When Existing Misinformation Isn’t Enough, Make More Up

It’s bad enough that misinformation and misperception continues to swirl after nearly 20 years about the O.J. Simpson trial and the presiding judge, Lance Ito. But when some yokel comes blowing onto the scene who neither attended nor knows anything about the trial and participants, except what he apparently fabricates in his own reality, it’s more than maddening.

Enter one Don McNay, who bills himself as “Guardian & Conservator for Injured People. Best Selling Author. Award winning Settlement Planner” and somehow won a berth on the Huffington Post. The gimmick for his March 4, 2014, blog post was “How Judge Lance Ito and OJ Simpson Ruined the Legal System”.

McNay’s major beef is that the judge allowed camera coverage of the trial. Whether or not Ito should have allowed cameras, or indeed whether any judge should ever allow cameras in any courtroom, is a matter that has been hotly debated for nearly two decades in the Simpson case, and for a good decade longer than that in general.

McNay might think Ito doing so was a bad idea, and I’m not about to get into that fray here — I covered that in detail in “Anatomy of a Trial”. As the saying goes, he’s entitled to his opinion, but he’s not entitled to his own facts.

The first blatant nonfact in McNay’s blog post is, “Ito went on The Tonight Show and other entertainment programs like a small-time comic trying to work his way to Vegas.”

I can state categorically and unequivocally that Ito neither went on The Tonight Show — not before, not during and not after the trial — nor did he go on any other entertainment programs.

Neither did he grant any interviews — not during and not after the trial. And unlike just about every other person involved in or associated with that case, neither did he write a book or capitalize in any way from presiding over that case.

So where does McNay get off saying such a thing? It’s called exploitation. Demonize and falsely accuse someone who either can’t or won’t defend himself in order to make a name for and/or puff up his own self.

You don’t have to read too far into McNay’s blog post before tripping over another whopper.

“After the (1954 Sam ) Sheppard trials, televisions were basically banned from the courtroom until Judge Ito made his horrible decision.”

That sentence is a three-fer.

(1) Dr. Sam Sheppard had only one trial in 1954. His retrial was in 1966.

(2) Televisions in the courtroom were never the issue. Cameras were. Both still (or print) and television cameras.

(3) Assuming McNay meant television cameras, cameras were not banned from courtrooms from the 1954 Sam Sheppard trial until the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. Florida pioneered with permitting courtroom camera coverage in the 1970s. California began permitting cameras on a trial basis in 1980 and made a permanent state court rule change in 1984, allowing cameras in its courtrooms, contingent on several factors.

Many, many courtroom proceedings included camera coverage during those years, including the 1992 Rodney King beating trial and the 1993 Menendez brothers trial.

Worse than McNay’s ignorance or willful disregard for factual accuracy, and the Huffington Post giving the guy a forum is his premise that the U.S. judicial system is so weak and ineffectual, that one judge and one trial could ruin it.

Despicable. 

 

 

Oscar Pistorius and Media-Created Bias?

When does media coverage of high-profile events tread into the murky waters of affecting the outcome of a court case or person’s reputation?

That question has popped up in the charges against and legal proceedings of  South African Olympic hero Oscar Pistorius, who is accused of killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp — just as it has in just about every notorious case since the beginning of time, or perhaps since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

That issue was at the heart of the change of venue that moved the Rodney King-beating trial from Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley just 25 miles up the freeway to the city of Simi Valley in the adjacent  county of Ventura. The impact of media coverage was also asserted in just about every other high-profile case in the Los Angeles Superior Court during my 1991-2002 tenure there as information officer and media liaison, including the 1995 O.J.Simpson trial.

South Africa has at least one anti-bias measure in its toolbox that puts the onus on the news media there that U.S. courts don’t have. They can hold the news media contempt, if it’s determined that coverage has created bias.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/oscar-pistorius-media-south-africa-contempt

True, the criteria in South Africa’s contempt provision have become less intimidating  and subjective in recent years, thanks to a 2007 review of the provision by that country’s highest court. The threshold before the review permitted contempt charges “if a report ‘tended’ to prejudice the administration of justice.”

Such a measure in the United States would have chilled the news media right out of the country’s courthouses. It’s so arbitrary, I can’t think of a single trial of significant public interest in which one side or the other couldn’t have made a stickable argument for excluding media coverage or that might have led to the news media being liable for contempt.

The South African high court, however, amended the provision so that now “…the question a court must ask is whether there will be ‘real risk’ of substantial prejudice to the administration of justice,” which raises the bar considerably for all parties in a court case. It, in essence,  says that “The question must now be decided in the context of a balancing exercise between two competing constitutional rights: the right to a fair trial and the right to freedom of expression,” according to The Guardian article.

I see a substantial difference in the wording of the pre- and post-high court rulings. But even though the current criteria brings the South African standard closer to the Unites States standard, holding the news media in contempt for their coverage of a case rare to non-existent in this country,  thanks to the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of a free press. And fewer than a handful of cases have been permitted retrials on the grounds that media coverage affected the verdict. Billie Sol Estes and Sam Sheppard, are the only ones that come immediately to my mind.

http://www.anatomyofatrial.com