For Shame: A Brief History of the Perp Walk

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/02/us/perp-walk.html

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Parading the accused and the condemned before the citizenry is an age-old tactic used by those holding power. The most famous example goes back some 2,000 years, when a Jewish preacher from Nazareth was forced to trudge painfully to Calvary. William Wallace, the Scottish independence leader, experienced it being dragged through London before his execution in 1305. French monarchists, during the revolution, endured it as well in the tumbrels carrying them to the guillotine.

That sort of public shaming has not disappeared, even if conducted in 21st-century America with less brutality. The modern version is known as a perp walk. As in days of old, a criminal suspect is displayed in front of a fevered crowd — composed now not of the howling masses but of camera and microphone holders pushing and shouting in sweaty pursuit of the best possible lens angle.

This installment of Retro Report, a series of video documentaries evoking major news stories of the past to help explain the present, examines the evolution of the perp walk because it remains integral to the criminal justice process, notably in media-soaked environments like New York City. Variations of the ritual have recently taken place in criminal cases against the film producer Harvey Weinstein and the former Trump lawyer Michael D. Cohen. With the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III still at work, it would seem reasonable to anticipate more to come.

Perp, for the uninitiated, is short for perpetrator. As commonly used, it is a loaded word. Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines a perpetrator as “a person who commits an illegal or bad act.” But those typically subjected to perp walks, often in manacles and looking their worst, are merely accused of wrongdoing. The walk is an unfair maneuver, critics say. With it, a cherished element of American justice — the presumption of innocence — is tossed out the window, or at the very least perched precariously on the ledge.

“Under such circumstances,” the Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff wrote three decades ago, “even Mother Teresa would look extremely suspicious, especially if her hands were cuffed behind her back.”

Opponents of the practice say it is intended not so much to serve justice as to give the police an opportunity to show off. But defenders say that the risk of being put through such public humiliation sends a “don’t do the crime” message to would-be malefactors, especially of the white-collar variety. Howard Safir, a former New York City police commissioner, insisted years ago that well-publicized walks sometimes led to new witnesses coming forward. And The Chicago Sun-Times argued editorially in 2011 that they protect both the public and “ironically enough, the suspect.”

“The alternative is far worse: a society where government secrets are sanctioned,” the newspaper wrote. “Suspects are hidden away, courtrooms are closed and, far too often, anything goes.”

The perp walk in its modern format took distinct shape in the 1930s, when camera technology had advanced enough for photographers to shoot the accused and their captors while everyone was on the move. Crime films of that era (a fair number of them written by former newspapermen) routinely portrayed the media as a braying herd. On that score, not much has changed. “The Front Runner,” a new movie about the implosion of Gary Hart’s 1980s run for president, shows the news media collectively as about as dignified as an oil spill.

Some perp walks have become lore. John Gotti, the well-tailored mob boss who died in 2002, looked so self-satisfied that his walk amounted to a perp strut. In the 1980s, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a federal prosecutor with a somewhat cavalier approach to the rights of the accused, built a tough-guy reputation by marching accused Wall Street types before the press. Some of the cases turned out to be flimsier than tissue paper. But they were good publicity for Mr. Giuliani, and fueled his successful run for New York mayor.

One of the more famous walks of recent vintage involved Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who in 2011 was managing director of the International Monetary Fund and a likely candidate for the French presidency. His ambitions unraveled that year after he was accused of sexually assaulting a female housekeeper at a Manhattan hotel, charges that were soon dropped amid doubts about the woman’s credibility.

But first, Mr. Strauss-Kahn had to face a gantlet of photographers who had waited as long as 15 hours. The rumpled image of him remains fixed in many minds. “It’s a punishment in and of itself,” Benjamin Brafman, a lawyer for Mr. Strauss-Kahn then and for Mr. Weinstein now, told Retro Report.

For photographers, a perp-walk assignment can amount to warfare by other means. “You go from deadly dull to sheer terror, all within five seconds,” said Les Rose, a longtime photojournalist who teaches at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He described the setup for Retro Report as “waiting, waiting, waiting,” followed by a sudden spring into action when the police say “O.K., he’s on his way.”

The symbiosis between the police and media can go too far. In one such instance, in 1995, a New York man under arrest was taken from a police station house, driven around the block and brought back to the station solely for the benefit of a late-arriving television crew. That was too much for a federal judge who in 1999 ruled in a lawsuit brought by the man that the intent was to humiliate him, with “no legitimate law enforcement objective or justification.”

After that court decision, the New York police said they would stop tipping off journalists as to when a suspect would be transported from a precinct to the courthouse. Old habits die hard, though. Whether through an officer’s whispered heads-up or by way of journalists’ waiting patiently at curbside, perp walks endure.

There are times when they have gone horribly wrong — most infamously in 1963 when Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy’s accused assassin, as the Dallas police led Oswald past newsmen. In Baton Rouge, La., in 1984, a suspected kidnapper and child molester named Jeff Doucet was fatally shot by the victim’s father, who had been told when the accused man would be walked before the cameras.

Once in a rare while the ritual redeems itself. At his 1985 trial in Manhattan, Emmanuel Torres insisted he was innocent of charges that he had murdered a woman after trying to rape her. But Mr. Torres was done in by his own words. During his perp walk months earlier he had called the victim a “slut” and snarled that “it was her own fault.” The jury found him guilty.

When it comes to the rich and mighty — say, a Harvey Weinstein or a Martin Shkreli, the smirking hedge fund manager — there is an inescapable reality: Many people take pleasure in seeing them demonstrably brought low. For that reason alone, the perp walk seems destined to go on. A defense lawyer like Mr. Brafman may not approve, but he conceded, “It’s been in place for 100 years. I’m not going to change it.”

John Gotti reveled in media attention as the boss of the nation's largest and most influential organized crime group. In his 2002 Times obituary, the F.B.I. agent who supervised the unit that uncovered the evidence that ultimately convicted him called him “the first media don.” In five and a half years as the federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani stepped into the spotlight with victories against organized-crime figures, drug traffickers, Wall Street manipulators, tax cheaters and corrupt officials. But in law-enforcement circles, some officials were irritated by what they considered Mr. Giuliani’s showing off. “A lot of announcements of indictments were media events,” a former senior federal prosecutor told The Times. In 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was apprehended in the first-class section of an Air France plane minutes before it was to depart for Paris, in connection with the sexual attack of a hotel maid. Criminal charges were later dropped.