This will be the first and the last time the name JonBenet Ramsey appears here.
The macabre fascination that people have with the horrible murder of this little girl is appalling to me. Now, more than ever, with the arrest of John Mark Karr, this unspeakable crime has become a hideous parlor game presided over by talking heads on cable news stations. The usual cast of blowhard lawyers, windbag pundits and so-called “experts†of every stripe have re-emerged to spew nonsense and to re-fill their bank accounts, all at the expense of this dead child.
Then there are the radio talk shows where people who drive fork-lift trucks or are landscapers give their “opinions†not just on the guilt or innocence of Karr (of which they are somehow certain), but also their “opinions†on things such as the admissibility of evidence and the usefulness of “degraded DNAâ€.
Lawyers are fighting with one another to get a chance to represent Karr, even for free – just to get the camera time. Karr’s relatives are already trying to sell media rights. Psychics, conspiracy kooks and freaks of all kinds are clamoring to get a piece of the action.
It’s positively maddening, and, what is worse, the media frenzy has a huge potential to corrupt the system. It certainly did just that in the O.J. Simpson case. Can there be any serious doubt that, had O.J. Simpson been a regular guy, and had the justice system proceeded in its normal fashion, the evidence against him would have put him away forever?
If John Mark Karr did kill this child, I hope he is convicted and punished as severely as the law will allow. It would be nice if the system were simply permitted to work as it does thousands of times every day in courtrooms all over the country.
So, as far as I am concerned, nothing will produce a television or radio station change, a page turn, or a mouse click faster than a bunch of JonBenet Blather. You sure as hell won’t get any here.