Smeared, and No ‘Excuse Me’

In the case of Richard Jewell, it’s worth noting that other nations have different standards for releasing the names of criminal suspects. In Australia, for example, a name is not released to the press until a suspect has been arrested and charged with a crime. In Britain, arrests can be made public but media coverage of a case is banned until it is tried. In the United States, once a “prime suspect” has been named, the press can--indeed, is expected to--publish whatever it can discover about that person.

The zeal of these pursuits depends on the crime and/or the suspect. In the Jewell matter, the public’s outrage was great: A bomb had been planted that killed one person outright and injured more than 100 at last summer’s Olympic Games in Atlanta, and the crime occurred just after a mysterious explosion killed 230 people aboard TWA Flight 800 over Long Island. Jewell, initially hailed for finding the knapsack containing the bomb minutes before it exploded, went from heroic to heinous within days when the FBI announced that he was a suspect.

What did the FBI have on Jewell? In retrospect, not much. He fit a profile of a lone bomber. He lived with his mother. He had been overzealous as a college police officer. He’d once wrecked a squad car. He had impersonated an officer when trying to quiet some neighbors. And he had said that if something bad happened at the Olympics he wanted to be there. Big deal.

Now the FBI says that Jewell is no longer a suspect, but nothing remotely resembling an apology has been uttered. And the FBI’s claim that it regretted “the highly unusual and intense publicity” is hard to swallow.

A lot of Americans will admit that, deep down, they embraced the idea of Jewell as the bomber. With him in the FBI cross hairs, there was no need to fear some shadowy international terrorist conspiracy. With Jewell labeled the villain, there was no reason to fear that something far more sinister or coordinated had been involved.

The FBI has wasted a lot of investigative time on what it now says is the wrong man. And it nearly destroyed that man in the process.