Criminal cases put human nature on trial

All reporters have their favorite beats and favorite subjects. Working at

smaller papers for the past 15 years has forced me to become a

generalist.

Here on Kaua’i, for example, I cover the County Council,

collect and write the police blotter, and attend at least segments of as many

serious felony trials as I have time for.

I also write this weekly column

and help out with a feature now and then.

I don’t mind the variety, but if

I had my druthers, I’d cover nothing but criminal trials, no matter how petty

the offense charged.

I’m fascinated by the legal process, including the way

attorneys justify what they do for a living.

I worked for a short time in

Seattle as a private investigator for a friend who happens to be one of that

city’s best defense practitioners. He primarily defends people charged with

serious felonies. By his own, necessarily conservative estimate, at least three

out of four of his high-profile clients are probably guilty.

Honest

big-city detectives will tell you that most metropolitan police departments

don’t bother charging cases where there is a lot of doubt about guilt. Cops,

even here, are always saying they know who did it. They just can’t prove

it.

A 30-year veteran police investigator told me once that 98 percent of

the people charged with felonies in his jurisdiction were guilty.

“We never

charge the ones we can’t prove, so, except for a mistake once in a while,

they’re all guilty,” he claimed.

My friend, the attorney, never asked his

clients about their guilt or innocence. He didn’t want to know. He said he was

afraid it might affect the way he presented someone’s defense if he knew,

beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they had assaulted, murdered or raped

someone.

I know attorneys are necessary. But I often wonder how criminal

attorneys, from F. Lee Bailey on down, sleep at night, knowing that when they

are successful they’ve (often, not always) put a guilty party back on the

streets.

For me, their standard defense of the job – that everyone charged

with a crime deserves representation – rings shallow if they know their client

did it.

But I have also seen trials (not here, not yet) where I knew the

police were not telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I’ve also

seen some mainland prosecutors try to suppress evidence that would have been

harmful to their case, even though that same evidence would have helped the

jury get closer to the truth.

I liken the battle between prosecutor and

defense attorney to sports, only with much bigger stakes than a mere football

or basketball game.

In addition to enjoying the dueling attorneys, I like

the way a good trial pulls the covers back and allows you to see how some

people really live (and die).

Good reporters are people who want to know

what exactly is going on. They hate hypocrisy more than treason.

If I write

a feature story about an inventor or a politician, I can only approximate his

or her character. They can present themselves any way they want to for an hour

or so. But in a criminal trial, everything about the folks involved eventually

comes out one way or another in open court.

I have a good friend who writes

(and publishes serious literary fiction). He reads the Bible’s Old Testament,

not because he necessarily believes it is the word of God, but because the

stories are “so good.”

I like to cover murder trials for the same reason.

It’s not that I’m bloodthirsty. I wish people didn’t kill each other.

And

as I grow older, I no longer like going to murder scenes. When I was a younger

reporter, I stood around a lot of bodies that had been violently separated from

life, silently watching detectives and crime-scene people do their work. And if

I missed a crime scene, there always seemed to be a detective willing to help

me out.

Cops like throwing murder snapshots of the victims at reporters.

In one way, it’s kind of a macho thing, but I believe it’s also the cop’s way

of saying to the reporter, “This is what we have to deal with. You look at

it.”

As I write this, dead faces of the murdered I’ve seen are lining up in

front of my myopic eyes.

But the crimes do happen despite my fondest

wishes that they did not, and the trials follow. And I like the trials. I am

endlessly fascinated by the defendants, who often have done something truly

horrible to another human being. But by the time they get to court, after

they’ve been cleaned up to look like someone’s favorite nephew, it’s usually

hard to believe they’ve killed or raped anyone.

That’s the reason so many

people who are tough on crime in theory always want to make an exception for

criminals they knew before the wheels came off.

“But he’s such a nice guy,”

they’ll say. Someone just said it about the bearded whacko who executed seven

co-workers in Massachusetts last month. (There will be a lawyer for him,

too).

People want their murderers and rapists to look like other people,

not themselves. And that’s also fascinating to me.

Other excellent

reporters I’ve known have preferred politics, or sports, or fashion, or movies.

Me, I like the courthouse, as long as I’m not one of the

defendants.

TGI staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681

(ext. 252) and dwilken@pulitzer.net