INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY

It goes against my better instincts to say what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway. It’s somewhat of a “gut feeling” I have, even though I typically don’t like gut feelings when it comes to seeking out the truth. Also, after 8 years of a moral deviant in the White House using his “gut feelings” to tell him what to do since his brain was permanently out to lunch, “gut feelings” should carry no more weight than determining if someone’s a witch by throwing them in the river to see if they float. But there is one form of “gut feelings” I find more often than not extremely accurate in predicting guilt.

Let me explain.

On Friday, I read that friends of Phillip Markoff, the alleged Craigslist killer, had set up a Facebook page to defend his innocence. Their argument is straightforward, intelligent, and hard to disagree with, namely that “Phillip Markoff is innocent until proven guilty.” They claim that Phillip is being railroaded by the media, and certainly the national media’s track record in convicting people before they’ve had a trial is not a good one (Richard Jewell, Gary Condit, etc). But the thing I find most telling about Markoff’s behavior is what he and so many others accused of brutal crimes do when they’ve been convicted, and it’s not, I believe, what innocent people would ever do – and that’s to go through the process without emphatically proclaiming their innocence.

Imagine you’ve been accused of something that you clearly didn’t do and that, if convicted, will mean you’ll spend either the remainder of your life in jail or your execution. What level of emphasis would you put into proclaiming your innocence? How much would you be looking into the facts of the case? Would you become almost lawyerly in your obsession to prove you were innocent and a major injustice was taking place? Wouldn’t you be quite a bit “perturbed”, to put it mildly, to be in such an outrageous predicament?

When Steven Hatfill was accused of being the anthrax terrorist several years ago, he immediately became obsessed with arguing his innocence. He went so far as to hold a press conference to explain how he was being railroaded. The press treated his "guilt" as almost a given fact, and he fought back since he knew the truth. He knew damn well he hadn’t done what he was being accused of and it was of monumental importance to him to clear his name and also to find out why he was being falsely accused. He demanded justice be brought. Now look at Phillip Markoff and how he’s reacting to what he’s been accused of. He can barely muster enough “outrage” to stay awake during the proceedings.

A few years ago there was brutally savage murder committed in New York City of a young woman named Imette St. Guillen. The initial suspect was a bouncer in the bar where she was last seen named Darryl Littlejohn. Unlike Markoff, Littlejohn did have a criminal history, but like Markoff, he had never been accused of anything as violent as what he was being charged with. I remember following that story and thinking, because he was an African-American, there was a chance the police were singling him due to his race (this is NYC, after all. Home of Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Abner Louima), but the first time I saw him speak to the local media when he was in custody, his guilt seemed overwhelming. What he said that was so ridiculous in light of the grisly nature of his crime was that the press should talk to his family since “they know I wouldn’t do something like that”. Imagine being accused of a crime so brutally sadistic, so unspeakably vicious, that it was considered one of the most savage in the city's history. Would you say, “my family knows I wouldn’t do that?” Would you even think of say something that absurd in defending your innocence?