New York Times issues correction of story about death of Capitol police officer. He wasn’t killed as a result of a blow to the head with a fire extinguisher. He had a stroke. Possibly as a result of something that happened that day, but it wasn’t the way the media reported it.
You count on the fact that initial reports from major news stories will be wrong. It’s a rule of the universe — like the rule that whenever I fix something of any significance, I end up bleeding.
Freddie Gray, George Floyd, the Capitol riots, alleged election irregularities, Bubba Wallace and the “noose,” … it doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s sensational, the first reports are almost always wrong.
Do you think that that young man just happened to die of a stroke later? People often don’t die immediately from severe wounds.
It is unclear whether he had any kind of severe wound. That’s the thing that’s casting the most doubt here. If it was established he sustained a serious head injury and died of a stroke, it would be entirely reasonable to assume they were connected. But the very fact that he sustained any trauma of that kind is what’s in question.
It’s quite possible that if he died of a stroke that was not the direct result of a trauma, though it was the result of the extreme conditions he endured during the rampage. However, a police officer stroking out because a riot was really stressful and he had an unknown susceptibility to that kind of condition isn’t going to result in a murder charge for anyone.
If there is no evidence that he sustained a severe head injury, it is highly unlikely that the subsequent stroke was a mere coincidence. It goes without saying that we would be wrong to expect all reports to absolutely accurate in every detail. But it would be even more wrong to whitewash an incident due to a an inaccuracy in the details of reporting.
I think I said it was unlikely that it was a mere coincidence, though not in so many words. But to fail to report an unfortunate outcome of a bad situation as a murder is not to whitewash an incident. Things happen as a result of bad situations that are nonetheless not crimes attributable to any particular actor. Reporting that he was killed as a result of the riots, which is pretty much what happened, is fine. Everyone jumping to “and therefore someone is guilty of murder” is why we should be careful about what conclusions we draw from what is reported, even when it is not inaccurate in the details. In this case, it wasn’t even accurate in the details, which emphasizes even more how careful we should be to draw conclusions. Assumptions can’t be easily made about what is accurate, and accuracy isn’t even a given. Some of the news reports described him as dying of a stroke after the riots. Others made claims about him being hit on the head in a certain way, and that’s what’s turning out to have been unreliable. And that matters, because dying of a stroke because you were involved in a terrible and physically stressful situation has different legal and even social ramifications from dying because some particular person committed some particular potentially lethal act on you.
It could be manslaughter or reckless endangerment, maybe something else, instead of murder. Most likely the media first grabs on to the most sensational scenario, as that is what draws viewers. Shame on them! (There are some typos in the book that I just published. Shame on me!) That being said, none of this will essentially change any reasonable person’s extreme disgust of what violence that caused this young man’s untimely death.
Certainly. But in any situation, there are more angles to consider than “what should a reasonable person’s emotional reaction be”?
And even a charge of reckless endangerment or manslaughter needs to be attributed *to a particular person’s action.* Just because a situation arose because of a group of people’s collective action does not mean one of those specific crimes was committed by a specific person, if in fact no person’s particular action led directly to the man’s death.
Also, I believe Crowhill’s point was not “all early reports will be false” but “don’t believe them, because it is likely the are unreliable. Wait until some time has passed and facts are sorted out.” There’s really nothing to gain by insisting that people sitting armchairs hundreds or thousands of miles away are entitled to a snap judgment.
*any reasonable person’s extreme disgust with the violence that caused this young man’s untimely death.
I don’t think anybody is trying to whitewash an incident. It’s easy to hold to both of these positions: (1) he very probably died as a result of the deplorable actions of that day, and (2) he probably was not killed directly, as, e.g., by being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
One must look at the pragmatic aspects of communication which often move outside the orbit of a strictly logical analysis.