L.A. Times Orange County recently reported that a taxicab passenger was arrested on suspicion of malicious mischief after punching and breaking the window of the cab when the driver refused to turn around at a red light, according to police. Police say that the driver flagged down an officer after the incident at 2:03 a.m. last Thursday, at which point police arrested the passenger.
One thing that is always troublesome about crime reports in the press is that the point of view of the accused is never taken into account. The press never goes to the defendant for comment, and even if they did it would not be a good idea for him to make a statement anyway, as anything he said would be used against him in court. The end result, however, is a snippet in the newspaper and on the internet, searchable by the defendant's name, that only includes the point of view of the police and the "victim." Which is to say, in a case such as this, the point of view of the "victim" only, as police were not witnesses to the crime, they simply took the statement of the cab driver, believed him, and then arrested the person who had been riding in the back of the cab.
The problem with this practice, of course, is that it is far too easy for people reading the paper/internet to read the snippet, and conclude that the person in the back of the cab is guilty because police arrested him.
Which may not seem like a problem, unless you are the person who was riding in the back of the cab. Now, your name is on the internet, and this one-sided (in the literal sense, calling the snippet "one-sided" is not a criticism, it is, objectively, one-sided as the paper did not report on the other side of the story), account of what happened in the cab that night now pops up whenever anyone, e.g., future potential employers, future love interests, future clients, and, most insidiously, future jurors, google the name "Ryan Eric Nelson." (Try it, with the quotes around his name, at the time of this blog entry there were 4 results in the top ten discussing the cab incident and how Mr. Nelson had been arrested for it).
In reality, no one should believe Mr. Nelson is guilty of what the cab driver accused him of doing. We are talking about a cab driver. There are cab drivers out there who are good people, I have even met a few, but there are plenty of bad people - some might argue the majority - who are cab drivers. Or let's not go so far as to say "bad people," but liars. Cheaters. People who are willing to lie to the police, or to judges, or on the stand, under oath, at trial. People who are willing to say that "the person in the back punched out a window and all because I refused to make an illegal U-turn at a red light," when, in actuality, what happened was that the cab driver refused to drive him where he wanted to go. Refused to get off his cell phone while he was driving in the wrong direction. For five minutes. And the passenger got concerned. Said something about it. Was ignored. Ten minutes, and the passenger was scared. Tried to get the driver's attention. Talked loudly, interrupting the driver's cell phone conversation, to which the driver reacted, with hostile annoyance, by pointing to his phone insinuating the passenger was being rude. Then the passenger said "let me out," tried to open the door, but the driver had engaged the child safety locks, a "trick of the trade" he had learned to make sure that no passenger could ever leave without paying.
It was this passenger, in this situation, who, now desperate and starting to harbor an increasingly more reasonable feeling that he was being kidnapped, buttressed ultimately by the non-functional door latch and a driver who refused to drive in the right direction, out of this desperation punched the window in the hopes of reaching and releasing the door latch from the other side. It was this passenger who is being written up in the paper as being charged with malicious mischief for all to see for years to come. This passenger who is now in need of a good defense attorney to make sure an otherwise tainted-by-the-media jury pool sees things as they actually happened.
At least, for all the L.A. Times or OC Register know, that's what happened.
