Law, disorder on live shot
Is it safe to turn on a television set?
Are the motorcades and the stakeouts over for now? Have the helicopters landed and the telephoto lenses been capped? Is Nancy Grace revisiting the Natalee Holloway case yet?
The evening news is now probably a Neil Entwistle-free zone, at least until the accused killer's next court appearance in March. These periodic media storms blow through with the same intensity as last week's northeaster and melt away about as fast as last week's snow.
Not that those of us in the business of peddling voyeurism as news ever acknowledge as much. Between live shots of the darkened windows of police cruisers, we give the coverage the sheen of social commentary with psychobabble about the nature of family violence, the lure of Internet porn, and the isolation that might have befallen a debt-ridden Briton suddenly relocated to the colonies.
We have no idea what we are talking about, but that never stops us when the subject is murder and the victims are white suburbanites. To review: Charles and Carol Stuart were not the Camelot Couple; Dirk Greineder was not a devoted husband; Kenneth Seguin was not an unflappable family man; Louise Woodward was not Mary Poppins.
Appearances, it turns out, are often deceiving.
We pay lip service to the presumption of innocence even as we mine one-sided court papers for an outline of the preliminary case against a man who has yet to meet his lawyer. We break no rules. The public, we intone, has a right to know. The lack of restraint is a reasonable argument for the British criminal justice system, which limits pretrial publicity. That restriction would not only protect the right of a defendant to a fair trial but it would preserve the right of the reading and viewing public to some perspective and proportionality in the coverage of crime.
With no real news to report after the arrest in England of Entwistle for the shooting deaths of his wife, Rachel, and 9-month-old daughter Lillian Rose in Hopkinton last month, newscasters were reduced to speculating about his state of exhaustion (It is a long flight from London.), to interpreting his facial expressions (He looked either stoic or shifty-eyed at his arraignment.), to commenting on his wardrobe. (He wore the same black jacket when he got pinched at a London tube stop.)
Don't you feel better informed, knowing that he traveled from Gatwick Airport outside London to Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford in a Gulfstream G-IV jet named the ''Spirit of America?" I know I do.
There is no denying the human fascination with homicide, especially when the victims are as innocent as an infant napping with her young mother. There is a reason ''Law and Order" is a click away on cable at any hour of the day. But Martha Coakley is not Jack McCoy. She does not play a prosecutor on TV. She is one, a district attorney willing to exploit the public attention for prosecutorial and political gain. (All these press conferences do not lower the visibility of her campaign for attorney general.)
The motivation of the rest of us is harder to figure. Criminal trials rarely answer the question that keeps us glued to other people's tragedies. We might learn who; we almost never learn why. Cross-examination does not expose the human heart or mind as easily as it cracks an alibi. The law does not require the state to prove a killer's motive and its attempts to do so are usually no more successful than the media's efforts to cut and paste random facts into a full portrait of a life or of a marriage.
Financial pressures or a secret life of Internet porn might have driven Neil Entwistle to kill. Revenge might have motivated a customer scammed by the Internet entrepreneur to do the deed. Cyberspace is chock full of theories and that is where they belong, not on the front page or on the evening news.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
