How local and national news coverage can affect alleged sex offenders
“In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous.”
Those words mark the beginning of the NBC television show, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, which has been on the air for over 2 decades. The episodes keep viewers captivated by watching a team of New York City detectives chase and apprehend serial rapists, child molesters or other perpetrators of these “heinous” crimes.
While such shows portray the brave men and women on the police force as the protagonist and the guilty party as the antagonist, an argument could be made that such portrayals have created an environment of “guilty until proven innocent” when it comes to sex crimes in America today.
All it takes is one accusation, a police investigation or even a grand jury indictment to completely upend the life of a man or woman who is not even guilty of the sex crimes they have been accused of.
Media cover of sex offenders
A study was conducted that looked at over 300 L.A. Times articles published between 1990 and 2015 on media coverage of sex offenders. While there is nothing wrong with a media outlet providing an accurate report on an individual who has been tried and found guilty by a jury of their peers, that is not always the case in mainstream media or social media.
Often, reports are printed and produced before evidence has been uncovered or alibis have been checked. This leaves people facing the wrath of public outcry without ever having the opportunity to have their name cleared.
How does the media impact your case?
Any individual can be charged and arrested with a crime before there is any actual proof that ties them to the offense. As our justice system currently stands, being charged is not the same as being convicted, although the court of public opinion causes that fact to seem untrue.
Sex crimes in the media are often reported on before any conviction or decree of innocence has been handed down from a court. As news of these charges and accusations spreads, potentially innocent men and women are vilified by their neighbors and others in the community based on nothing more than an accusation that may end up being disproved.
While the ultimate goal of the legal system is to see justice brought to the guilty while the innocent are exonerated, careless media work can lead to an upstanding citizen having their reputation damaged beyond repair, based solely on how they were portrayed by local media and talked about on social media.
How offenders are portrayed in the media is relatively consistent. With or without any concrete evidence of guilt, the terminology that is used in media reports concerning sexual assault typically paints the suspect out as a violent predator that poses an immediate threat to the community. This type of unfair portrayal is exactly why anyone that has been accused of a sex crime should seek out the aid of a sex crime defense lawyer.
How the media impacts sex crime legislators
In addition to the irreparable harm to a potentially innocent person’s reputation, it’s also worth noting that the elected officials who create the sex crime laws are subjected to these reports and media portrayals.
Whether subconsciously or consciously, these legislators are being influenced by the way that newspaper articles are written, television news stories are presented and the conversations that are taking place on their social media feeds. This does nothing but further stack the deck against someone who has yet to be proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Under the U.S. Constitution, every man and woman, whether guilty or innocent, are promised the right to fair and professional representation in a court of law. This guarantee is at the heart of our nation’s legal system and must be upheld at all costs.
Just as much as the promise that any accused person is “innocent until proven guilty” must be kept at the forefront of all reports, the representation those accused people receive must be of the highest caliber.
The media, both mainstream and social, only serves to add fuel to the social panic when it comes to sex crimes. Reports are often slanted against the alleged perpetrator and rarely discuss anything other than the goriest of details about the crime that has supposedly been committed.