"Alleged", "indicted" and "suspected" must be handled with care
By R.L.G. | BERLIN
JOURNALISTS have a bad habit. Writing about people suspected of crimes is tricky in many ways, and one of them is conveying the level of facts legally proven to be true at the time of writing. Specifically, journalists too frequently use “alleged” as their own kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, attaching it to a noun that very much implies the suspect is guilty, without the journalist committing to it outright.
Take “alleged Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev”, mentioned here. As it happens, there seems to be a lot of evidence that these two young men did, in fact, commit the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013. But that is not proven yet, and Western legal systems rightly raise the standard of “innocent until proven guilty” quite proudly. Proven guilty, that is, in a court—not in the court of public opinion, where “alleged bomber” puts a heavy thumb on the scale.
The problem is, at its nub, grammatical. “Alleged bomber” is a noun phrase, and noun phrases have what linguists call “heads”, the noun at their core. A kitchen sink is a noun phrase made up of two nouns, but only one is the head, and the other is a mere modifier: a kitchen sink is a kind of sink, not a kind of kitchen. An “alleged bomber” automatically calls to mind a bomber.
Modifiers can make it clear that the noun phrase is not really an instance of the class named in the head: “fake leather” or “vegan chicken wings”, say. The United States Mint most certainly will not recognise a “counterfeit $50 bill” as a kind of $50 bill. The problem is that when you read the words “counterfeit $50 bill”, you immediately saw a $50 bill in your mind, counterfeit or no. “Fake leather” makes you imagine something very much like real leather. “Alleged bomber”, “alleged murderer” and the like, especially next to someone’s mug shot, so quickly calls to mind the image of the person in question carrying out the act in question—even if this is not consciously intended by the journalist—that it should be banned from newsrooms. Far better to refer to the “person suspected of guilt in the so-and-so bombing”, leaving the person a person and not yet a “bomber” until the verdict has come. In headlinese, where compression is key, “murder suspect” is preferable to “alleged murderer” (or, just as bad, “suspected murderer”).
A so-called “indicted criminal” has an even stronger complaint than an “alleged criminal”. “Indicted” carries a strong judicial whiff—it is a technical term of criminal procedure—but it means nothing more than formally accused. In New York state, for example, a mere majority of a grand jury can indict by finding only “reasonable cause to believe” that a suspect committed a crime. Grand juries' proceedings are sealed because nothing has been proved in the adversarial trial process yet. A conviction in the same jurisdiction requires unanimity that the suspect is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”, after evidence is presented in open court. In jurisdictions outside America, a single prosecutor may bring an indictment. So someone called an “indicted war criminal” has every right to complain that he has been found guilty before his trial has even begun.
If “alleged murderer” is unfair, “alleged shooting”, “alleged stabbing” and their like are plain silly. “To allege” means “ to assert to be true”, and so pertains either to the assertion of a suspect’s guilt (“The police allege that Smith committed the robbery”), or to the existence of the crime itself, when this is not yet shown: an alleged conspiracy, say, or an alleged fraud. Stab and bullet wounds, however, are not alleged by police or prosecutors. If a 57-year-old woman is lying in hospital with a life-threatening hole in her temple, this is no “alleged shooting”: the shooting is literally bloody obvious, only guilt is left to be alleged.
Journalists are rightly warned by editors to avoid prejudicial language by ring-fencing suspicions with words like “alleged”. But this is a case where rigid adherence to a rule (“make sure to add ‘alleged’”) is no substitute for careful thought.
