Popular Crime by Bill James

Author:Bill James
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Non-Fiction, History
ISBN: 1416552731
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2011-05-03T07:00:00+00:00

XX

F. Lee Bailey was involved in four of the most famous cases of the 20th century, and other very famous crimes as well, but four of the twenty most famous cases of the century. While many other lawyers had multiple associations with famous crimes, only one other lawyer—Darrow—is equally prominent in the most famous cases.

Looking back on it, it is my belief that Bailey helped to cause the system of justice to fail in all four cases. In the case of Sam Sheppard, Bailey cleared the name of a man who probably was involved in his wife’s murder. In the case of the Boston strangler, Bailey sold the entire nation on the story that Albert DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler, which he probably was not.

Patty Hearst was a young woman who was dragged violently from her room in the middle of the night, raped and terrorized into joining her captors in their further misadventures. Bailey’s defense of her allowed her to be convicted in 1976 and sentenced to 35 years in prison, a miscarriage of justice later limited by Jimmy Carter, who commuted her sentence, and Bill Clinton, who pardoned her. And in the case of O. J. Simpson it was Bailey, not Johnnie Cochran, who set the N-word trap that turned the trial of O. J. Simpson into a trial of Mark Fuhrman, thus helping a murderer to walk free.

If you were to evaluate our justice system based on how well it performs in high-profile cases—popular crime cases—you would conclude that our system was a disaster. The system failed in these four cases; it has failed, at least so far, in the JonBenet Ramsey case, it failed in the assassination of President Kennedy—allowing the accused to be murdered—it failed in the case of the Black Dahlia. In cases like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer, the system “succeeded” only after many people were dead. In the cases that the tabloids live for, the system of justice fails a huge percentage of the time. Why is that?

Which way does the cause and effect work? Does the system of justice fail, in these cases, because there is something about the types of crimes that become most famous that makes them difficult for the criminal justice system? Or is it the fact that these cases are so famous that causes the system to fail?

It’s both. Sometimes it’s one; sometimes it’s the other; sometimes it’s both. In the O. J. Simpson murder case, the system failed in substantial measure because of the attention given to the case. In the JonBenet case, I think the same is true: that had the press never gotten interested in the case, it is more likely that the investigation would have been handled properly.

If that were generally true, it would be an important indictment of the popular crime phenomenon. But more often, I think, it works the other way: that these cases become famous because they are hard cases. And in some cases, crimes are solved only because of the attention given to the case by the media.

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