Thursday, August 26, 2004
Newsworthy
I am still having an incredibly difficult time trying to figure out why the Laci Peterson murder case is such big news. Admittedly, I don't know all the particulars of the details of the case, but that's just because it is so mind-numbingly uninteresting to me. And I can't understand why it would be interesting to anyone outside the social circles of the people involved.
So a guy allegedly killed his wife. Big whoop. But wait--she was PREGNANT at the time. So what? Men kill their wives all the time. It's sad, but true. When I visited a maximum security state prison here in Massachusetts as a field trip for my Criminal Law class, we were told by the warden that an overwhelming majority (I forget the exact number, but I'm going to conservatively guess 75%) of the people in prison for murder had murdered their wife or girlfriend. So an unborn baby died, too. Again, that's sad, but it happens all the time. Whether through abortion or miscarriage or violent murder, the death of an unborn baby is dog-bites-man, not man-bites-dog.
The recent Lori Hacking case in Salt Lake City was a little more interesting because of the weird deception pulled off by the husband. And I understand that it got media attention because she was originally reported missing before we knew she was dead, and the media wanted the public to help look. (Which brings up the question of why the media choose some missing-person stories to plug and not others: hundreds of kids go missing every year, but Elizabeth Smart gets all the press. Other missing kids have tried to replicate Elizabeth's media frenzy, to no avail. I've heard some people opine that Elizabeth got the coverage because she was 1) rich, 2) white, and 3) pretty. I think it's a little more than that (the fact that she was stolen from her bed in the middle of the night--everyone's worst nightmare), but those factors sure didn't hurt.) But to my knowledge, the Peterson case has no alleged facts that are out of the ordinary for a homicide, except the fact that the victim was pregnant. And that's just not compelling to me.
So a guy allegedly killed his wife. Big whoop. But wait--she was PREGNANT at the time. So what? Men kill their wives all the time. It's sad, but true. When I visited a maximum security state prison here in Massachusetts as a field trip for my Criminal Law class, we were told by the warden that an overwhelming majority (I forget the exact number, but I'm going to conservatively guess 75%) of the people in prison for murder had murdered their wife or girlfriend. So an unborn baby died, too. Again, that's sad, but it happens all the time. Whether through abortion or miscarriage or violent murder, the death of an unborn baby is dog-bites-man, not man-bites-dog.
The recent Lori Hacking case in Salt Lake City was a little more interesting because of the weird deception pulled off by the husband. And I understand that it got media attention because she was originally reported missing before we knew she was dead, and the media wanted the public to help look. (Which brings up the question of why the media choose some missing-person stories to plug and not others: hundreds of kids go missing every year, but Elizabeth Smart gets all the press. Other missing kids have tried to replicate Elizabeth's media frenzy, to no avail. I've heard some people opine that Elizabeth got the coverage because she was 1) rich, 2) white, and 3) pretty. I think it's a little more than that (the fact that she was stolen from her bed in the middle of the night--everyone's worst nightmare), but those factors sure didn't hurt.) But to my knowledge, the Peterson case has no alleged facts that are out of the ordinary for a homicide, except the fact that the victim was pregnant. And that's just not compelling to me.
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