Reporters Try to Hook Truth Beneath Court ‘Pond Scum’

A colleague from a competing newspaper was showing a young reporter around the courthouse. “The first thing you have to know,” he told her, “is that they are all guilty. You cannot cover criminal courts until you understand that.”

The young woman was appalled at his admitted bias. Her friends were horrified.

I understood his point.

With rare exceptions, they are all guilty.

Too many defense arguments I’ve read belong in the fiction section of the law library. You cannot survive as a reporter in the criminal courts if you don’t look at defense lawyers with a skeptical eye. Your readers would think the system was falling apart.

But the question of guilt is not the beginning and the end of a criminal case. Even when the defendant is clearly guilty of something, the question often remains: guilty of what? And what about the exceptions?

For courthouse reporters, it gets to be too easy to see the prosecutors as the good guys with white hats and the defense lawyers as the black hats sitting next to pond scum. You know what pond scum is. That’s the guy who not only robs your house but also breaks open your kid’s piggy bank and takes all the nickels and pennies.

In fact, there are many shades of gray in the criminal courts. Too many times a man facing first-degree murder is guilty of no more than manslaughter. A man who shoots at vandals is charged with attempted murder, when maybe his case in a jury’s eyes is good for just a slap on the wrist. You learn to use a skeptical eye on prosecutors too.

Sometimes, courthouse reporters’ views can be affected by factors outside the courtroom.

Last month, Willie Wisely began serving a sentence of life in prison without parole for the murder of his stepfather. Because Wisely, a jailhouse lawyer, is brash, arrogant and egocentric, most reporters I know would be secretly delighted to see him dragged off to the dungeons of hell. But that’s because of his personality, not the evidence.

Darrell Roberts, in contrast, was charged with an even worse crime. He was accused of beating to death his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son in 1981. Roberts, who was free on bail, coached football and track at a local high school. He was humble, gracious and always good for sports talk with reporters. After six months, you knew Darrell Roberts couldn’t kill a cockroach, let alone a child.

When the charges against him were dismissed, most of us reporters wanted to hug him. But not because of any careful scrutiny of the evidence. We just liked Roberts.

Then there was Beverly Jean Ernst, who last year got a four-year prison term for felony child endangerment. She had left her twin infants in a car at 7 a.m. on a hot July day, fell asleep with her boyfriend and did not wake up until past noon. Pathologists said the babies died of heat stroke by 10:30 a.m.

At one of her hearings, I sat between a Times photographer and another Times reporter, each the mother of a small child.

“There’s a story here that needs to be told, about low-income, single mothers trying to cope,” the reporter said.

“They should fry her,” the photographer said.

I knew Beverly Ernst was guilty of something . But what? The three people representing The Times there that day may never agree.

The only white hats at the courthouse are on the heads of the cafeteria cooks. And sometimes, underneath the pond scum, there’s a fish who has lost his way.