Murder and the Media:
What the case of Kristin Lodge-Miller can teach us about how the news media cover crime

By Sylvia Colwell
 Knight Copy Editing Fellow
 Fall 1997

Early on the morning of July 15, 1993, long before the full force of the summer sun reached the neat and pretty college town of Chapel Hill, N.C., the lives of Kristin Ann Lodge-Miller and Anthony Georg Simpson collided in a shockingly violent way. Minutes after the two crossed paths along leafy Estes Drive, Lodge-Miller, a young woman building a promising career as a speech therapist, lay dead in the street and soon Simpson, a troubled high school student, was shackled and facing a murder charge.

The murder was a cinch to become a major media event. It had all the elements of drama: a pretty, sympathetic victim gunned down while running along a popular jogging trail as horrified bystanders watched; a defiant teenage suspect who embodied society's worst fears about youth crime. It was a crime of black against white, male against female. And not least, it happened in a town promoted by its Chamber of Commerce as "The Southern Park of Heaven," a town whose heart and soul is the University of North Carolina, where thousands of parents send their children each year.

Over the next few months, and as Simpson's murder trail unfolded in the spring of 1994, the case became fodder for hundreds of newspaper articles and television and radio broadcasts across the state. It was mentioned in articles about rising crime rates, about falling crime rates, about violence among young black males, and about the difficulties of serving on a criminal jury. The residents of Chapel Hill, most of whom knew about the case only what they heard from their neighbors and gleaned through the media, were stirred by the case, and many were outraged when the jury found Simpson guilty of second-degree, or unpremeditated, murder. Letters to the editor, most condemning the decision, flooded local newspaper offices. Gun control became a red-hot local issue, and Chapel Hill's town council subsequently passed the toughest gun restrictions in the state. A plaque was erected in Lodge-Miller's memory, and the public donated more than $2,000 to a fund set up in her name to benefit victims of sexual violence. Three Orange County women's agencies teamed up to hold public forums to allow people to vent their feelings about the case and to look for solutions to crime.

Jury foreman Stephen Pizer remembers his involvement as one of the unhappiest parts of his life, and prosecutor Carl Fox says the case was the most divisive he's handled in his 13 years as district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties. Even four years later, people in Chapel Hill remember what they were doing when they heard about the murder, much as people remember what they were doing when they heard President Kennedy had been assassinated.

In this context, my aim is to use the Lodge-Miller murder as a case study of how effectively the media cover crime, to examine the fairness and relevance of the local coverage and whether it helped or hindered justice and public understanding. I have done this through the anecdotal observations of some of those involved, directly or peripherally, in the case; through a review of the coverage in two local newspapers, the Durham Herald-Sun and the Raleigh News & Observer; and through a study of pertinent sociology, criminology and media-studies literature. My ultimate goal is to gain a better understanding, from an outsider's point of view, of how those touched by a crime are affected from what we in the media do, and to learn how we can use our influence to most beneficial effect.
 


The Prosecutor: Manipulations Cause misconceptions

Murder does not come often to Chapel Hill, so when Carl Fox, the district attorney for Prosecutorial District 15-B, heard a jogger had been slain on Estes Drive, he got in his car and drove there, arriving just after the body had been removed. He says he had no idea the case would turn out to be such a big one. And, although he can understand why people were interested -- they could relate to the victim because they were familiar with the street, or because they jogged themselves -- he believes the media attention given to the case was overblown, at times insensitive, and may have interfered with the job of the criminal justice system.
For example, he says, the press presented Kristin Lodge-Miller and Tony Simpson as opposing archetypes rather than human beings: "The case became called 'the jogger case,' and her name became secondary to the fact that it was related to ... someone being a jogger. He could be viewed from his picture as being somewhat of a menacing ... teenager. Juvenile crime was beginning to be on the increase and it was easy to relate him to the problem of juveniles occurring in our society. That's what the two of them represented. ... They used it to sell papers."

Fox also takes issue with the fact that jurors were interviewed, and publicly identified, after the unpopular second-degree murder verdict was reached. He says this resulted in the jurors "being subjected to an ordeal that I can only adequately relate to being burned in effigy" and he fears this might cause others to shy from sitting on juries in controversial cases. Fox also took some criticism for remarks he made to reporters about his disappointment in the verdict, though he says he felt a responsibility to comment when asked. If he had it to do over again, he says, he might have instead made a "soothing" comment about how jury compromises such as the one in this case -- in which several white jurors changed their initial votes in order to assure some type of conviction -- aren't unusual.
That, he says, is something the media should have made clear to people even without his help. Anyone familiar with the workings of the criminal courts, he says, should know that "it wasn't the first time a jury compromised on a verdict, and it won't be the last time." He also says the media should have gone to greater lengths to point out that a murder like that of Lodge-Miller is quite unusual: "In reality, the actual numbers would show that ... the likelihood of being attacked by a perfect stranger was actually extremely minimal. (As a white woman,) Kristin Lodge-Miller ... has the lowest statistical probability of being attacked." As a black man, the defendant had a far higher probability of becoming a homicide victim, he says. And most homicides are intraracial, not interracial.

Though it is taken as a given in some of the media-studies literature that prosecutors, and to a lesser extent defense attorneys, use the media to help present their cases in the best light, Fox says his goal is to treat the high-profile cases exactly like the less celebrated ones. "I'm convinced that if you handle a big case differently ... the chances of an adverse outcome go up," he says, mentioning the tactic of keeping Rodney King off the stand in that California case, and the famously failed glove stunt in the O.J. Simpson trial.

This stick-to-the-facts approach extends to his assessment of the media's handling of the Lodge-Miller case. The coverage of the actual murder and of the trial itself, he says, was "absolutely accurate" and appropriate. It's the media's tendency to delve into analysis and speculation, which he calls "creating" and "manipulating" the news, that gives him pause.
This is the same phenomenon that author and reporter Nathan McCall alludes to in the Freedom Forum video Handcuffed Reporting: Is Crime Coverage Race Biased? Discussing the O.J. Simpson case, McCall says his impression of the initial coverage was that it was "fair and fairly raceless." But as the case wore on, that ceased to be the case. "It's almost as if we in the media began to get bored and to look for more exciting angles, " McCall says.
 


The Police Spokeswoman: Controlling the Flow of Information

A phone call in the dark of the morning awakened Jane Cousins, police analyst for the Chapel Hill Police Department. As she got dressed to head for the office, "I just remember thinking this is gonna be a big one, this is gonna be radio and TV. ... My experience is when something happens in Chapel Hill it has a statewide impact because people send their children here." And she was right. She spent the rest of the day, and many of the following days, fielding calls from newspapers and television stations and wire services.

As with all high-profile cases, Cousins found herself challenged to give reporters information they could use while holding back details that might compromise the case: "You sort of want to prove to the world, yes we have the right guy and this is how we know it ... but oftentimes you find yourself saying, well, you know it's part of the investigation and we can't discuss that." Her strategy in such instances is to issue as many written press releases as possible. This is in accordance with the department's detailed "Information Release Policy," which specifies, among other things, that the same information be given to all news agencies, and that certain information, such as identifying characteristics of witnesses who might be in danger, be withheld.

The constantly ringing phone in Cousins' office the day of Kristin Lodge-Miller's death was a noisy testimony to the department's policy of routing media requests for information through Cousins' office. When a public information officer just won't do, when reporters need someone who'll appear on camera in uniform or whose name in print will be preceded by a military title, Cousins sets up interviews with the police chief or with the officer who supervises those who are doing the investigative footwork. "(The investigators) are just the last people you want talking to the press," she says. "You just don't want to risk messing up a case by something that was said in the newspaper" by someone unaccustomed to dealing with reporters. Further, she says, the investigators and the officers directly supervising them are so close to the case that it would be impossible for them to provide the objective assessment the press needs.

The lead investigator in the Lodge-Miller case, Detective J.D. Parks, is more than happy about that arrangement. "My relationship with the media has always been a good one because I let somebody else deal with it," he says. "That way I can focus on what I do best, which is police work." In fact, Parks says, he made it a point not to follow the news coverage of the Lodge-Miller case. "I never picked up the paper on that one," he says. "It has a tendency to distort what I need to do, and I need to remain focused on the investigations."

Of course, it's part of Cousins' job to follow the coverage. She has mixed feelings about how the media performed in the Lodge-Miller case: "During the initial few days ... I think the coverage was good, I think it was fair, I think it was really thorough. Then they started digging into Anthony Simpson's background. ... I don't know that it was fair to him or to the case or to his mother."

A former social worker with the department's Crisis Unit, Cousins also felt discomfited by the television stations' interviews of Erik Miller, the victim's husband, just after the murder. "He was very calm and collected and I remember there were comments about this. ... He was in shock." Many victims, she says, don't know enough about the media to understand that they don't have to say anything at all.

Simpson's trial, she says, brought out a lot of anger, including racial anger, in this generally liberal community -- anger at the black jurors who didn't want a first-degree murder conviction, anger at Simpson's lawyers' "black male rage" defense, anger at Simpson's mother for moving him to Chapel Hill, anger at his sister for leaving a gun where he could find it. But Cousins doesn't necessarily fault the media for that: "When it got to the trial point, all the race issues kicked in and that was very difficult to cover; (it's) very difficult to talk about that in this community."

Because Simpson was arrested immediately after the crime, this case was actually a fairly straightforward one for the department, Cousins says. The difficulties arise, "when you don't have the answers and you have reporters asking lots of questions and they get into 'what-ifs' and 'coulds.' ... On the other hand, the exposure that (press attention) gives the law enforcement agency and the whole criminal justice system I think is real helpful. People learn more about how the system works or doesn't work. From a public relations standpoint, if you can think of those things while you're dealing with a situation like this, it's an opportunity to present yourself really well or really poorly," Cousins says, quickly adding that department officials are rarely thinking in those terms in the initial stages of such a case.

The Chapel Hill Police Department's careful control of information is similar to the phenomenon described by criminologist Renee Goldsmith Kasinsky in "Media, Process and the Social Construction of Crime." "In the past few decades," Kasinsky writes, "the police profession has become much more involved with the news media, which has been accompanied by an increase in their political power, personnel and fiscal power. They have made an effort to control their environment through a proactive strategy of selectively disclosing information about organizational activities and of defining their public image. ... The police are the primary definers of crime and its control to the public. ... The police are also restricted and controlled to some degree by the media."

It's a fact, Cousins says, that the media can help the police in searching for witnesses or a suspect. But she is leery of enlisting the media's aid in prevention efforts, at least in the context of a newsmaking crime. "I'm always real hesitant about teaching ... prevention because it's too easy to blame the victim. And that happened in this case -- you know, she had the pepper spray, why didn't she use it; somebody stopped a car, why didn't she get in?"

And those, she said, are the kind of questions the police department is not equipped to answer.

The Defender: Making the Case for Restraint

On July 15, 1993, James E. Williams Jr. picked up the phone. The voice on the other end was that of another local attorney, asking Williams, the chief public defender for the two-county district, if he'd heard about the shooting in Chapel Hill, and telling him that the police might be questioning a suspect. That was Williams' introduction to Anthony Simpson and the Kristin Lodge-Miller case. Next, as Williams recalls it, he tuned into a local radio station and heard the first bits and pieces of the media coverage that he would later call biased, inflammatory and antithetical to a fair trial for Simpson, whom Williams represented along with public defender Bob Trenkle.

Williams says there were inaccuracies, such as in the early stories that had Simpson hiding in a thicket as he fired on Lodge-Miller. He says there were revelations of information from records that should have been sealed, such as Simpson's school record from Virginia and his juvenile crime record. He says there was overkill, with articles and broadcasts about the crime nearly every day for weeks. Even the photos of Simpson that were used, Williams says, seemed designed to portray his client as sinister, showing him in shackles and prison jumpsuit. "I find it hard to believe," he says, "that the majority of the media people who covered this case had not pretty much already decided that Anthony Simpson was guilty of first-degree murder, that he was probably trying to rape this woman and that he should suffer the consequences."

Something that stands out in his mind is a lengthy radio broadcast that came within a few days of the killing. "There was ... an open forum that was broadcast live on one of the local AM radio stations where people from all over the state just sort of came and expressed their outrage and their grief and their concern about public safety and how they sort of identified with Lodge-Miller as their wife or sister or whatever... and this went on and on and on. And that's just an example of the type of media exposure, of a very passionate, emotional nature, that was generated in this case."

It's only natural for people to form opinions about a suspect's guilt when they're hearing so much about a crime, Williams says. "When a case receives as much coverage, and the public is so inundated with inflammatory information as they were in this case, I think there is almost a natural tendency for people to come to conclusions ... even though they're only hearing information that's filtered through the media and the spokespeople -- whoever those spokespeople may be, like initially the police officers, the D.A.'s office -- who are obviously making comments that as far as I'm concerned sort of further their goals ... in the prosecution of their case"
It's very difficult, Williams says, for a defense attorney to try to overcome the effects of this type of publicity. "I think it is almost impossible to counter that initial damage that's done, particularly when you're working with limited resources," he says. "I mean, we don't have public relations consultants, and spin doctors and so on. ... The damage is done. ... How do you go about correcting that? "

The same point was made by William M. Kunstler, the late founder of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in Culture of Crime. "Unless the defendant accused of heinous crimes has the money necessary to purchase the services of specialists who can reach and manipulate the press, they are doomed to accept the slings and arrows without an adequate response," Kunstler wrote. "Sometimes the presence of a well-known defense attorney can stimulate media interest in a client's side of the story, but in the main, even when counsel is included to run the risk of a contempt citation or professional disciplinary action (for commenting publicly on a case), it is generally impossible to blunt the prosecutor's initial bombast or the media's adverse treatment of the pariahs accused of such offenses."

In a high-profile trial like Simpson's, attorneys must be very careful about what they say, Williams says: "In a case of this nature, that's receiving such scrutiny, you know that everything you say in court, everything you put in writing in a motion, is subject to becoming headlines." But that doesn't mean catering to the media, says Williams, whose strategy included a widely criticized "black rage" defense. "In most instances I try to make myself oblivious to (the media), to the cameras in the courtroom, that sort of thing, because I think it can adversely affect you if you go about your preparation giving too much attention to the fact that hey, I'm on camera."

He notes that the Bar Association's ethical code limits how much attorneys can say to the media about a pending case (and says he thinks the prosecutor's office violated this code early in the Simpson case). He believes there should be similar self-imposed constraints on journalists: "I don't advocate that trials be held in secrecy. I don't advocate that the media have no access to this information. But I do think that there has to be some balance, there needs to be more guidance, there needs to be consequences when these lines are crossed."

Further, he says, further protections might be advisable in some heavily publicized cases. For example, reporters could be prohibited from covering suppression hearings, at which attorneys discuss evidence that the jury may not be allowed to hear.
Even without such steps, Williams says, if everyone involved goes to "extraordinary measures," it's possible for a defendant in a sensational trial to get a fair trial. And he says Simpson got one: "I think despite it all, I think ultimately justice prevailed. I think he was one of the lucky ones, in that he was able to survive an avalanche of media coverage and the jury was able to forge through and reach a result that was supported by the evidence."
 


The Victims' Rights Advocate: Trying to start the healing

Margaret Henderson, executive director of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, knew the killing of Kristin Lodge-Miller had touched a real nerve in the community as soon as she got to her office that July morning.

"Our phones started ringing off the hook when it happened," she said. Some of the calls were from reporters, but more were from residents who were sad, furious or frustrated. This being an activist community, "they wanted some sort of community action," she says. And she felt it was her job to do something.
Henderson's group, along with two other women's agencies, eventually sponsored two community meetings centered on the murder, aimed both at educating people and at allowing them to express their feelings. She also provided support to Lodge-Miller's family during Tony Simpson's murder trial.

From a victims' rights perspective, she rates the local news coverage of the murder and trial as generally fair, accurate and appropriate. "I wouldn't call it sensationalist," she says. The volume of coverage, she believes, was warranted by the level of community interest, if it also helped to keep that interest alive. "I think people were hungry for lots of information," she says. "I think people wanted to know why." In a more general sense, she believes the wide coverage of what is statistically the most unusual type of violence against women -- an attack by a stranger -- reflects what most people are most frightened of, and therefore most interested in.

In this sense, she agrees with scholar Steven Gorelick, who writes in The Culture of Crime that "the media do not create our fears of crime, rather they share their own fears and reproduce ours. ... Our fascination with the unusual conflicts with the classic educational mission of the press, but the unusual and the sensational are wrapped up in the very definition of news."

Henderson also commends the local media for including lots of information about how women can protect themselves against assault, though she says some of the more detailed questions about what Lodge-Miller might have done to protect herself "got a little silly." "Six women with six cans of Mace couldn't have stopped him," she says of Simpson, and she believes the fact that Lodge-Miller was "a totally blameless victim" was one reason the public was so horrified by the crime. She praises a newspaper article that detailed how the jury reached its decision -- the same article that has been criticized by some of the attorneys involved -- as helping to foster a greater understanding of what the jurors were up against.

Henderson, however, says that Lodge-Miller's family, particularly her husband, Erik Miller, felt besieged by the media at times. When he returned from California upon learning of her death, reporters were waiting at the couple's apartment, which Henderson feels was inappropriate. And during the trial, "we couldn't eat lunch" without being approached by reporters. She says, however, that once having asked, most reporters backed off when Erik Miller politely refused to be interviewed. Indeed, after the verdict Miller wrote an open letter to the Chapel Hill Herald in which he thanked members of the local media "for not hounding myself and my family during this trial." And he was grateful for a sympathetic letter he received from a man who had gone through a similar experience, and who had learned of Miller's situation from news reports.

One thing that stuck in Henderson's craw was the line of questioning from one local TV news show, whose reporter interviewed her before the post-verdict community meeting. The reporter, she believes, was anticipating, even hoping for, something explosive to occur at the meeting. "In general, I have less patience with TV and radio than with the printed media," she says. "They want 15-second sound bites, and what we do in this office you can't get in 15-second sound bites."

But the coverage of the case, Henderson says, wasn't what inflamed the public's wrath against the jury's decision. "People were looking for someone to blame," she says, and she got a taste of that herself when one man accused her organization of using the case to further its own agenda.
 


The Reporter: Putting the Reader There

Planning to attend some meetings, News & Observer reporter Jane Stancill was in the Raleigh newsroom early that morning. Then an editor mentioned having heard on the radio that a jogger had been shot in Chapel Hill, the town Stancill covered at the time. As soon as it became clear that the jogger was dead, Stancill knew she'd be needed to help. So she set off for the 35-minute drive to Chapel Hill.

It would turn out to be a story that Stancill followed for months. Police reporter Chris O'Brien handled the law enforcement angle, which was the main thrust of the early stories, while Stancill at first mostly gathered reaction. As the story developed, Stancill teamed with O'Brien to produce the bulk of the paper's coverage of the case. Because her beat included Chapel Hill's city government, Stancill was the lead reporter on the gun control stories that grew out of the case. And when it came time for Anthony Simpson to go to court, Stancill worked with courts reporter Todd Nelson.

She found a number of challenges in covering a story in which there was so much public interest, and about which emotions ran so high. Covering gun control, for example, is no easy task. "This is never really a logical debate," she says. "The public hearings seemed to drag on forever and the Town Council seemed to have gotten in over its head by trying to tackle such an explosive issue. But Chapel Hill has always been a very activist town, so in some ways, the outcry to 'do something' was not all that surprising. ... Of course, the NRA became involved in indirect ways, helping the local gun enthusiasts put on a campaign to oppose the ordinance."

It was also difficult, Stancill says, to find enough information on Simpson to present a balanced picture of him. "We talked with a lot of people about him, but because he came from a military family that moved around a lot, no one who spoke with us had a good sense of the young man's life in totality. Besides the grandmother, no family member would talk with us. ... What we had pretty thoroughly documented were his troubles in school in Virginia and North Carolina and his brushes with the law. And we had some friends and acquaintances from Chapel Hill willing to talk about him."

Then came the trial, which touched on the always sensitive issue of race. Stancill doesn't recall any debate in the newsroom over naming the jurors in print for stories analyzing the verdict, since this was part of the public record (the newspaper had a list from the courts). But it was tough, she says, getting the jurors to talk. She and Nelson called, sent letters, and visited the jurors' homes. "Most had no intention of talking because they didn't want to relive what had clearly been a painful experience," she says. "But with persistence, we managed to convince some of them to talk, and to talk in great detail."

This resulted in the story on the case that Stancill is most proud of, a front-page article published July 18, 1994, which described exactly how the jurors reached their decision. "We really tried to put the reader there in the jury room to try to show how race divided these 12 people," she says. "At the time, some staffers were surprised at the amount of space we were allowed on that story (99 inches). The editors were very supportive and pleased with our outcome."
She believes, however, that the News & Observer could have done a better job of profiling Kristin Lodge-Miller: "Here was a woman whose name was on the lips of practically everyone in Chapel Hill. Yet no one really knew much about her. The profile immediately after the murder was fairly superficial, mainly because her relatives were just too shook up to talk. In hindsight, we should have taken another crack at it."

Stancill says the media played some role in Chapel Hill residents' agitation over this highly atypical crime, but isn't solely responsible. "I'm sure our intense coverage of this event must have contributed to the sense of paranoia in the community about crime in general," she says. "In reality, Chapel Hill is a pretty darn safe place, yet everyone seemed to be worked up into frenzy about Lodge-Miller and personal safety in general. Looking back at the 'fear' story Chris and I did (a front-page piece not long after the murder about how the crime had shaken up people in the town), it probably could have used more of a reality check from someone saying that crime really isn't THAT bad. On the other hand, this was the early '90s, when crack was just becoming big in the Triangle and communities here were seeing a level of violence that had not been experience before. Also, because this crime seemed so horrific and had several actual witnesses ... it captured everyone's attention as other area killings had not."

The media, Stancill says, do have a responsibility to educate about crime and the criminal justice system. And she thinks news outlets, particularly local television news shows, could do a better job of putting crime in perspective. "Some nights, I watch local TV news and wonder if there's anything BUT crime going on in my community," she says. "The N&O has made a conscious effort to bring more perspective to our crime coverage, but we can always do better. ... A lot of people are still bewildered about how the criminal justice system works on a day-to-day basis. We could do a little more explaining in our trial stories. Sometimes I think we assume too much about our readers' knowledge."

In this, Stancill's experiences coincide with the findings of sociologist Roy Edward Lotz, who writes in Crime and the American Press that the news media have made strides in covering the larger issues of the criminal justice system, but that there is room for improvement. "Recently, court reporting has shown considerable improvement, going beyond mere names and legal terms to provide more description of the events and circumstances surrounding them," Lotz writes. "There is no gainsaying that court news still fails to provide analysis or critical thinking, but it deserves some credit for the small gains it has made."

Stancill's overall assessment is that the News & Observer covered the Lodge-Miller story well and appropriately. The sheer number of stories about the case was proportional with public interest in the case --which resulted in no small part because of the town in which it occurred, she believes.

"I've never seen a community react to a murder in this way," Stancill says. "More than a year after Lodge-Miller's death, strangers were still leaving flowers and cards on the spot where she died. Cars slowed along the jogging path months after the crime. I still can't drive by there without thinking about it. And now there's a permanent memorial near the site -- at the home of Orange County's Rape Crisis Center. If this crime had happened in another community, coverage would have been much different. But Chapel Hill is unlike most towns. People around the state have a real connection to this seemingly idyllic town, and there were plenty of UNC grads who could identify with Lodge-Miller, jogging on a crisp sunny morning on a very familiar jogging path. In most places, city government doesn't go about trying to change gun laws because of one crime."

The Judge: Keeping Order in the Courtroom

To the best of his recollection, it was through the media that superior court Judge Gordon Battle learned of the slaying of Kristin Lodge-Miller, though he can't say now whether it was from a newspaper or a television broadcast. A 20-year veteran of the bench in the Orange-Chatham County judicial district, Battle makes it a practice to read the papers and to catch the 6 o'clock news, particularly when they feature a case over which he's presiding.

Many times, as in the Lodge-Miller case, he is less than happy with what he sees. The media, Battle says, are drawn to conflict and tend to focus on the negative, because "like man bites dog," that's how they define newsworthiness. "I think the press is always looking for something that went wrong," he says. "As long as things go the way the press thinks they should, it's not much of a story."

A prime example, in his opinion, is the reporting on the verdict in Anthony Simpson's trial: "At the end of the trial I thought the thrust of the press was that something went wrong; there's something wrong with the criminal justice system; how could this have happened?" At least one headline stated that Simpson could be released from jail in 10 years, while Battle -- who gave Simpson the maximum life sentence for second-degree murder -- finds it highly unlikely Simpson will be paroled that soon. "From my standpoint," Battle says, "the system worked the way it's supposed to work. We had a trial within a reasonable period of time, the trial went along and the jury reached a verdict."

He attributes this sort of reporting not to ignorance about the criminal justice system on the part of reporters, but to their desire to land a flashier story. Battle wonders whether that also might be why the media choose to cover some cases that seem to him to be less significant than others that are ignored. He mentions a recent case in Durham in which a defendant convicted of a raft of offenses including burglary, robbery and rape was given an 80-year jail sentence. "There wasn't a word of that in the Raleigh paper," he says. "Instead they covered a college professor who was charged with using a credit card improperly."

The judge thinks the reporting about racial tension on the Simpson jury reflected that same tendency "to create problems or magnify problems. ... I don't know what the press says to the jurors but I've got a feeling they say things like, 'We've heard there were racial problems on the jury; What do you have to say about that?' ... I think it would be improbable if there wasn't some controversy on the jury and some jurors who had to compromise. ... And I think the idea that three black women on the jury intimidated the rest of the jurors is a little far-fetched."

Battle says he had no quarrel with the coverage of the actual courtroom proceedings. The media blitz before the trial began, though, made jury selection difficult. "There's a lot of difference in the perception people have of the case from reading about it in the paper and the evidence that actually comes out in the courtroom," he says. He recalls one potential juror who, when asked how he thought the crime happened, said Simpson had been hiding in the woods and pounced on Lodge-Miller as she ran by. "Of course there was no evidence of that at all," Battle says. "That's a conclusion he had drawn from the pretrial publicity."

Nonetheless, Battle thinks it's possible for conscientious jurors to ignore what they've heard from the media and focus on the evidence presented. And he believes Simpson got a fair trial. Despite the heavy coverage, the defense made no effort to get a change of venue. "I don't think anybody has ever asked that a case be moved from Orange County ... because Orange County juries have a reputation of being friendly towards the defense," Battle says.

Judges in North Carolina have the option of barring cameras from their courtrooms, but Battle did not find that necessary in this case, though he often finds a heavy media presence to be disruptive. Statewide rules say that only two TV cameras and one still camera -- quiet and without a flash -- are to be allowed, and that photographers must set up before court opens and stay put until it recesses or is adjourned. But there are sometimes violations of the camera rules, and reporters routinely fail to follow another rule that says they're supposed to select one representative to ask all the questions in a particular session, Battle says.
Battle commends those who, like one television news cameraman he knows of, follow these guidelines and encourage others to follow them. He finds it helpful, to himself and to reporters, to issue an order spelling out just what is expected of the press in the courtroom. Trouble is, judges in North Carolina rotate from place to place, and there's not always time to get such an order out to the local press before proceedings begin.
A glaring example of a trial gone out of control because of media attention, Battle says, is another Simpson case -- that of O.J. Simpson. By contrast, he notes, the judge in Susan Smith's murder trial in South Carolina banned TV cameras, and Battle thinks that trial went well. After the O.J. spectacle, he says, "I think some judges will just say no cameras in the courtroom, be more inclined to do that."

In Culture of Crime, Minnesota courts information officer Rebecca Fanning speaks to a point that may shed light on Battle's concerns about the media's tendency to draw conclusions. She writes that communication problems between judges and journalists may arise because "judges tend to be concerned with process, while journalists focus on outcome and impact. Judges are trained to build a foundation for an argument and lead the audience to the point. Journalists get to the point and then explain how they got there." In the same book, former Ohio trial judge Thomas S. Hodson speaks to another of Battle's points when he writes that one reason for what he calls an adversarial relationship between the media and the courts is that "those of us in the judicial system find that there are no enforceable rules when working with the press. Courtrooms, by contrast, are governed by rules: rules of evidence, rules of procedure, rules of decorum. No such rules exist in our media relations, and that makes judicial participants in the process extremely uncomfortable."
 


The Juror: Taking the Heat

Unlike many people in Chapel Hill, professor Stephen M. Pizer doesn't recall the circumstances under which he learned of the death of Kristin Lodge-Miller. That's not surprising; the gritty world of police and prosecutors is generally far removed from the scholarly one Pizer inhabits. A Harvard Ph.D. who has spent 30 years with the University of North Carolina, Pizer is the Kenan Professor of Computer Science and holds adjunct professorships in three different departments in the Medical School. His specialty is the display and analysis of medical images, which he describes in layman's terms as "helping physicians extract information from ... various pictures of people's innards." Pizer couldn't have dreamed that he would find himself deeply immersed in the Lodge-Miller case, as the foreman for the jury charged with determining Anthony Simpson's fate. It was Pizer's first experience with jury duty, and it was an experience he would come to call "one of the unhappiest parts of my life."

Faced with a divided jury; a law that allows even a murder as cruel as that of Lodge-Miller's to be called second degree if there is no premeditation or secondary crime involved; and the desire to reach a decision that would at least ensure Simpson didn't go free, the jury arrived at what Pizer calls "the right verdict for the wrong reason."

Pizer came away from the complex and painful negotiations convinced that the law defining first-degree murder should be changed, and soured on our system of justice. "I came out of that process convinced that the jury system today is a hopeless system, that there's no way that that system can be as good as the multiple-judge systems that some of the European countries have, for example," he says.

Then, he and the other jurors emerged into a community infuriated at their decision, and to newspapers and television shows reporting in detail on that fury. Pizer doesn't hold the media responsible for the public wrath, but he believes they could have been more analytic, could have done more to illuminate what he sees as the real cause for anger -- the law to which the jury was bound. "The media .. .as far as I'm concerned ... reported the passions of the people. And the passions of the people said this was a brutal murder; this guy should get executed. It was as simple as that. There was no reporting, as far as I could see -- although I must admit I stopped reading the newspapers pretty quick because it was pretty painful -- saying, 'Wait a second, guys, the law says such and such. ... These are the criteria that not only this jury but we the people who are ultimately the judicial system of the United States are supposed to follow."

He calls this reporting the heat, instead of the light. "My impression is that journalists try in general to report what the situation is and only in editorials try to propose solutions, if you will," he says. "But we don't get to solutions if only the heat is reported."

Pizer points out that some television shows have depicted juries heroically as relying on their own emotions and beliefs rather than the letter of the law. In reality, he says, "the law very, very carefully defines what first-degree murder is and the jury was instructed -- is always instructed -- to carry out the law, not to take your emotions ... or even your well-considered moral judgments and make this call."

It's true that the public often has false notions about the judicial system, former judge Thomas S. Hodson writes in Culture of Crime. He cites polls that have indicated some 75 percent of adult Americans know "little to nothing about the functioning of our court system. Almost half think that a criminal defendant must prove his or her innocence." Additionally, Hodson quotes a survey done in the mid-1980s that concluded "Americans are twice as likely to get information about courts from television drama as they are from people they know who have been jurors or have other court experience."

What media coverage of the Anthony Simpson verdict that Pizer could bring himself to follow, he says, gave the impression that race was a defining factor in the jury's decision. But he sees the real issues as far more complex, and the differences between jurors as hinging on the credibility of the police as witnesses. Police testimony, he says, was the only evidence to support a rape attempt that could have made this a first-degree murder. "There were divisions across race. That's not the same as racism," he says. "The difficulty is that while there is a presumption of credibility on the part of the police by most white jurors, there is a presumption of lack of credibility of the police on the part of many black jurors. You saw that in the O.J. Simpson trial. We saw that in the Anthony Simpson trial."

District Attorney Carl Fox didn't help matters, Pizer says, by publicly expressing his own dissatisfaction with the verdict. "And the media ate it up," he says.

In the end, Pizer says, "the jury came up with what our system wanted it to do, albeit for the wrong reasons, and having done so was excoriated, not for not functioning the way the ideal jury should operate but for not succumbing to rewriting the law in the jury box".
 


Conclusion: Far beyond the blotter

In my review of the news coverage of this case, I was struck by just how many things, in the traditional journalistic sense, were done right. In fact, because it got so much attention, this case was covered more thoroughly and thoughtfully than more typical crimes generally are.

There were efforts to add context, to make clear that this was an uncommon type of crime. There were efforts to explain, such as in the story that detailed how the jury made its decision. Legal experts were consulted to analyze the verdict. Restraint was used in reporting the gory details of the murder, and reporters were generally sensitive to the victim's family's wish for privacy. The public was given its say through the publication of numerous letters to the editor, and was fully notified about the public meetings aimed at taming the fear and anger this case engendered. Information on how women and joggers could protect themselves from assault was included with some of the stories. In profiles of the defendant, it appeared that reporters tried for balance, including positive information as well as negative. Most journalists, I think, would say a pretty good job was done with this one.

Why, then, does the coverage come in for such vitriolic criticism from some of those involved with the case, notably the attorneys for both sides? And how can it be that the public seems to have ended up with serious misconceptions about the case?
As might be expected in such a heavily covered and controversial case, the media did make some missteps. One story that appeared before the verdict, for example, used this case as a peg to the larger problem of crime among youth, when this was a crime hardly typical for that demographic group. Another, using questionable sources, reported that Simpson had told a cellmate he'd carried out a "hit" on someone in Virginia. A third quoted two unnamed white jurors as saying they'd been pressured to change their decision on the verdict by black jurors, but carried no response from the black jurors said to be involved. And some of the stories reporting and analyzing the verdict gave little attention to the fact that it's hardly atypical for jurors to compromise in order to reach a decision.

Additionally, there's the question of just how much of the content of the coverage the news audience actually absorbed. Studies have found that people are far from passive receivers of information from the media. They filter it through their own experiences and opinions, and through what they've heard from acquaintances. Further, the saturation effect of intensive coverage from television and radio stations as well as newspapers no doubt obscured many of the more subtle points that I've mentioned here as positives.
But I'm not willing to lay the entire blame for the misconceptions and negative impressions that consumers of this coverage were left with on any of those things. The answer, I think, lies not so much in the coverage of this case as in the thousands of crime stories that came before and after it, the daily diet of mayhem made up of police-blotter briefs and 15-second sound bites as well as the blockbuster stories like this one. Though there are notable exceptions, and though we have improved substantially in the past few years, the way the news media cover crime day in and day out still tends to be in a piecemeal fashion, with the most atypical crimes getting the most attention, and reveals little about the true dynamics of crime or the workings of the criminal justice system. I don't believe we cover crime, for the most part, as effectively as we cover government or medicine or education, and I think that's because we don't cover it the same way as we do those other things. With public fears of crime rising, with crime having become such a big political issue, and with up to 28 percent of our total newshole and airtime devoted to crime (according to some studies), I think that's something we need to rethink.

Crime news has been called the most traditional kind of news, and I think that's part of the problem with the way we cover it. Even at the big daily newspapers that provide the best of the media's coverage of crime, we're hidebound in many ways by the old conventions of covering it on a reactive, case-by-case basis instead of as a substantive, ongoing public health issue. Particularly at smaller news outlets, the crime beat is often a low-status one, given to the most inexperienced reporters, who work vampires' hours. Reporters (encouraged by editors) still tend to rely on law enforcement sources for the bulk of their information about crime, sometimes forgetting that the police have their own agendas, as do all sources.
I'm not implying that we shouldn't continue thoroughly covering the nontypical horrific, humorous or otherwise sensational crimes, because I think people want and need these stories, and I think news outlets are there to inform and entertain as well as educate. Those stories, I believe, have a place as one part of a more informed, proactive, skeptical approach that addresses causes and solutions as well as events.
So how do we go about making this change? Some of the best solutions I ran across in my research came from Steven Gorelick, special assistant to the president at the Graduate School and University Center and the City University of New York. In Culture of Crime he suggests that the media should:

*Actually be more explicit and more sensational in its crime coverage. What he means by this, he explains, is to pull no punches and stop with the euphemisms. Nonspecific words such as "sodomy," for example, can obscure the horrors of child sex abuse.

*Look for ways to report on how a particular crime might point to a larger social problem -- without necessarily implying that this type of crime is on the rise. For example, an incident of child abuse at a day-care center might give rise in the longer term to articles about the overall quality and lack of oversight of day care.

*In reporting an atypical crime, include recent and reliable information about just how unusual it is.

*Be smarter about reporting crime statistics. He suggests that the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, which are compiled by police and commonly used by reporters, are less accurate for many purposes than the Justice Department's National Victimization Crime Survey, which also measures crimes not reported to police.
*Once having reported a sensational case, follow it to its conclusion. This is generally done only with the most high-profile cases, he says, which doesn't give people a complete picture of how the justice system works.

*Consider stories about things -- such as homelessness -- that have disappeared as issues, that are no longer routinely making front-page news.
*Analyze, in print or on the air, the performance of one's own newspaper or television station on a particular crime story, as the Los Angeles Times did in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on its coverage of the McMartin child sexual abuse case.

Another insight comes from Michael J. Kirkhorn, a former journalist and current Director of Journalism at Gonzaga University, who warns of the pitfalls of too much sensitivity. This is not as callous as it sounds. In an article in the fall 1996 issue of Nieman Reports, he writes about the routinely sympathetic coverage of victims of "firestorms" in the Spokane, Wash., area. Every other year or so, these fires destroy the homes of those foolish enough to have built in the dry woods where they occur.
"The same kind of stories are done regularly about victims of crimes of violence," Kirkhorn says. "If they encourage a sympathetic response, they are worthwhile. But maudlin journalism has its limits and it reveals the absence of other kinds of reporting. The stories that would ask intelligent questions about the factors that produce firestorm victims like clockwork: the building and real estate practices, the zoning laws, the planning, the fire protection. Or those that would investigate local patterns of crime and violence, correct rumors and misconceptions, such as the common notion that downtown districts are necessarily more dangerous than other parts of town."

I think we can also learn from the lament of Arizona Republic reporter William Herman, who in Crime on Deadline discusses his efforts to transcend the typical telegraphic coverage of the murders a police officer once described to him as "practice homicides" -- those in which the victim was poor, lived in a low-income neighborhood, perhaps was involved in crime. These, he writes, "are the homicides that tell the tale of our cities. These are the real stories of our nation. Stories of teenage boys with guns slaughtering thousands yearly. Stories of drug dealers, gang members, society's bottom ranks, shooting their wretched neighborhoods and the people in them to tatters. Thousands and thousands of these killings ever year, many times more in the United States than in any other nation. Our newspapers too often give life to the deaths that ultimately mean little while we bury the murders that are killing us."
David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who spent a year observing homicide detectives at work before writing the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets , makes a similar point in arguing the case for crime reporting in narrative form -- that which follows a crime in extensive detail, from the point of view of a suspect, police officer, or victim. "Every time a reporter sits down and recounts an act of violence in the same time-honored formula -- lead, nut graph, best quote, and so forth -- something almost as dehumanizing as the crime itself has occurred. Having lost his art, the storyteller is reduced to the mere transmission of facts, and the cost to the reporter, to the news report and to society itself is certain," Simon writes in Culture of Crime . "Repeatedly bludgeoned with crime and violence by every medium, our culture is now so bored with ordinary tragedy that we only become excited by those crimes that are larger, more unlikely and more bizarre."
To the comments of Herman and Simon, I'd like to add that by spending more time in the communities where the most crimes tend to occur, the media can learn of the other stories in those communities, which will mean that we don't present such an incomplete picture by covering them and their residents only in the context of crime.

One way reporters can present a more accurate picture of crime and its causes and effects, says Stevens H. Clarke, a criminologist with the University of North Carolina's Institute of Government, is to more actively pursue alternative sources of crime information. He suggests that, in addition to law enforcement sources, reporters use medical examiners' files, opinion polls, academic experts, and sources from hospital emergency rooms, schools and community organizations. Much useful information, including data from the Vital Statistics system, the Centers for Disease Control and the Harris Polls, is easily available through the Internet, he says.
I have also found information from many journalism organizations and publications that reporters and editors can use to educate themselves and their staffs (and perhaps their bosses). The Columbia Journalism Review Web site, for example, contains a list of expert sources in every conceivable area of crime coverage. From the Freedom Forum, you can get worksheets that detail exactly how one newspaper went about doing an investigative series on its state's parole system and how another was able to gain electronic access to criminal justice files. At the Poynter Institute Web site, you can call up how-I-got-the-story interviews with some of the best crime reporters in the business.

My final suggestion would be that media organizations restructure their crime beats, to make them more closely resemble those for other topics we cover. Perhaps a reporter knowledgeable about statistics and criminology could work as part of a team with a reporter whose forte was daily hard-news stories. They'd need an editor with a specific interest in and knowledge of the topic. There's probably not much that can be done about the hours and working conditions, but once crime reporters start doing more of the high-impact series that get big play, the best reporters wouldn't necessarily be in such a rush to move to another beat.

In these days of fewer newsroom resources; of what some contend are declining public attention spans; of media-savvy lawyers and law enforcement officers who manipulate the press to their own ends; of pressure from tabloid TV and CNN and the Internet to provide more information faster than ever before, there are plenty of obstacles to more informed and thoughtful coverage of crime. But there are hopeful signs, particularly among the larger print media outlets, and my prediction is that while there will always be careless and sensationalized crime coverage, there will also be more of the type of reporting I and the experts I've quoted have championed in this paper.
For me, the real lesson of the Kristin Lodge-Miller case is that the intense reaction to the coverage shows just how personally people can take news that, on the face of it, has little to do with their lives. That's something we in the media can be grateful for -- that people care so much -- but it also reminds us of our responsibility to present as clear and accurate and complete a picture of this issue as we humanly can.

For if we don't do that, who will?
 


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 Buchanan, Edna. Never Let Them See You Cry. New York: Random House, 1992.
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 Elias, Robert. "Official Stories: Media Coverage of American Crime Policy." The Humanist, January-February 1994.
 The Freedom Forum. Handcuffed Reporting: Is Crime Coverage Race Biased? (video). 1994.
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 Surette, Ray. Justice and the Media. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, 1984.
 Trost, Cathy. "Covering Violence: A Report on a Conference on Violence and the Young." American Journalism Review, September 1994.
 

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