As much as I detest sexual predators (the resident in chief is a prime example of my hate) should their names be made public before the trial?
I wonder if the innocent that have been accused ever recover from having their name smeared in such a revolting crime? Do people forget?
I’m not saying I know the mayor is innocent, but in his position I wonder if he can ever regain his status if it is proven the accusations are false.
How you feel about sexual predators is beside the point because you’re talking about people who are presumed to be innocent, not convicted predators. If it’s before the trial they absolutely should not have their names publicized. Same for accused rapists.
Accused murderers, robbers, jaywalkers, etc.??? I’m not sure if I feel the same way but I couldn’t tell you why. I admit it’s somewhat hypocritical of me. Maybe it’s because with sex crimes the media go to great lengths to not name the alleged victims so I feel an accused perpetrator should get the same courtesy.
ETA: In this case the accused is a public figure who was likely named in a public manner so the point is probably moot.
“Feelings” about sexual predators is exactly the point. Feelings run high, feelings let people make judgements without proof. Feelings are what continue the ill will towards someone accused of sexual abuse, especially abuse of children.
So my question on whether their names should be public before they are found guilty is all about the way people will “feel” about that suspect (myself included).
I would say they shouldn’t be named. If the person is acquitted, and for the sake of the argument, let’s assume it’s proven that there’s no possible way they could have sexually abused the victim in any way shape or form, that person will still have that hanging over their head for quite a while, possibly forever.
After the trial, if they’re guilty, that’s another matter.
Which brings me to another question, I’ve always wondered why all this information is public in the first place. It always seemed odd to me that I can pick anyone I want and see if they’ve ever been sued, evicted, arrested, picked up a DUI, been arrested for shoplifting 15 years ago etc. It’s all right there on the internet for anyone to see.
Similarly, someone I know was killed by a drunk driver a few days ago. The person’s name (the drunk driver) was posted all over every media outlet’s website and facebook/twitter page within hours. At that point, the only ‘defense’ she had was a few drunken statements between puking at the scene. Based on what she was saying, I doubt there was a lawyer present when she said it.
Should the media have released her name that quickly?
How do you keep them unnamed? The proceedings of trials are part of the public record.
Are you asking if the NYT should voluntarily refrain from publishing their names? In this day and age, I think that’s a moot point.
They shouldn’t be…but I see no practical way to hide the names of the accused. If we tried to mandate hiding them, then we would wind up with a shadowy court system where there’s no public accountability for trials. Furthermore, accusers can’t be prohibited from making their accusations in public, and even if news organizations refused to publish the names (or even were legally prohibited), in the age of twitter and facebook and such, that won’t stop the names from becoming well known. The only way to do it would be to severely curtail freedom of speech, and that would be a worse thing for society than some innocent people being accused.
As impossible as it is, trying to enact some sort of social change so that people actually take presumption of innocence seriously across all facets of life, and not merely those they’re legally mandated to, may be easier than trying to find some way to prevent publication of the names of the accused without creating worse problems in the process.
The same way we keep the victims unnamed.
Huh? We already have this, of course - but only for (alleged) sex crime victims, not suspects.
I am semi-convinced that the stigma attached to sex crimes is in part facilitated by the different standards society insists on for sex crimes, particularly when it comes to reporting.
Many news outlets will not publish the name of alleged rape victims. Even though I understand why they think they should not publish the name, I wonder if it also doesn’t just reinforce the notion that ‘sex crime victims should be embarrassed’.
I would love to see the day when anyone could report a sex crime like they would report being pick-pocketed. No fear of undue stigma if the claim was true and made in good faith, etc.
In terms of fairness, if we are not going to publish the names of the alleged victim, we should not be publishing the name of the alleged suspect. It has to cut both ways.
The root of the problem is that, far too often, actual perpetrators of sex crimes go unpunished through the regular justice system, and so people feel the need to pursue extrajudicial punishment. And so the solution is to make sure that the regular justice system does work. There’s a backlog of many years on rape kits that have gone unprocessed: Why aren’t we processing them? There are genuine victims who won’t come forward because of shame: Why are we shaming them? There are victims who do come forward, and with the physical evidence going uninvestigated, it’s just their word against their accuser’s, and we’re giving less weight to the victim’s testimony just because she’s a woman: That needs to stop.
This seems to be a peculiarity of the US that most other first world countries manage to do without, without any discernible negative consequences on how the legal system operates.
For example where I live (Germany), I would not be named in the media as a victim, witness, or suspect of any crime. I would not be named as an accident victim either. For defendants in court the media usually use first name and intial of last name, but as my first name has a spelling that is very rare in Germany they would very probably not even use that but refer to me only by age and gender. If convicted the same would continue to apply. (Of course the audience in the court session would hear my full identity, any reporters present would write it down, but not include it in their article).
Press reports of court cases here use phrasing like “… the 26-year-old admitted hitting the 34-year-old while the 28-year-old and the 29-year-old denied it. The 34-old maintained that both the 26-year-old and the 29-year-old hit him but was not sure about the 28-year-old”.
Photographs of court appearances pixilate defendants and witnesses; photographs of wanted and missing persons are withdrawn when not longer needed (I have seen articles in the online edition of my local paper, about missing persons with dementia (a number of nursing homes being in the vicinity), amended with a paragraph to the effect of ‘the person has been found alive|dead at such and such a place at such and such a time; the picture has been deleted.’).
All of the above does not seem to lead to insufficient public scrutiny of the police and justice system.
I’m curious: is the above situation in Germany a product of culture or law? This seems like the optimal scenario either way.
You mentioned culture, which I think is the answer to a lot of these types of problems. There is no way to legally mandate keeping the names of accused, victims, convicts, etc, completely private while maintaining a free society. But we probably should develop a culture of doing so anyway.
I completely disagree.
If I have a family I want to know if there are threats to them in the neighborhood. Child predators should not be protected. Convicted rapists should not be protected.
Even if the printed media decided to blank everything out, it would take virtually no time for a website or many to reclaim the mantle of open disclosure. And via the 1st Amendment there would be nothing the government could do about it.
That doesn’t follow.
The standard of proof for criminal proceedings is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. If “it’s just their word against their accuser’s” then even if we give the accuser’s words as much - or even more - weight, it wouldn’t follow that the accused should be convicted.
ISTM that the opposite is true - that mindsets such as yours are an over-reaction and reflect a desire to give (a lot!) more weight to the accusers’ words over the accused “just because she’s a woman”.
And this attitude is part of the problem with publicizing names of accused people. Because they may well be innocent but there will always be many people who are predisposed to assume they beat the rap because “we’re giving less weight to the victim’s testimony just because she’s a woman”.
But the discussion is about before conviction (or acquittal), not after
For the US, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act stipulates that states don’t get funding unless they keep the identity of child victims confidential. So the situation is not symmetrical for perpetrators and victims.
I might favor this but the disclosure of a rape suspects picture might bring forward other potential victims.
No one’s name should be revealed prior to trial for anything. It poisons the jury pool and, in effect, convicts the person in the minds of the general public.
Media should be limited to making general statements that cannot lead to the identity of the person being arrested. The name should not be released until the jury’s verdict is in.
I realize that there is a snowball’s chance in hell of this happening, but the truth is that you really can’t get a fair trial until it does happen.
Wouldn’t that effect be accomplished just as well after he/she is convicted? Then more potential victims could come forward. Revealing a suspects picture could just as easily bring forward false victims as well, so the gamble doesn’t seem worth the smearing of a potentially innocent man to me.
I would consider that putting up a picture of any president from 1900 AD on with a different name would get certain people making statements at their local cop-shop explaining “I recognize him, he assaulted me in 1972.”