Jumping to judgment
What if the big, bad, scary black man didn't do it?
Willie Bennett had a long, ugly rap sheet when Boston police identified him as the prime suspect in the shooting death of Carol DiMaiti Stuart.
So did Jesus Carrasquillo when police named the Boston gang member as a suspect in the fatal shooting of an assistant attorney general, Paul R. McLaughlin.
There was plenty of circumstantial evidence, but neither man, targeted by eager investigators and trumpeted by a credulous media, was ever arrested. Why? Because someone else pulled the trigger in those high-profile murder cases.
That is worth remembering as the lynch mob gathers for Darryl Littlejohn, the bouncer at a New York City bar being linked by a flood of anonymous police leaks to the rape and murder last month of Imette St. Guillen. Littlejohn might prove to be the killer of the 24-year-old graduate student from Mission Hill, but being under suspicion is not the same thing as being under arrest.
Sometimes, even a career criminal is innocent.
There was a time police did not name a suspect until they had nailed down enough evidence to make an arrest. Now, police identify a ''person of interest" at the earliest stages of their investigation. One anonymous police source described Littlejohn to Globe reporters last week as ''our only potential suspect." What does that mean? That police have narrowed the field or settled on a target?
We know better than to think that cops always get it right the first time, so why do we broadcast their preliminary thoughts on a case as gospel? Carrasquillo was a drug dealer with a motive to kill a prosecutor, but it was a rival gang-banger who assassinated Paul McLaughlin.
Why do we treat a suspect's protests of innocence as pro forma denials, but take every nugget of information from police, no matter how anonymously sourced, as a breakthrough? If the goal is to find the truth, why do we use the word ''setback" to describe the fact that two rape victims did not identify Littlejohn in police lineups as their assailant?
Even as the media hysteria against Littlejohn built last week, the City of Boston agreed to pay $3.2 million to a man who had been wrongly convicted in the rape of an Emerson College student.
That was one of more than a score of cases in the past two decades in Boston alone in which prosecutors sent the wrong man to prison, sometimes for years, often for the city's most notorious crimes. Think Donnell Johnson, who did five years for the murder of a 9-year-old boy, a murder he did not commit.
Those miscarriages of justice are cautionary tales. If Littlejohn is guilty, evidence will tie him to the crime. But am I the only one in Boston who gets shivers reading that detectives are going door to door interrogating every young black man in Littlejohn's Queens neighborhood who might have been an accomplice?
Remember, Mission Hill is not just where St. Guillen grew up; it's the neighborhood that police turned upside down in the Stuart case in a single-minded search for a phantom black man in a black sweat suit. Didn't we learn anything about probable cause in 1989?
Does no one else feel queasy when a cop attributes to fear a rape victim's failure to ID Littlejohn as her assailant? ''We think the victim got scared," an anonymous source told the Herald. Or maybe he is not the guy.
When Stuart did not pick Willie Bennett out of a police lineup, police sources insisted that Bennett looked ''most like" the man who shot Stuart and his pregnant wife. ''That's the guy," an anonymous cop told the Globe days before we learned that Stuart himself was responsible for his wife's murder.
Last week, The New York Post ran a photograph of Darryl Littlejohn on Page One under a headline that read: ''IT'S HIM." Maybe it is, but let's not put the conviction before the arrest. It's worth remembering that, despite all the Page One headlines, it was not Willie Bennett and it was not Jesus Carrasquillo.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at McNamara@globe.com. 
