Crowded around Scott Peterson, as he was being led into Stanislaus County Jail on April 18, were about 200 people, come to see the man who murdered his pregnant wife. One of them reportedly held up a young baby, to show Peterson what he’d given up.
Almost every man and woman in this psychological lynch mob was convinced of Peterson’s guilt, based on media reports and other speculation.
Laci Peterson, 27 years old and in her eighth month of pregnancy, was reported missing on December 24 shortly after Scott returned from a day-long fishing trip. Within a couple of weeks, Laci’s family – and the media – turned on him when they discovered he’d taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy on Laci, and that he’d recently had an affair with Amber Frey.
“Fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson’s alibi stunk as badly as the stuff he sells” –Geraldo Rivera
Did the police focus their investigation entirely on Scott after that point? It’s difficult for an outsider to tell: Modesto Police Chief Roy Watson says the police investigated almost 10,000 leads. Bill Kurtis, the host of an A&E documentary about this case, claims that 8,000 others weren’t investigated – and yes, that was a documentary being aired just a week and a half after Scott’s arrest.
Scott was arrested a few days after the remains of a woman and baby were found not far from where he claimed to have been fishing December 24. The arrest came hours before the bodies were identified as those of Laci and their unborn son, Conner. Scott had been spending most of his time in San Diego, where his family lives, and police were apparently afraid he’d run off to Mexico, from which extradition could be difficult.
“A jury will find it highly suspicious that when the medial examiner was trying to identify his wife and his baby’s remains, he was setting up a tee time, all right? That’s not consistent with a grieving husband. I don’t care what any defense lawyer says.” -Nancy Grace, CourtTV analyst, on the Larry King Live show
In a recent online poll (conducted by this website), 4000 respondents were almost evenly split on the question of whether they could be impartial jurors in Scott Peterson’s murder trial, based on what was known in mid-May:
- Scott took out a life insurance policy on Laci (in fact, they took out an identical one on Scott, which isn’t uncommon before the birth of a child).
- Scott had had an affair.
- Scott had told Amber Frey, upon meeting her, that he was a widower.
- Scott was the last person known to have seen Laci alive.
- In 80% of all cases of women being assaulted or killed, an intimate partner
is responsible (though other sources say 30% or 90%).
- Laci was in the habit of opening the drapes every morning. They were never
opened on December 24.
- The bodies were found not far from where Scott said he’d been fishing.
“Why would he go 80 miles fishing, come home with [receipts] and tell the police exactly where he went fishing – and the body would be there! That does not make sense.” –Jackie Peterson, Scott’s mother
- Traces of powdered cement in Scott’s boat, which could have been used to
make an anchor to weigh down Laci’s body (no such anchor has been found)
- Scott refused to cooperate fully with the media, including declining to
film an episode with John Walsh
- Scott’s claim that he’d told Laci about his affair with Amber Frey was
(according to Harland Braun, one-time attorney for Robert Blake), “potential proof that he knows she’s dead.”
- Television stations hired psychologists and behaviorists to explain why
Scott’s body language and eye movements indicate guilt.
- When he was arrested, Scott was only 30 miles from Mexico, with his hair
dyed blond, the addition of a beard, and $10,000 and his brother’s identification
in his possession (his mother points out that if these were indications he was planning to run off to Mexico, he could just as easily have stayed in Mexico when he was down there on business a few week after Laci’s disappearance; but of course, that was before two bodies washed ashore)
A lot of odd behavior here… a good deal of suspicious behavior, in fact… but was this enough to warrant California Attorney General Bill Lockyer calling the case “a slam dunk”, and for high-profile Los Angeles attorney Mark Geragos to publicly call the evidence against Scott Peterson “devastating”?
(Geragos backed off from that opinion at the beginning of May when he signed on to be Peterson’s new attorney)
We don’t have to go back very far to find another case where the media led the public to convict a man absent any real evidence. In fact, as guilty as people perceive former California congressman Gary Condit to be… Can anybody say exactly what he was guilty of? His career came to an ignoble end because of his involvement with Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old former Bureau of Prisons intern who was last seen April 30, 2001, and whose body was found just over a year later.
It’s hard to say, of course, how many members of Congress enjoy extra-marital affairs. Few of them are likely to come forward with the information, just as Condit attempted to hide his own relationship with Levy. It didn’t, after all, seem to have anything to do with Levy’s disappearance. Would it be cynical to assume that if he’d been more forthcoming with the media during the early weeks of the investigation, he might not have been painted as the villain of the piece?
Condit was never charged with any involvement in Levy’s disappearance, and he was never a serious suspect – but the proverbial Court of Public Opinion had passed sentence.
Perhaps the most extreme example of the media trying a defendant was the Sam Sheppard case. The basis for The Fugitive’s Richard Kimble, Dr. Sam Sheppard was accused of the 1954 murder of his wife. The police quickly fixated on Sheppard as the only suspect (refusing to believe Sheppard’s account of a “bushy-haired man”, just as nobody accepted Kimble’s “one-armed man”), and the media made the most of the story. They printed police detective Robert Schottke’s comment that “I think you are the one who killed your wife” as if it were fact. They wrote about Sheppard’s lover, and searched for others. Newspaper editorials attacked the police for not being aggressive enough, and the Cleveland Press ran a front page editorial titled “Somebody is Getting Away With Murder”. The coroner questioned Sheppard on national television, and had Sheppard’s lawyer ejected from the hearing because he interrupted with certain procedural objections.
The media was also allowed to look on and report as the police were interrogating Sheppard and searching his home, and were given evidence by the prosecution which would not have been admissible at trial – but which they printed as fact, thereby calling it to the attention of future jurors.
Referring to the Scott Peterson case nearly half a century later, attorney Chris Pixley would say, “The defense doesn’t seem to understand that the press is the way to get this story out, that the jury pool is being polluted” – but the Sam Sheppard case wrote the book on the prosecution and the media using one another.
The judge bore his share of the blame once the trial started, doing nothing to keep the juror from being spoken to, questioned, and even harassed by the media – and the end result was, a decade later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Sheppard’s conviction on the grounds that he’d been denied his right to a fair trial. Though he’d already been imprisoned for over ten years, the state retried him. He was acquitted; but for the rest of his life, the acquittal wasn’t what the public would remember.
The press was probably equally responsible for the 1982 murder conviction of Lindy Chamberlain, an Australian woman who claimed her 9-week-old daughter Azaria was taken away and killed by a dingo (dramatized in Meryl Streep’s 1988 A Cry in the Dark): Chamberlain and her husband didn’t exhibit “proper grief”, and popular mistrust of Seventh Day Activists led to the rumor that “Azaria” meant “sacrifice in the wilderness”. Though the evidence certainly supported the defense version of the events (dingoes had been seen in the area, a growl was heard just before Chamberlain called for help, blood was found in the tent and not in the car where the Crown claimed she’d killed her child, dingo tracks were found near the tent…), the Crown was able to convince a jury that (quoting an article by University of West Sydney law professor Russell Hogg) “in a space of five to ten minutes, during which Lindy returned to the tent with the baby and six-year-old Aiden, she had cut Azaria’s throat and stuffed the body into [husband] Michael’s camera case while her son apparently stood by. She had then raced Aiden back to the barbecue area, where normal life was resumed, and displayed no signs of unease or distress until the opportunity presented itself of blaming a dingo for the baby’s disappearance. The Chamberlains were said to have later buried the body, then exhumed it so that the clothing could be placed in a strategic location to lend further credibility to the dingo tale.”
Lindy was found guilty of murder, and Michael of being an accessory.
Though a 1984 appeal to the High Court to rule the verdicts “unsafe and unsatisfactory” (could a jury, acting reasonably, have found the defendants guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based on the evidence set before it?) was turned down, new evidence and the discrediting of some of the Crown’s trial evidence led to a lower court releasing the Chamberlains in 1986.
So far, this has all been fairly straightforward: Convicting somebody – or assuming his or her guilt – on the basis of allegation and suggestion rather than clear evidence, is wrong.
But…
What if you’re sitting on a jury, and you know the defendant is guilty – and I mean you know this, not just by speculation and rumor, but as clearly as you know your own name – yet the prosecution has not offered sufficient evidence to warrant a conviction?
“It is not only [the juror’s] right, but his duty… to find the verdict according to his best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court” –John Adams
When legal writer Russ Emal quoted our second president in an article he wrote some years back, he was making a case for jury nullification, the principle that a jury has the right – and even the obligation – to refuse to convict a defendant if they’re convinced
the underlying law is bad or they feel the circumstances don’t call for punishment. I there even a name for the opposite case, where a jury convicts based on their certainty of a defendant’s guilt, rather than on the facts (or, as the Australians would say, “an unsafe and unsatisfactory verdict)?
Last year, former Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry stood trial for the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls. This was pretty much the sum of the evidence against him:
- He’d been a member of the Ku Klux Klan along with two other men who’d been
convicted in the same bombing
- He’d told relatives that he was involved – but the various stories he told
were not consistent with one another, and he’d also told relatives he wasn’t
involved.
- The FBI recorded conversations Cherry had had with other Klansmen, during
which they’d driven around town drinking and shouting racial epithets,
which imply that Cherry had been involved.
- His son testified that Cherry’s alibi for the night the explosives were
set was a lie.
And there was this: Every man and woman in that courtroom knew, in his or her heart of hearts, that Bobby Frank Cherry was guilty. The evidence didn’t support a verdict of guilty, but the jury returned one nonetheless. Were they wrong to do so?
“[You are] about to hear and see evidence of a crime so tragic and horrific your memory will be permanently etched with the name and image of Kathlyn Poirier.” -from the prosecution’s opening statement in Donald Blom’s trial.
“[Blom did] some of the stupidest things you could possibly do on the way to a trial … The stupidest thing he did was make a statement or confession to a crime he didn’t commit.” -from the defense’s opening argument
Two years earlier, in Minnesota, Donald Blom faced a jury, accused of abducting and murdering 19-year-old Katie Poirier. By all objective standards, the trial was a travesty, beginning with the judge’s decision to allow Blom’s confession into evidence: a confession Blom made while under a number of medications, and only as part of a plea bargain arrangement that later fell through. Blom later recanted the confession, and said he would have confessed to anything in order to be allowed out of his cell.
Beyond that, the prosecution had only this:
- Blom’s history as a sex offender
- A blurry surveillance tape that shows a man who seems to be the same height
as Blom (though experts originally looked at the tape and said the man was in his 20s with long hair, while Blom was 50 with short hair)
- Blom got a haircut shortly after the abduction
- Found on his property was a tooth (which experts said was “probably human”),
and a button from a pair of jeans that could have come from a brand Poirier often wore.
- Blom had been seen in the area the night of the abduction.
There really isn’t much doubt about Donald Blom’s guilt: He was a sexual predator whose history of kidnapping and assault convictions went back at least 17 years. If he’d been acquitted, he would have killed again – which presumably was why the judge allowed the confession into evidence.
Would the jury have convicted without it? Probably. Though this case received little attention outside of the state, Minnesotans perceived Blom as a monster (which begs the question of why there was no serious thought of a change of venue).
The conviction of Donald Blom on questionable evidence was a pragmatically sound decision, and it may even be called an ethically sound decision.
But legally… Is there any real difference between convicting Donald Blom because we know he killed Katie Poirier, and convicting Lindy Chamberlain because we know she killed Azaria?
(c) 2003 by Bill Bickel
This article originally appeared in the June 2003 issue of Crime Justice & America
Bill Bickel's Crimeweek 