Javert syndrome (again)

I've written previously of what I call "Javert Syndrome, which I described as the pathological situation in which police's, prosecutors' or victims':

… concern to see justice done has become so inextricably bound to their initial suspicions that they are unable to accept even overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence that those first impressions were wrong …

The result is a double injustice: the wrongly accused can end up being punished and the actually guilty get away with their crimes.

The recent acquital of Allen Gell provides another example.

Gell had been on Georgia's death row since 1995, when he was convicted of killing Allan Ray Jenkins. Gell received a new trial this year after it was determined that prosecutors withheld key exculpatory evidence during the trial in which he was convicted. That evidence included a tape in which the prosecution's main witness said she had to "make up a story" for the police, as well as evidence that the murder most likely occurred while Gell was "either out of state or in jail on a car-theft charge." And, "Investigators found no physical evidence such as hair, blood, fingerprints or fibers linking Gell to Jenkins' death."

The current prosecutors' degree of confidence in their case can be measured in the Attorney General's comments following Gell's being found not guilty:

Attorney General Roy Cooper released a statement saying he was "confident that a thorough presentation of the evidence was made" by both sides.

"The jury has spoken and we respect its decision," Cooper said.

That's terse, but it doesn't sound like he think's an actual murderer has just gone free. It sounds more like a prosecutor who inherited what he saw as a weak hand and played it without enthusiasm.

Cooper is an unlikely candidate for Javert Syndrome because he is far removed from the trauma of the initial crime. And the trauma of crime is, above all, what I think creates this irrational response.

For the victim's family, the trauma of that murder is still fresh, still ongoing. And when all that pain has been focused on a single cause, a single suspected villain, it can be very difficult to realize you've got the wrong guy.

Charles Jenkins, the older brother of the murder victim, said watching Gell go free was "hard on everybody." His wife, Maxine Jenkins, remained convinced of Gell's guilt.

"The bottom line is, we know who pulled the trigger," she said.

Now it may be that they know something about this case that the jury and the AP reporter do not. But it seems, rather, that the jury and the reporter were simply able to recognize cold facts that they as traumatized victims could not. They remain immovably fixed upon their original suspect, so fixed that they may never understand what the jury has just told them: that they didn't just watch a murderer go free — that the man who killed their brother has never been caught.

I understand that their response is driven by their pain, and that their pain is something I could never understand. But then again I can't fully understand the pain that Gell has experienced either, spending nearly all of his twenties as a condemned prisoner for a crime he did not commit.