By Michael Miner
If you read last week’s Hot Type and marveled at the blistering hostility to the Chicago Tribune expressed by groups of prosecutors, you might have supposed that the press and the forces of law and order are natural enemies. They aren’t. They share an old, familiar, workaday relationship that cops, prosecutors, and reporters all have an interest in preserving. Cops and prosecutors routinely know things the public finds out. Reporters are the ones who do the telling.
“These are friends of mine. I’m a frustrated journalist myself,” he replied. “As far as I’m concerned, more power to them….Newspaper reporters are like water. They seek their own level. They’ll find a way to get around this. Police officials talk. Judges talk. Lawyers talk. They’ll just have to work a bit harder.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The rewritten rules are a little broader and more detailed than their predecessors, and at one or two points could strike a layman as ludicrous. Litigators are warned against expressing “any opinion as to the guilt or innocence of a defendant or suspect in a criminal case,” and even against stating “the fact that a defendant has been charged with a crime, unless there is included therein a statement explaining that the charge is merely an accusation and that the defendant is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.” This seems to say that when police nab a suspect at gunpoint and toss him in jail without bond, no one should conclude that the police think he’s done anything wrong. Even the DA trying him for murder will be expected to assert his innocence.
Ratcliffe reacted, as Haine said reporters must, by working harder. She started filing Freedom of Information requests for the sort of data that used to be hers for the asking. Before long, cops started giving her information again–“though now generally only the chief will do it.”
“I got into a discussion with reporters last night. I said, ‘Don’t blame the messenger. We’re carrying the spear for the emperor.’ We’re not doing this because we like to. We’re looking over our shoulder at what may happen if we don’t take reasonable care. What may happen to our verdicts. What may happen to us as licensed attorneys. It’s like someone writing an article on Normandy Beach, on how many innocent Frenchmen were killed by the D-day bombing, and forgetting the fact they’re defeating the Nazi army. We can all talk about mistakes of a human system, but what is the general pattern of the judicial system in Illinois? There are thousands of decisions in Illinois every year that are fairly rendered.
That said, it’s nice having it available to the Sun-Times, along with London’s Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post, a couple of other Hollinger papers whose stories the Sun-Times often reprints. The benefits of Hollinger ownership don’t end there. The same edition of the Sun-Times also carried a northwest Indiana story borrowed from the Post-Tribune in Gary.
