High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes.

High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes

Lynn S. Chancer University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu 288 pp., $38

Those involved with the law--lawyers, judges, court and law enforcement personnel, even jurors--tend to view a criminal defendant as one of two things: guilty or innocent. And their discussions about crimes tend to be two-sided. As sociologist Lynn Chancer explains in High-Profile Crimes: When Legal Cases Become Social Causes, people on the sidelines of a crime, including the media and members of the public, also hold this dualistic view. However, these cases are more complex, and an either/or viewpoint discounts a wider variety of interpretations and responses.

Chancer, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Fordham University, has written two previous books on beauty, pornography, and feminism and the dynamics of power in sadomasochism. This time, she examines how people discuss and react to what she calls "high-profile crimes." These she describes as "provoking assaults" that "became vehicles for crystallizing, debating, and attempting to resolve contemporary social problems" in the United States. She focuses on notorious examples from the 1980s and 1990s (what she calls a post-civil rights mass-mediated age).

Such crimes include the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger; the 1989 shooting death of a black teenager in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, by a group of community youths; the 1991 Rodney King police beating case; the 1992 attack of a white truck driver in Los Angeles after the King verdict was announced; the 1991 William Kennedy Smith and Mike Tyson rape cases; and the O.J. Simpson murder case of 1993. By studying published reports and interviewing more than 200 people involved, Chancer examined these and other crimes "to illuminate patterns in American culture generally, certainly not to settle questions of guilt or innocence in particular criminal cases."

In the traditional academic approach, the author states her theories about people's approach to her subject, spends a couple of chapters defining the appropriate jargon, and then discusses how the law, the media, and the public perceived and reacted to these crimes. For the reader, trudging through the professorial passive voice and gerundizing of nouns is sometimes a task. For instance, she discusses "concretizing social issues through single cases that permit emotions to be vented and reasoned arguments to be made."

Her chapter about the law is well-covered ground: Chancer notes that there are traditionalists among judges and lawyers who believe the worlds outside and inside the courtroom can be kept completely separate--and those with modernist views who ac knowledge that the line has blurred. What might be of value to a trial lawyer is Chancer's take on how the media and the public (potential jurors) react to high-profile crimes. The book considers only the criminal side of law, but knowing how people respond to traumatic news can be useful to civil litigators as well.

In the media chapter, the author defines two types of journalists: those who believe high-profile cases are chosen for coverage because they have inherently interesting characteristics, and others who self-consciously admit they have a relationship to the subject matter and the power to shape public perceptions. She finds the latter more common and holds that when editors and reporters of either type select and shape events, their claim of objectivity prevents them from openly declaring what they are doing.

Chancer concludes that the practice of presenting two sides to every story--another form of the "dualistic framework" of discussion--isn't as necessary for the media as it is for the law, which follows precedent. "In principle," she writes, "nothing prevents journalists from covering stories in more complex ways." She posits that multifaceted news coverage would avoid some of the resentment that community members feel after a crime and would point to several kinds of social discrimination that might be at work, rather than one type or another. She wants the media to enrich the story from many sides rather than oversimplify and sway people to believe there is one simple cause.

Chancer seems to find more fault with the media's two-sided approach than that of the other groups she chose to study. In initial chapters discussing the Central Park rape and Bensonburst shooting cases, she presents pages of illustrations from newspapers of the time to strengthen her points about legal, criminal justice, or community reactions.

In the chapter dealing with public perceptions, a lot of jargon blooms. Chancer talks about "social-psychic dynamics," including "partializing" (taking a side), "substituting" (blaming the victim), "reversing" (defending the defendant), and "exceptionalizing" (taking a "yes, but" approach). These dynamics, she says, operate unconscious y in defense against the inadmissibility of social responsibility in these cases." Yet she finds that community leaders, whether they engage the media directly or focus on the symbolic aspects of a high-profile crime--for example, by using a rape case to discuss broader gender violence--may be taking effective stances. When the people of a community try to make more systemic critiques, they might alter resentful reactions to a crime, she finds.

In the end, incidents become high-profile crimes because of three factors: rising public concern about violent crime as a social problem; issues of identity politics concerning gender, sexuality, and race; and the explosion of media competition and coverage. These would seem to be facts of life these days--and how people in every community react may be lessons worth studying.

REBECCA PORTER is an associate editor of TRIAL.