydrochloric acid poured over them in a futile attempt to hide his identity.
There were few clues to the identity of the killer(s) other than a pair of glasses found in the location where Bobby Franks’s body had been stuffed into a culvert. The prescription on the glasses was soon identified by a local optician, who indicated they belonged to Leopold. Confronted with the glasses Leopold insisted they must have fallen out of his pocket when he was out observing birds. It was acknowledged he was an accomplished ornithologist and genius with an IQ of 200, had at 19 completed college, and was enrolled in law school. He claimed he and Loeb were out driving the family car on the day Bobby disappeared, but detectives discovered they had rented an automobile. Soon police were able to elicit a confession from the young men.
Their explanation of the motive for the killing shocked the public and ignited a media frenzy. Here were two young men of privilege, the sons of families worth millions who had planned for six months to carry out the “perfect crime.” Their explanation was that they wanted to see what it was like to kill someone. Their belief in their intellectual superiority led them to think that they would be able to commit the murder without being caught. The two accused were also lovers, another factor that fueled the media circus that evolved around their case. Their arrogance, wealth, and the horrific details of the murder shocked the public.
Leopold’s father prevailed upon famed lawyer Clarence Darrow to defend his son. Darrow is widely viewed as the greatest trial lawyer of this period. He would appear for the defense in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) in which he defended a school teacher charged with teaching evolution against the regulations of the local school board. Darrow could not hope to win an acquittal but felt that he could save the lives of Leopold and Loeb. Normally the majority of defendants in homicide trials are unable to hire top-rank lawyers to argue their case, most often relying upon public defenders or lawyers inexperienced in homicide cases.
Darrow was a brilliant orator who eventually was able to persuade the jury to spare the boys’ lives. Both men were sentenced to life in prison plus 99 years. Loeb was killed in a prison shower by an inmate who claimed he had tried to engage him in sexual relations. Leopold was paroled after 33 years and moved out of the United States.
The Lindbergh Kidnapping
The kidnapping of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr., was one of the highest-profile cases of the 20th century. Charles Lindbergh, Sr., was, at the time of the kidnapping, the most famous man in America and one of the most recognized in the world. He had been the first man to fly a solo airplane across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Europe, opening the way for commercial airlines of the future. The child disappeared from his parent’s home on March 1, 1932. Ransom demands were made for the return of the child, and Lindbergh paid $50,000 in gold certificates through an intermediary to a man in a cemetery. Each certificate’s serial number was recorded. However, two months following his disappearance Charles Jr.’s body was discovered a few miles from his home. He was dead from a blow to the head.
Over two years passed before one of the gold certificates made its way to the detectives investigating the case. The bill had an automobile license plate number written in the margin—an alert gas station attendant had written it down because he suspected the certificate might be fake. Police soon arrested the owner of the automobile, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant who had been convicted of crimes in that country. The police found almost $14,000 of the ransom money in Hauptmann’s house and garage. Under intense police questioning Hauptmann claimed a business partner named Isidor Fisch, who had died upon his return to Germany, had left the money behind. Hauptmann found it and claimed it was owed to him. Other evidence was found by police, including a piece of wood in the attic that matched the ladder used to kidnap young Lindbergh from his bedroom on the second floor of his parent’s house.
Hauptmann’s story was purchased by a newspaper that, in exchange, provided him with legal representation. At trial, handwriting experts matched Hauptmann’s handwriting with that of the ransom note submitted to the Lindberghs. Hauptmann asserted his innocence throughout questioning, the trial that was to follow, and up to his execution. He turned down a $90,000 offer for his confession and a similar offer to commute his sentence to life in prison. The case has remained a subject of controversy because many experts believe that Hauptmann was wrongly convicted on planted evidence in order to provide a solution to the case, since an inability to solve the case was not acceptable given Lindbergh’s popularity and power.
The O. J. Simpson Case
The O. J. Simpson case was also referred to as the “trial of the century,” reflecting the common media technique of repeating highly successful formulas for news reporting. Orenthal James Simpson was a famous former National Football League (NFL) player, actor, and sports reporter who was charged in the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Goldman was a friend of Nicole Simpson who happened to be delivering an item she had left in the restaurant where he was employed. They were attacked outside of her home in June 1994 and both were brutally slain with a knife. Robbery was ruled out as a reason for the murders because nothing was taken from the victims. There was no forced entry and the front door was open, generally an indicator that a victim knew the assailant.
The arrest of O. J. Simpson led to a trial that lasted almost one year. The trial was extensively covered by the media, not only in the United States but on a global basis. The judge permitted the trial to be broadcast live on television, and this resulted in a worldwide audience that viewed the case turned the case into a form of judicial soap opera with audiences eagerly anticipating the next day of testimony.
Simpson was a man of considerable wealth who assembled a group of lawyers who arguably were not only the most competent, but also most famous in the United States. The so-called dream team included Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz (a famous Harvard Law School professor), Robert Kardashian, Gerald Uelmen (a dean of law), and DNA experts Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Completing the team was F. Lee Bailey, arguably the most famous lawyer of the 20th century whose colorful style, media savvy, and record of winning important criminal cases would be integral to the defense.
A number of factors made this one of the most high-profile cases of the past century. Simpson’s status as a former pro football player and actor made him very recognizable. The case involved extreme violence and jealous rage fueled, the prosecution argued, by the mistaken belief that Nicole Brown was having sexual relations with Goldman. As criminological research has consistently shown, sex and violence combined with the human drama and tragedy of murder capture the imagination and interest of the public. The racial element of the case (Simpson is African American while the victims were white) added more tension to media accounts and became a pivotal issue in the defense strategy.
Public interest exploded when Simpson, who had been asked to surrender to Los Angeles police with his lawyer, failed to appear and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He was later captured following a low-speed chase with a loaded gun, passport, fake mustache and goatee, and thousands of dollars in his possession. Millions watched the chase and its aftermath live on television. Simpson had flown to Chicago on the night of the murders shortly after they had occurred. When informed by telephone of his wife’s murder he sounded upset, but strangely did not inquire as to how she died, according to the detective who called him.
The impact of the coverage on the case raised an issue of ethical concern, which is how potential jurors might be influenced by what they read or viewed. The initial grand jury in the Simpson case had to be dismissed due to the influence of media coverage, and the trial moved to a different city. Two of the witnesses who testified to the grand jury sold their stories to media outlets and thus were not called as witnesses at trial. One would have testified that she saw Simpson’s Bronco speeding from the victim’s house immediately following the murders, and the other sold Simpson a 15-inch knife several weeks prior to the murders. The unethical practice of the media in purchasing the evidence of key witnesses in celebrity criminal trials, thus tainting it for the purposes of prosecution, is a serious ethical concern because it may corrupt the administration of justice.
There was considerable evidence indicating guilt on the part of Simpson. He had a history of violent domestic assault against his wife. DNA evidence collected at the murder scene matched Simpson’s blood. The bloody glove found at Simpson’s house yielded a positive match for the blood of Goldman. Bloody shoe prints found at the murder scene matched the rare size 12 Bruno Magli shoes worn by Simpson. However, the defense argued that the glove and blood evidence had been placed there by racist and overzealous detectives to frame Simpson. The defense strategy in the case involved attacking the handling of blood and other evidence by forensic technicians. The defense also argued that racism was a factor in the police selection of Simpson as the perpetrator and raised this issue during Bailey’s cross-examination of one of the detectives in the case, who had used a racial epiphitet to describe African Americans. Racism had caused a “rush to judgment,” according to lead defense attorney Cochran. A key moment in the trial was when Simpson was asked to try on the bloody glove in court, and he struggled and tried unsuccessfully to put it on, shaking his head in the negative. Simpson wore a rubber glove when trying on the glove. The glove had, after all, been soaked in blood, and subsequently frozen and unfrozen during forensic testing. This incident led to Cochran’s famous and oft-repeated statement, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
After almost a year of courtroom drama followed by audiences around the world, the jury went into deliberation and emerged after only four hours. The verdict announcement was watched by one of the largest audiences in television history, over 100 million people. The jury declared Simpson not guilty of the murders. The jury was criticized for the brevity of its deliberations considering the complexity of the scientific evidence presented over several months at court. Support for the verdict divided sharply along racial lines, with African Americans viewing the verdict as a victory over racist police tactics, while white Americans viewed Simpson as guilty given the overwhelming evidence mustered against him. It raised the issue of whether Simpson had bought a verdict through the use of his dream team and highlighted the difference between most defendants and celebrities charged with similar crimes.
In the next few years other ethical controversies emerged from the trial. Both of the lead prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, were paid millions to publish books discussing the case. Clark eventually left law to become a reporter for Court TV. Shapiro and Cochran both wrote books profiting from the trial. Detective Mark Fuhrman, a lead investigator in the case, also wrote a book. This raises the ethical question of whether the selling of books or interviews based upon participation in a criminal case by court officers, witnesses, jurors, and others should be legally permitted, allowing them to profit from the suffering of others.
Judge Lance Ito, who had presided over the trial, received criticism that he had failed to prevent a “media circus.” One question that was raised was whether the public’s right to know required televising the trial live. The influence of television cameras on the courtroom behavior of lawyers, witnesses, and judges has also raised serious ethical concerns about whether justice is taking a back seat to entertainment in providing a show for an interested audience.
Serial Killers
Serial and mass murder cases first became an intense focus of media and public attention during the 1970s following the enormous publicity accorded the case of Ted Bundy. Bundy was not America’s first serial killer but rather its first identified nomadic serial murderer. The elements of Bundy’s case proved fascinating to the media and general public. He was a good-looking young man who abandoned a seemingly bright future to go on a streak of murdering young women. Captured in Colorado, he escaped jail and made his way across the country to Florida, where he was finally apprehended. Estimates put the number of his victims at between 40 and 100 women and girls.
In court Bundy exercised his right to defend himself but eventually was given the death sentence. His execution was intensely reported in the media as were the tailgate parties outside of the prison where he died. Bundy’s case set a template for media coverage of serial murder cases, which have been found to hold a great deal of interest for the public. Media exploitation of serial killer cases raises many ethical issues worth consideration. First, reporting of these cases focuses almost entirely upon the murderer(s) and rarely is coverage extended to victims.
People, therefore, are acutely aware of the names of serial killers but have almost no knowledge of their victims, excluding their manner of death. The serial killer’s life from childhood to the present is minutely analyzed in the search for clues into the mind of the murderer by the media and true crime writers. The true crime genre has grown into an immense industry commencing in the modern era with the Bundy case. Societal fixation on the exploits of serial killers reduces the value of victims in the interest of producing “news” and “entertainment,” a highly unethical practice that has been questioned by academic researchers working in the field.
Aileen Wuornos, a female serial killer, was a prostitute working truck stops in Florida. She is often erroneously referred to as America’s first female serial killer. It is more accurate to say that her method of murdering was more akin to that of male serial killers because she used a gun to kill. She had experienced a horrendous childhood full of abandonment, violence, and rejection. Wuornos engaged in heavy alcohol and drug use. Eventually she began murdering her clients as a more lucrative source of revenue to support her and her girlfriend. Wuornos was eventually apprehended and charged in the deaths of seven men. She received several death penalties and was eventually executed for her crimes.
A documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1993) examined the ethical issues involved in exploring individuals who profited or tried to profit from Wuornos’s case. Those documented in the film included case investigators who tried to sell a script of her story to film producers, a lawyer who wanted the documentary filmmaker to pay thousands or dollars for an interview with Wuornos, a woman who legally adopted Wuornos and wrote a book about the case, and others. Eventually a Hollywood movie, Monster, was filmed and released in 2002, the year of Wuornos’s execution. The film received critical acclaim and enjoyed reported profits of over $34 million in the United States. In the end, many individuals seized the opportunity to profit from the murders committed by Wuornos, while few had any interest in the victims she murdered or their families.
Jeffrey Dahmer, a prolific serial killer who murdered predominantly young African American men, intrigued the public because like Bundy his murderous actions seemed incomprehensible given his relatively normal upbringing. People and Newsweek brought his case international notoriety by featuring the killer on the cover of their respective magazines, granting him infamy while at the same time profiting from the case. The case also had several bizarre elements associated with the murders. Dahmer cannibalized parts of some of his victims; he also saved their skulls with plans to construct a form of shrine to them. He had body parts stored in drums in his apartment. Hoping to render his victims compliant rather than dead, Dahmer futilely attempted to create zombie-like sex slaves by drilling holes in their skulls. All of these elements made the case irresistible to the media. The case closely parallels that of Dennis Nilsen, the British serial killer who chose young gay men as his victims. He secreted his victims under the floorboards of his house for long periods of time before eventually disposing of the bodies. Like Dahmer, he intensely disliked being alone, preferring to “kill for company.”
Team serial killers represent a form of high-profile case that illustrates the sale of extreme violence for profit through public consumption. Such practices do not bring justice for victims and have been argued by some to glorify the actions of serial murderers rather than acting as a form of condemnation. The case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka involved a husband and wife team of serial killers that murdered three girls including Karla’s sister. The couple were labeled the Ken and Barbie killers by the media, reflecting their good looks and seemingly good life. The contrast between the smiling newlyweds featured in a famous and often reproduced picture of the two and their involvement in the kidnapping, torture, sexual assault, and disposal of their victims was seized upon by the media and by individuals writing true crime books. The two had filmed their last two victims being assaulted and murdered; however, the tape was hidden in their house above a light fixture and the police were not aware of its existence until one of Homolka’s lawyers turned it over after a plea bargain had been signed.
Homolka was a subject of intense media and public scrutiny preceding the trial, while in prison, and following release. News stories about her number well over 1,000 since she was identified for her involvement in the murders, far more than any other serial killer in Canadian history. Her status as a woman involved in these events proved perplexing for the public, who could not understand the motives that drove her participation, particularly her involvement in the murder of her sister Tammy. It was completely contrary to the nurturing role often assigned to women in society. For many, Homolka escaped justice through a plea bargain giving her a 12-year sentence for manslaughter in exchange for providing evidence against Bernardo. In her prison years, she took university courses and learned French. Pictures from inside the prison found their way to the media, and criticisms of the justice system for allowing her to improve herself while her victims’ families suffered propelled continuing stories on her life. Homolka was eventually released from prison; Bernardo is serving a life sentence.
Mass Murderers
The increasing frequency of mass murders in modern society has meant that many are reported only at a local or state level rather than on the national news. Certain mass killings, however, are of greater interest because of the choice of target. The Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting of 2012 is a prime example of a type of mass murder case that attracts considerable media coverage. Such cases appear “senseless” to television audiences, particularly when there are numerous victims, and more specifically, when those victims include children. Media coverage has become almost instantaneous since the O. J. Simpson case, and television stations such as CNN provide on-site, live, continuous reporting of events as they unfold, along with interviews with victims’ families, community members, and officials from the police and other services. The public’s “need to know” is paramount to news coverage, while the length and depth of coverage reveals the value of such stories to the media as revenue generators. This has occurred since the mid-1960s, when America’s first two modern mass murderers, Charles Whitman and Richard Speck, emerged and sparked prolonged nationwide media coverage.
The Columbine school shooting provides another example of how the packaging of tragedy for mass consumption presents ethical problems for media. After events like Columbine, experts warn of the possibility that others may be influenced by the notoriety given to the murderers to commit heinous acts of their own in order to become “famous.” Typically the attribution of motivations in these cases remains superficial. Researchers do not have a plentiful source of data gleaned from interviews with mass murderers, since most are either killed by police or commit suicide after completing their murderous deeds. In order to reach a national audience mass murders must have a significant number of victims, noted victims (the Gabby Gifford shooting, for example), child victims, or include some other feature that is unusual or bizarre.
A recent example is the 2012 shooting of multiple victims at the premiere of a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado, by James Holmes. This case provoked considerable media coverage similar to that accorded the 1984 MacDonald’s massacre and the 1986 Montreal massacre at a Quebec university. In the former case the killer, James Huberty, wanted to “hunt humans,” choosing those enjoying the good life, from which he had been displaced. Marc Lepine shot women engineering students who had been admitted to the university while he had not (although he did not have the marks to be admitted). These killers took their revenge on society at the heart of institutions where individuals feel safe. The actions of individuals in these cases seem incomprehensible to a media audience, and news organizations often seek out and present so-called experts to explore possible explanations. These “talking heads” comment on the killer(s) without benefit of all of the information on a case, psychological reports or assessments, or even the full details of the case. The selling of high-profile cases does not mean that experts need be accurate in their assessment of mass murderers or other killers, since they are generally not held legally accountable for erroneous opinions based upon speculation rather than evidence. This raises the ethical question of presuming guilt for the purposes of garnering audience ratings.
Females as Accused in Homicide Cases
Murder is overwhelmingly the domain of males, so when a female is accused of a homicide there is potential for a high-profile case, with attendant high levels of media coverage. Amanda Knox, a 24-year-old American student attending university in Italy, was a codefendant in the 2007 murder of her housemate Meredith Kercher. In 2009 she and her coaccused were convicted of the sexual assault and murder of Kercher. The innuendo surrounding the case produced international headlines and news coverage during this two-year period. It was alleged that Knox had been involved in a sexual orgy that ended in the killing of Kercher. In the United States there were a number of television shows that discussed the case on a regular basis, including Nancy Grace and Jane Velez Mitchell. A high level of interest in the case continued as Knox remained in prison awaiting her appeal. Finally on October 3, 2011, her appeal was successful and having been found not guilty of the murder she was released and immediately left for the United States. Coverage of the case continued, however, because the Italian court overturned her acquittal and ordered a retrial.
Casey Anthony, the 22-year-old mother of 2-year-old Caylee Marie Anthony, was charged in the murder of her daughter in 2008. Caylee’s grandmother reported to authorities that she had not seen her granddaughter in 31 days. Upon questioning by detectives Anthony claimed her daughter had been kidnapped by a nanny. She was eventually charged in October 2008 with the murder of her daughter after the skeletal remains of Caylee were found close to her parent’s home wrapped in a blanket inside a garbage bag. Duct tape was discovered at the front of the skull near the mouth area. The case received almost daily coverage on television.
Some consideration must be given to why certain cases are chosen by television shows for intense scrutiny while other homicides make their way routinely through the court system.
Critics charge that stories are chosen for their audience appeal rather than for their newsworthiness. In the Casey Anthony case, the defendant was a young, good-looking mother of a small child. Investigation soon produced pictures of Anthony partying and “dirty dancing” during the time her child was missing. The mixing of sex, beauty, and violence has been shown by researchers to garner public attention and partly accounts for the selection of this case for intense national scrutiny. The case also raised the issue of a woman rejecting the role of caregiver and mother.
While the murder of children occurs at a much lower rate than homicide generally it is a social taboo that provokes strong emotional responses in viewers. The case was also a death penalty case, which creates further viewer interest. Viewers could watch the case on live television and endless repeats of portions of the trial in the evening with commentary. Finally, the Internet provided viewers with access to investigative documents such as the original interview with Anthony running to several hundred pages, permitting viewers to participate in the case through the construction of personal analyses of evidence.
The Anthony case provided television show hosts with considerable fodder for righteous indignation and this only increased when, despite their condemnations and predictions, Anthony was found not guilty. After a finding of innocence, negative commentary generally shifts to the failure of jurors to make the “right” decision.
Bibliography:
- Bugliosi, Vincent. Outrage: The Five Reasons O. J. Simpson Got Away With Murder. New York:
- W. Norton, 1996.
- Hickey, Eric. Serial Murderers and Their Victims. 6th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2012.
- Surette, Ray. Media, Crime and Criminal Justice. 4th ed. New York: Wadsworth, 2010.
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