They get away with it, almost as often as not.
You might not realize this, because in your corner of the world murder is a rare crime that is usually committed on television or in despair, a crime of passion that leaves the killer spent and sobbing over a victim he loved and hated. But at least one-third of murder cases in this country go unsolved. In a private, unguarded moment a detective might tell you about two or three known murderers out walking the streets. Because there is a difference between knowing what someone did and surmounting the legal burden of proof.
A lot of people in Arkansas think they know who killed the beloved musician T.C. Edwards. And someday there might even be an arrest in the case. But there are reasons there hasn't been an arrest yet, and most of them have to do with the existential difficulty of proving anything beyond a reasonable doubt. Contrary to what the procedurals suggest, most crime scenes aren't rich with DNA evidence and fingerprints. Most convicted murderers convicted themselves, through their own words or by acting in view of witnesses.
If you are the sort of calculating person who is able to wait until you are alone with your victim and calmly pull a trigger, you might also be cool enough not to confess your crimes. Criminals don't have to be smart to get away with crimes, sometimes they only have to avoid bad luck.
One reason prosecutors win convictions in 90 percent of criminal trials is because they proceed cautiously, like the lawyers they are. They know the answers before they ask the questions, they are risk adverse. They would prefer to strike a deal rather than risk acquittal. Since there is a political component to our legal system, because we vote on prosecutors, there is little incentive for them to bring shaky cases to trial. If no one is charged with a crime, maybe you can blame the investigators--it's not the prosecutor's fault when law enforcement fails to find compelling evidence.
But if you charge someone and lose the case, that's on you--you've done damage to your own fortunes and (if the defendant is in fact the bad actor you believe he is) your community. You usually only get one shot at trying someone for murder. Once they're acquitted, we're all bound by law to consider them not guilty.
And so, the conventional wisdom is, it's better to wait, to see if you can't make a case stronger before moving against the killer. It's like playing poker, you wait until you get what you believe is a winning hand before going all-in. You only bluff out of weakness.
The prosecutors were admirable who went after O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1994. You can criticize how they presented their case, but it's impressive that they took on the challenge of trying a wealthy celebrity defendant with the wherewithal to match or over-match the resources the state brought to the case. And in the end, I was not terribly disappointed with the not-guilty verdict because there was some question as to whether some of the investigating officers acted improperly. I believe if a representative of the state misbehaves in an investigation, a reasonable jury has the right to deny the state a conviction.
Guilty people should go free rather than signaling the state that it's OK to cheat.
So I have a nuanced opinion on how Simpson's murder trial turned out: Not guilty was a reasonable verdict, even though I'm convinced Simpson butchered those people. So I'm glad a 1997 civil suit found Simpson responsible and financially liable for the deaths of his ex-wife and Goldman.
Simpson will be getting out of prison, maybe as early as Oct. 1, after serving nine years of a 33-year sentence he received for a 2007 kidnapping and armed robbery incident in Las Vegas. Given the circumstances, the parole board's ruling wasn't unusual or unfair. It's just the way the rule of law routinely works here.
Because this is America, I can make a few more comments about the strange case of O.J. Simpson.
First of all, I've heard people say the Las Vegas incident is "completely unrelated" to the murder case Simpson was involved in. This isn't so--had Simpson never been charged with murder, had Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman not been slaughtered, it seems doubtful he would have ever arrived in such a desperate place as he found himself in Las Vegas in 2007. O.J. Simpson was, in his athletic heyday, a culturally transcendent figure who, before Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, posited himself as post-racial.
"My biggest accomplishment is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man," Simpson told New York Times' sportswriter Robert Lipsyte in 1969. And he succeeded in receiving the sort of justice typically reserved for rich, white men.
And it is possible, 23 years later, to see the Simpson murder trial--the last "trial of the century" of the 20th century--as an event that made some things clear about America. As the trial was presented as entertainment programming--and it introduced to the public the paterfamilias Robert Kardashian--it demonstrated to media corporations that the public's attention could be captured and held by heightened reality. While it wasn't the first reality series (go back to the '70s and An American Family for that) it was the most influential one.
It also demonstrated the deep divide among racial lines that still existed in this country, as well as the willingness of significant numbers of Americans to reject forensic evidence and empirical results because they don't fit the narrative of their wishfulness. The O.J. Simpson jury acquitted the Juice for the same reason that a significant minority of Americans voted for Donald J. Trump for president: because they prefer their fantasies to the best sourced facts.
Which is another reason they get away with it, almost as often as not.
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 07/25/2017