The Ability to Kill (4 page)

It seems harmless. The dreamer is reporting a murder trial. There he sits in the press seats of a crowded court, gathering the facts, weighing the evidence, shrewdly anticipating
counsel’s next move, and watching that small muscle twitch in the neck of the accused. His novelist’s (or playwright’s) insights probe sensitively for the hidden truth, the reality beyond what is being said. His professional compassion, even as the murderer describes the trouble he had forcing the dismembered body of the child into the kitchen mincer, is there ready to invest the creature with human dignity. Beautifully balanced sentences appear, as if by magic, in his notebook.

Good, simple fun; until one day a terrible thing happens. A harassed editor takes leave of his senses, and the dreamer is actually asked to report a trial.

The day came for me eventually. The alleged crime had been committed in extraordinary circumstances, and the case had already attracted wide attention. An American news agency, serving the Hearst papers among others, asked me to report the Old Bailey trial.

Eagerly I accepted. Within twenty-four hours panic had set in.

The American in charge of the news agency’s London office was a sleepy-eyed professional with long experience of ‘wire service’ operation. Over luncheon he explained to me what the assignment would entail.

I need not worry about the literal reporting of the case. He had already arranged with a British agency to share the cost (staggeringly high it seemed) of a complete daily transcript of the proceedings. This would be roughly edited, and teletyped to the New York office as it was received. My task would be to dramatise the daily progress of the trial, to report trends, highlight personalities, make the whole thing ‘come alive’ for Americans from San Diego to Portland, Maine. New York, he told me a trifle wistfully, had said that I was to be given a ‘hunting licence’ on adjectives and adverbs.

At the time, I did not understand what he meant by this. Now,
I think, I do. There is a tradition in American newspaper reporting which forbids the reporter to ‘editorialise.’ He may write only the received facts. This is not to say, however, that he only reports the truth. He may, indeed must, report what someone has said, even if he knows it to be a lie; but he may not say that he knows that it is a lie; that is editorialising. The ‘fact’ which he is reporting is the fact that the statement was made. The theory behind all this is that it is not the reporter’s business to tell the reader which facts are really facts, but only to report what has been said and done. It is up to the free and independent reader to decide for himself what he believes. The reporter who writes the ‘truth as he sees it’ is hell-bent for corruption.

The principle is admirable; its practice has drawbacks. One of the reasons why the late Senator McCarthy was able so rapidly and so easily to lie his way to power was that everything he said was always faithfully reported. The New York
Times
once acknowledged the problem, but also shrugged it off: ‘It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore charges by Senator McCarthy just because they are usually proved false. The remedy lies with the reader.’ As Richard Rovere has pointed out, ‘to many people, this was rather like saying that if a restaurant serves poisoned food, it is up to the diner to refuse it.’

What was meant by a ‘hunting licence’ then, was a pundit’s right to comment on what was said and done during the trial; moreover I was given that right in respect of the one event for which it must always be denied by British editors—a legal process which is still
sub judice.
I did have sense enough to question that aspect of the job, but was assured that, as none of the subscribing newspapers had British editions, there could be no contempt of court involved. It was the only piece of reassurance I received.

‘We’d like a couple of pre-trial pieces,’ I was told; ‘say a couple of thousand words apiece. The first one should outline the case as it comes from the magistrates’ court. The second should be a run-down on the trial personalities involved; the judge, counsel pro and con, Scotland Yard brass, the local police, the accused man, probable trial tactics and so on. Of course, when the trial starts you’ll have plenty to work with. You’ll have to keep the pieces fairly short though. Not more than a thousand words a day. And there’s just one more thing I’d better fill you in on—the time factor. New York is five hours behind London so we should make the afternoon editions of the evenings pretty easily. Court usually recesses around four. As long as we start sending your copy through around four-thirty, we’ll be in good shape. Timewise it’s only New York we have to worry about. Farther west there’ll be no problem. Of course we’ll have a private line run in from the Old Bailey press room to the office, and you could dictate your stuff over the phone, but I think it’ll be easier if you just walk across to the office when the court recesses. It’s only a couple of minutes. We’ll have a desk and a typewriter ready for you.’

I nodded stupidly. I am a slow worker. The composition of five hundred words in a seven-hour day is, for me, a fair rate of progress. Moreover, I write in longhand. I have never learned to use a typewriter.

On the way to his office I tried to explain these things, and said that I would not mind a bit if they decided to employ another writer.

That, he said, was out of the question. I had made a deal. Besides, New York was already selling the coverage in advance for syndication abroad. It was going great. Naturally, I was nervous. He was always nervous, too, before a big story. It was really very simple. All you had to do every day was to find a lead. The piece would then write itself.

My protestations of incompetence seemed to disturb him less than my inability to use a typewriter. How could a writer
not
type?

We arrived at his offices. They were on one of the upper floors of an old building in Fleet Street and consisted of one large room, almost entirely filled with teletype machines, and two or three glass-partitioned hutches. The noise of the machines was overwhelming. I was introduced to several men whose names I could not hear for the din. Then, I was given a stack of files containing all the available information about the case, and sent home to start work on the preliminary pieces.

Most fictional stories are constructed so that the climax is reached at or near the end. Newspaper stories, I now had to learn, must be written with the climax first. This, it is reasoned, puts the most interesting part of the story on the front page where it will sell papers. I was warned that it was no use my doing it any other way; sub-editors short of space would automatically cut from the end of the copy. To paraphrase an old precept; every news story should have an end, a beginning, and an expendable middle.

In practice, it means that you try to buttonhole the reader with some odd-sounding tit-bit of news—‘In the Smith trial today the prisoner threw an egg at the judge,’ perhaps—and then delay the explanation—that the egg was really thrown at a board held by an usher standing by the judge, to demonstrate a point in the evidence—until you have unburdened yourself of the other dull parts of the story. The bit about the eggthrowing is your ‘lead.’

The week before the trial with which I was to be concerned began, I obtained permission to sit in the press section of Court Number One while another murder trial was in progress, and made some experiments in reporting.

The results were not discouraging, and my anxiety about the speed with which I would have to work was to some extent allayed. I had discovered something which should have been obvious; selecting and presenting material was not as laborious a process when the material did not have to be invented first. There is a quiet snack-bar in the basement of the Old Bailey. I decided that I would go down there and try to get the main body of the daily piece written during the luncheon breaks.

It had been expected that this trial would be a long one, perhaps as long as two weeks. In the event, it was one of the longest murder trials in the Old Bailey’s history; it lasted over three weeks. By the end of the first week it had become fairly obvious that the prisoner was quite innocent of the murders of which he had been accused. It was thought that the defence plea that there was no case to answer might very well succeed. However, it was rejected and the trial dragged on. By the end of the second week, I knew the Old Bailey snack-bar from the Cambridge sausage to the sardines on toast, from the table that wobbled as I wrote to the chair with the cigarette burn on the leatherette seat. I had also learned, too well, that having to go on writing about a trial as if the outcome were still in doubt, when, in your own mind, no such doubt exists, is one of the most exhausting journalistic exercises there is; and also the most demoralising.

I came to hate the teletype machines. Soon after four in the afternoon, I would reach the office and begin to bellow the day’s piece into the ear of a man who was one of the fastest and most accurate typists I have ever encountered. Another man hovered beside me. It was his job to get the pages to the teletype operators as they were finished. Unless I snatched them from the typist first, they would be gone before I could read them through. Once, while on page two, I decided to transfer a paragraph to page one and was told that it could not be done;
page one had already reached Chicago. After that, I held on to the pages until messages began to come from the machines saying that New York was becoming impatient.

At the conclusion of the trial, the judge’s last act was to thank the jury for their patience and to free them from any future liability for jury service.

He did not, of course, see fit to thank the acquitted man for
his
patience during the proceedings, nor to express any regret for errors of judgment made by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Yet, the jury had only been inconvenienced. The sufferings of the innocent man in the dock had included, aside from the mental anguish of the entire ordeal, several months’ imprisonment, exposure to newspaper publicity of the worst kind (French newspapers had referred to him, before the trial which proclaimed his innocence, as every kind of villain) and the destruction of his career. Had the legal costs of his defence not been borne by a professional association of which he happened to be a member, he would have been ruined financially as well.

Nobody supposes that a legal system which presumes innocence until guilt is proved can function without sometimes causing the innocent to suffer arrest and trial; and nobody supposes that prosecutors and policemen enjoy those occasions, which can make the lawyers look careless, the police incompetent (or dishonest) and which may seem to have wasted a court’s valuable time. It is even understandable that the officials concerned with an unsuccessful prosecution should try to preserve their postures of infallibility by referring to the acquitted person as ‘lucky,’ rather than as innocent. What does seem monstrously unfair, however, is that the innocents should so often be required to pay cash for their ‘luck’.

In law an indictment for a criminal offence is, in some contexts, referred to as a ‘libel.’ It is just that. But there are libels
and libels. The private person who loses a libel action usually has to pay his victim’s legal costs as well as the assessed amount of damages. The Crown does not have to pay either. The Crown may libel with impunity and shrug off all the consequences of its mistakes. The person tried and found not guilty must be content with his bare acquittal, no matter what it may have cost him. Unless he was already a poor man before the trial (and so entitled to legal aid), he will almost certainly be a poorer man after it.

True, he may be able to recoup his loss by selling an account of his misfortunes to a newspaper; but, generally, innocence is a less newsworthy subject than guilt. There may be more financial hope for him if he resorts to another legal remedy, that of libel suits (oddly enough) brought, not against the Director of Public Prosecutions or the police, who are securely privileged, but against the newspapers which over-reported his case (with the eager assistance of the police and other prejudiced informants) before the trial began. It is possible that he will have sufficient nuisance value to succeed in obtaining settlements out of court. It is also possible that he will be so sick and tired of the whole ghastly episode, and so anxious to minimise the no-smoke-without-fire damage already done to his reputation, that he will decide to accept his loss, avoid further notoriety and efface himself as quickly as possible.

For the social and psychological damage that may be done to the innocent man by due process of law there would appear to be no practical remedy. Obviously, the Crown must be privileged. Certainly, improved methods of criminal investigation and stricter police disciplines have tended to reduce the number of persons mistakenly indicted. But, when the inevitable mistake is shown to have been made, it would seem that the victim ought properly to be reimbursed for the costs of his defence, if he has had to pay them. Whether he is, indeed,
lucky, or whether he has been most unlucky and much ill-used, the fact remains that a jury has found him to be not guilty. He is, at least, entitled to go financially unscathed.

I have since learned more about the cost of being tried for murder. This is not only a British problem.

In 1960, when I was in America,
Life
magazine asked me to write an article about a murder trial which had just began in Los Angeles. The defendants were Dr R. Bernard Finch and Miss Carole Tregoff. They were accused jointly of having murdered the doctor’s wife.

The Finch-Tregoff trial (as it was called) was in the rich, rococo tradition of great American courtroom dramas. It had everything which that tradition demands: love, lust, passion, hate, greed, adultery, plots, counterplots, sensational disclosures. It had a cast of characters which included beautiful blondes, beautiful brunettes, Hollywood stars (or, at any rate, near-stars), hired killers, private eyes, and Perry-Mason-like attorneys. Los Angeles had given of its best; and intended to make the most of it.