So a woman goes into a Target store wielding some knives and stabs a bunch of folks before being subdued by an off duty police officer.
There are dozens of witnesses, and let’s assume she was on the security video for the entire time.
There’s no question at all she did the stabbing.
Why do the news stations still have to say she “allegedly” stabbed people? I mean you can claim she was mentally unstable, unfit for trial, that she was hypnotized, that she was sleepwalking, whatever you want in regards to legal charges. Was it attempted murder? Assault? I know there’s lots of ways that can go down.
But “ALLEGEDLY” stabbed the victims? Really? Can’t news outlets – in cases this blatantly obvious – flat out say she stabbed the victims?
It seems the use of “allegedly” in cases this extreme is just absurd. Why does it continue?
Well, even where there are witnesses, videos, etc, there is still the possibility that the woman arrested is not, in fact, the woman in the video. Or that the name which has been released is, due to some ghastly cock-up, not her name but somebody else’s. Or whatever.
Yes, you can reach a point of excluding all such contingencies with absolute moral certainty, but with looming deadlines it’s easier not to think about whether you’ve reached that point. So “allegedly” gets stuck in without anything thinking about it.
Not that “allegedly” is necessarily an absolute get-out-of-jail card, btw. If I write, in a context in whcih it might be taken seriously, that filmyak allegedly films himself raping goats and little boys and sells the tapes over the internet, that “allegedly” is not going to save me.
It’s mainly a way to prevent suits. Remember you don’t have to WIN a lawsuit to cause trouble. You can sue anyone and they still have to defend themselves in court.
A lawyer for a company looks at policy and then decides what is the quickest way to get out of a court case if I am sued.
So if a paper doesn’t use the world “alledged,” they get sued, it probably will still get thrown out of court. But it may take two steps to throw out the lawsuit instead of one (if they had used the word alledged). That extra step, in lawyers fees and time etc, can amount to thousands of dollars and bad publicity as well.
The one that always amuses me, and I could be overly pedantic here, is the phrase
“arrested for the alleged theft” or “arrested for the alleged stabbing” …I always thought that it should be “arrested for allegedly stabbing”
The difference?
In the first case it is the stabbing that is alleged, in the second, the stabbing is a fact, but who did it is the allegation.
Am I right, or is my understanding and english flawed?
The second form is clearer, but while the first two examples do seem to improperly connect the “allegedly” to the wrong act, they still work as a legal “Get out of libel lawsuit” card.
For example, in the first case – “arrested for the alleged theft” – suppose that what John Doe did wasn’t theft because he was the true owner of the money or things that he allegedly stole.
So, it WAS an alleged theft, and in fact after the cops investigated more, the alleged theft turned out not to be theft at all, but John Doe just taking what was rightfully his. Writing or saying “arrested for the alleged theft” is just a different way of saying that the cops think John Doe stole something, but he’s not yet been convicted of that act, so we use allegedly to give him the benefit of the doubt. Innocent until proven guilty, and all that.
It goes back to the phrase “innocent until proven guilty,” which has to apply to ***everyone ***accused of a crime. Sure, there are cases like the one in the OP, but there are also cases that fall into a gray area of “possibly” guilty or “probably” guilty or many other shades of gray. But there’s no logical way to draw the line; that’s what trials are for. So in order to protect the accused who very well may be innocent, the default is to “allege” everyone. The alternative would be for the news media (read: Nancy Grace) to be the judge and jury, deciding on their own who is guilty.
But again, in the case I described, we’re not assigning guilt. SHe could be not guilty based on insanity. I’m just suggesting we state the obvious… whether or not she’s guilty of a crime, the lady stabbed a bunch of folks and we all know it.
If you were the alleged perpetrator, whom would you want to decide how blatantly obvious your case is? If such a rule wasn’t absolute, it would be practically non-existent, because the news folks tend to be easily convinced of someone’s “obvious” guilt.
There may or may not be an insanity defense in her jurisdiction. But that’s not really the point. The point is that the people who own the newspapers and TV stations don’t want to get sued for libel. They don’t want someone who is acquitted of a crime to be able to turn around, say “they called me a killer!” and sue them. If you can forestall that by adding a couple of words to an article or a report, why wouldn’t you?
Bingo. Also, consider the following scenario: Smith and Jones are in a bar. They get into an argument, which escalates. At the end of it, Smith is lying dead on the floor with a knife in his vitals, and Jones is arrested and charged with murder.
The on-the-scene reporter on next day’s news says, “I am standing inside the bar, a few feet from the spot where Jones allegedly murdered Smith.”
Now:
– Was it murder or manslaughter? We can nitpick the difference – but to the lawyers representing plaintiff and respondent in a slander suit, it can mean many dollars. And Jones might prefer the shorter sentence and no chance of death penalty, too.
– Consider: If Smith was the first to employ deadly force – it was his knife, which Jones tried to wrest from him as he attempted to stab Jones with it, then there’s a good possibility it was self-defense, and Jones is innocent of any crime.
– Perhaps it was Brown, whose wife Smith was sleeping with and who has always hated Jones, who actually killed Smith with Jones’s knife in the course of the fight and set Jones up to take the fall.
– And any number of other possible scenarios, beloved of TV murder dramas but which do happen in real life from time to time.
Oh, and “allegedly stabbed Smith with a knife, killing him”? Let’s add another hypothetical here – Smith was a big beefy man with high blood pressure and cholesterol. As Jones was defending himself by holding a knife in a manner to warn Smith back, Smith suffered a massive heart attack and fell on Jones’s outstretched arm and knife.
Yep, “alleged” can even describe the probably uncontroverted act.
I do have issues with “his alleged death” though. Unless the reporter is named Schrodinger, he or she should be able to determine if the victim is alive or dead at the time of the report.
But none of those scenarios apply to this situation. In this case it’s not about assigning legal guilt. We’re not saying this woman stabbed people who died.
Remember, the scenario I quoted is recent and real, not a hypothetical. The woman CLEARLY was stabbing people, and a cop stopped her in the act of trying to stab even MORE people and there are a Target store full of witnesses who saw her stab people and then get apprehended.
I’d say the fact she stabbed people is as concrete as the walls of the store. ANd let’s assume the interior store cameras caught the entire event, which is a scenario I’d consider fairly likely. So we know it’s not a conspiracy – we’ve got video of her stabbing people and then being apprehended, and it’s clearly the same woman.
In this particular instance, I think it’s absurd to call her the “alleged” stabber. Is the fear of a libel lawsuit that dangerous in case that can’t get more clear cut than this?
The time square bomber wannabe doesn’t have that much clear evidence pointing at him. =)
PS - I’m sure you’re all correct and I’m tilting at bureaucratic windmills for a specific instance that is as rare as it is spectacular, but it’s still just… FRUSTRATING when we can’t speak the obvious truth on a newscast for fear of legalese.
I am sure they are not the least bit worried the woman will sue them for libel. But there’s no reason to change their policy and they don’t want their reporters to start dropping the “alleged” construction every time they think it’s obvious a person is guilty.
It’s not a bureaucratic issue, and they are speaking the truth. She is accused of stabbing people. She is the alleged stabber. It’s also true that there’s video evidence and she obviously did it, and I am sure any story they do makes reference to the video and whatever other evidence they have. They are not saying anything that is not true.