Richard Jewell and the Trial by Headline of a Security Guard Who Was a Hero

Here is a career path I do not recommend. Step one: spot a suspicious green backpack under a bench and move hundreds of people away from it. Step two: be photographed as a hero by every camera in Atlanta. Step three: three days later, find yourself on the front page as the man the government thinks did it. The whole journey takes about seventy-two hours, and it goes in exactly one direction, which is down.

That is what happened to Richard Jewell. It is also the cleanest example in modern American life of what happens when a leak, a hungry press and a plausible theory meet. I am going to tell it plainly, in order, with the dates, and then I am going to ask what the rest of us should do differently when we read a story that begins, "Authorities are focusing on..."

The night of July 27, 1996

The Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta was the open-air gathering place of the 1996 Summer Olympics, with concerts, vendors, and crowds late into the night. Shortly before 1:00 a.m. on July 27, 1996, Jewell, a security guard working for a private firm at the park, noticed an unattended green knapsack beneath a bench. He reported it to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and he and others began moving people away from the area. Not long afterward the bag, which held a pipe bomb packed with nails, exploded.

One woman, Alice Hawthorne, was killed. A Turkish cameraman, Melih Uzunyol, died of a heart attack as he ran toward the scene. More than a hundred people were injured. Many more would have been, if the area around the bench had not been partly cleared. The police and the FBI credited Jewell's alertness with saving lives, and the press did too. For a few days he was the hero of the Olympics, on morning television and the cover of newspapers, a large, quiet man in a security uniform who had done his job better than most of us do ours.

The turn

Then came the theory. Investigators looking for a lone bomber had, as investigators do, a profile in mind. The profile was of a person who plants a device so that he can be the one to discover it, a would-be hero who wants the glory of the rescue. It is a recognised pattern in the literature of investigation. It is also a pattern that, applied to a man who has just done something heroic, will fit anyone. A hero and a hero-seeker look identical from the outside until the facts separate them.

On July 30, 1996, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published an extra edition reporting that the FBI suspected the security guard who had found the bomb. Within hours every network and wire service was repeating it. Television crews stationed themselves outside the apartment where he lived with his mother. Late-night comedians told jokes about him. A national anchor said on the air that investigators probably had enough to arrest him. Reporters followed him to the grocery store.

Think about what that coverage did. It did not tell the public that a man had been charged. No one had charged him. It did not tell the public that the evidence against him was strong. It was not. It told the public that the government was looking at a man, which is a fact about the government, and the public heard a fact about the man. The distinction is easy to state and nearly impossible to hold onto in a news cycle, and the habit of treating "the FBI is looking at him" as if it were "he did it" has hurt more people than any single editor ever intended to.

What the FBI did

The government's conduct deserves its own paragraph, because it is not only the press that behaves badly in this story. Agents interviewed Jewell and, according to the account that has been public for years, told him he was helping them make a training video for law enforcement, and asked him to read and sign a waiver of his rights as part of the exercise. He grew suspicious when asked to sign the waiver, and the interview ended. A federal agent presenting a criminal interrogation as a training exercise is not a tactic that belongs in a free country. The law does allow a certain amount of police deception in interrogations. The point is that the same pressure that was operating on the press was operating on the Bureau: the Olympic bombing was a global event, and everyone wanted a name.

Then there is the leak. A story that begins, "the FBI is focusing on this man," did not come from the weather. It came from someone with access to the investigation who decided that the public ought to be told, before any charge, before any evidence had been tested in court. We do not need to know the leaker's name to know what the leak was: the use of the press to publish an accusation the government was not prepared to make in a courtroom. That is how a reputation gets destroyed without a trial. It is a way of punishing a person that does not require a prosecutor to prove anything.

The clearing

For eighty-eight days Jewell lived as a suspect. On October 26, 1996, the U.S. Attorney in Atlanta, Kent Alexander, sent his lawyers a letter stating that Jewell was not a target of the federal investigation. The letter did not apologise in so many words. It cleared him. The story that had run for months on the front page ran for a day on the back.

Jewell sued. He brought defamation suits against several news organisations, and some of them settled, including NBC and CNN. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution fought the claim, arguing that what it had printed was accurate when it was printed, which was true in a narrow sense: the FBI had indeed been looking at him. Jewell died in August 2007, at the age of forty-four, and Georgia's courts ultimately sided with the newspaper. I will not try to relitigate the legal question here, and I do not have to. The legal result and the moral result are different questions, and the case teaches best when you keep them apart.

Eric Rudolph

The real bomber was Eric Rudolph. In 1997 and 1998 a series of bombings, at an Atlanta abortion clinic, at a nightclub, and at a clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed an off-duty police officer, were connected by investigators to the same person. Rudolph became a federal fugitive and spent more than five years hiding in the mountains of western North Carolina. He was arrested in May 2003 in Murphy, North Carolina. In April 2005 he pleaded guilty to all four bombings, including the one at Centennial Olympic Park, in a plea that spared him the death penalty, and he received life sentences.

The cruellest part is the order of events. The man who saved lives in 1996 was publicly accused and had to spend years proving his innocence to a public that had been told he was guilty. The man who planted the bomb spent those years free. The system took more than seven years to name the right person, and it spent most of the first three months on the wrong one.

The steelman

Let me do justice to the other side. Here is the best argument for how the press behaved.

The FBI really was investigating Jewell. Reporting an investigation is not the same as accusing a person. The public has an interest in knowing how the government is conducting the most important criminal case of the moment. If reporters had held back and the FBI had later arrested him, the public would have said the press was asleep. A free press cannot work if it waits for a prosecutor to say it is safe to print.

There is truth in each sentence. The role of the press is not to guard the government's secrets, and I am not asking for a rule that forbids ever naming a person of interest. Leaks have exposed real abuses, and the press ought to publish the ones that serve the public.

But the argument has four holes, and I will count them.

1. The facts reported were true; the impression was false. A story can be accurate in every sentence and misleading as a whole. "The FBI suspects the hero" delivered a verdict by implication.
2. The strength of the evidence was not reported. A responsible account says how much the government has. The coverage said that the Bureau suspected him. It did not say how thin the case was.
3. The public interest in the name was thin. The public needed to know that an investigation was under way. It did not need his name to evaluate the Bureau.
4. The person bore all the risk, and the press bore none. If the suspicion proved right, the paper gained. If it proved wrong, he lost his name. A rule that distributes the gains to one party and the losses to another should not be left to the first party's judgment.

The Founding yardstick

The Constitution has a lot to say about what the government may do to an accused man, and it says almost nothing about what the press may do, because the Founders trusted a free press and did not trust a prosecutor. The Fifth Amendment says that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The Sixth Amendment promises, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury." An impartial jury is the point. A jury that has read for months that a man is guilty is not impartial, and the right the Constitution gives him is partly stolen by the newspaper before he ever gets to court.

That is why a leak of a suspect's name is not a minor matter. It is a way around the Sixth Amendment, accomplished by officials with the help of the press. William Blackstone put the principle in a sentence that the Founders knew well: it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. In the Jewell case it was not a matter of letting the guilty go free. It was a matter of punishing an innocent man before anyone had proven anything, and nothing in our tradition permits that.

You can find the same principle in the way juries have been protected for centuries, as in Twelve Strangers, How Trial by Jury Crossed the Atlantic to America, and in the way modern cases handle the pressure of public opinion, as in What the 2018 Kavanaugh Hearings Taught About the Presumption of Innocence.

What a reader should ask

Here is the practical part. When a story's lead is a leaked name, I suggest five questions, and I suggest asking them out loud.

• Who is the source, and what does the source gain? A leak from law enforcement is a choice. Ask why it was made.
• What does the government actually have? Look for a sentence that tells you whether there is physical evidence, a witness, or only a theory. If it is a theory, treat the name as a rumour.
• Has anyone been charged? There is a world of difference between "suspect," "person of interest," "target" and "defendant." Learn them. The glossary on this site helps; see the glossary.
• Does the headline say more than the body? Compare them, as How to Read a News Story From the Bottom Up and Catch What the Lede Hides explains.
• What would I think if this were a member of my own family? The rule that protects the person you dislike is the same rule that protects you.

Notice that none of these is a partisan question. The Jewell case did not run along a political line, and the injury it inflicted could be inflicted on anyone: a conservative pastor, a union steward, a quiet man in a uniform. We should say so, and defend the principle even when the person in the headline is someone we are inclined to distrust. It is easy to defend due process for the man you like. It is the test of character to defend it for the man you do not.

There is a sad joke in the way the profession behaved, and I would rather tell it than not. The people who spent three months telling America that the hero was a villain are the same people who like to say they speak truth to power. In this case, they were speaking the government's guess to the public, and calling it truth. That is the kind of coverage that gives the First Amendment a bad name. For another case where the press ran ahead of the facts, see The Duke Lacrosse Case and the Rush to a Verdict the Facts Never Supported, and the media watch page can help you follow how coverage changes as facts come in.

The case in brief

1. Richard Jewell found the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park on July 27, 1996, helped clear people from the area, and was hailed as a hero.
2. On July 30 the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the FBI suspected him, national coverage followed, and for eighty-eight days an innocent man lived as a suspect until a U.S. Attorney's letter of October 26, 1996 cleared him.
3. Eric Rudolph, later arrested in 2003 and guilty by plea in 2005, was the bomber; Jewell's suits against news organisations ended with some settlements and with the courts siding with the Atlanta paper.
4. Reporting that the government is looking at a man is a statement about the government, and the public hears a verdict about the man; the leak of a name before a charge is a way around the Sixth Amendment.
5. A reader's defence is five questions: who leaked, what the government has, whether anyone is charged, what the body says that the headline does not, and whether you would accept the same treatment.

What you can do: the next time a story names a suspect before a charge, write down the first sentence that says what evidence exists and, if there is none, decline to share the name.