Dominique Strauss-Kahn: presumed guilty?
Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5
When Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former chief of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested on allegations of attempted rape, he was paraded in handcuffs in front of mobs of reporters and photographers. To defend this decision, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “If you don’t want to do the perp walk, don’t do the crime.” The New York Post and New York Daily News blared incendiary headlines. Countless writers, columnists, bloggers, and anonymous Internet commenters denounced him and trashed his reputation. Worst of all, law enforcement officials forced him to be photographed naked, and the police commissioner apparently bragged, when he was initially denied bail and held in solitary confinement, that he was strip-searched multiple times a day.
It seems to be lost on New York City’s law enforcement and much of the media that Strauss-Kahn did not necessarily do the crime. This is not the way that a defendant should be treated in a system that, in theory at least, presumes people to be innocent unless proven guilty.
First of all, it is more than a little hypocritical for law enforcement to be so outraged about Strauss-Kahn’s alleged sexual assault on a hotel maid that they immediately hunted him down and dragged him off of a plane, but then bragged about how often they sexually assaulted him.
Second of all, being publicly eviscerated, having one’s reputation destroyed, and being subjected to strip searches, are all serious punishments that should not be inflicted on people unless and until they are found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (if even then). As Edward Wasserman eloquently wrote in the Boston Herald, ”Publicity itself constitutes an extralegal intensification of punishment,” which is ”far less accountable than [punishments] pronounced by judges.”
Third, it defeats the purpose of a trial if the world assumes that a defendant is guilty no matter what the eventual outcome is. The media’s purpose should be to hold the court system accountable, not to be the servant of the prosecution. Often, a defendant’s acquittal receives far less attention in the press than the initial accusations, and the public generally thinks of them as guilty forever more.
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers filed papers yesterday condemning the leaks from the New York Police Department and suggesting that the case against their client is not as strong as the District Attorney’s office has proclaimed. A prosecutor responded, ”If you really do possess the kind of information you suggest that you do, we trust you will forward it immediately to the District Attorney’s Office.” An interesting thing to say, given that many of the details about the case that have been leaked to the media have not even been shared with the defense team.