The joker

When President Kennedy was killed, the press had a field day with Lee Harvey Oswald, calling him an assassin and a murderer, until his mother pointed out that nobody could say for certain that he had done anything, and that he could be called all those names only if found guilty in a court of law. When she threatened to sue for defamation, the press pulled back and began to call him the accused assassin.

That was one of the early salvos in what has become a barrage of political correctness, and it has reached even into legal situations that are far less ambiguous than the event in Dallas in 1963. Today, when a lunatic goes into a movie theater and goes on a shooting rampage, hitting seventy people and killing a dozen, then is caught with a batch of other weapons in his hand and even more in his car, and is prepared to continue the onslaught, the papers go no further than to refer to him as the Colorado shooting suspect.

Because of the presumption of innocence in our system, nobody will say that this individual is the killer, Only the most bold press reports say that "police say he shot in the direction of the audience." There is a general fear that if somebody tells the truth about this incident before the facts are evaluated by a jury, the whole case could be thrown out because of pre-trial prejudice. We are protecting the constitutional rights of the accused and the right of the public to deal with him in a sanctioned way.

Mark Twain devotes two chapters in Roughing It (48 and 50) to this subject, ridiculing the usefulness of the jury system when the facts in a case are widely known.

Alfred the Great, when he invented trial by jury and knew that he had admirably framed it to secure justice in his age of the world, was not aware that in the nineteenth century the condition of things would be so entirely changed that unless he rose from the grave and altered the jury plan to meet the emergency, it would prove the most ingenious and infallible agency for defeating justice that human wisdom could contrive. For how could he imagine that we simpletons would go on using his jury plan after circumstances had stripped it of its usefulness, any more than he could imagine that we would go on using his candle-clock after we had invented chronometers? In his day news could not travel fast, and hence he could easily find a jury of honest, intelligent men who had not heard of the case they were called to try—but in our day of telegraphs and newspapers his plan compels us to swear in juries composed of fools and rascals, because the system rigidly excludes honest men and men of brains.

Will James Holmes be the only person in this whole mess who can express himself? Will the press ever get away from shilly-shallying and equivocation, when everybody in the world knows what happened even if the facts are never spoken openly?

We all know the facts: This joker is a murderer many times over, an unfathomable lunatic. Keeping the truth muffled will help none of the people he killed and will do nothing to protect us.