In the early days of this country, legitimate law enforcement was often scarce, weak, or simply nonexistent. In that vacuum came the so-called vigilance committees, a polite name for mobs with ropes, bad tempers, and an allergy to due process.
They held kangaroo court “trials” that usually ended the same way: some poor soul swinging from a tree while the crowd congratulated itself for delivering justice. Swift. Satisfying. Primitive. The kind of justice you get when the loudest man in the mob also appoints himself judge, jury, and executioner.
Today, of course, we like to pretend we are civilized.
We arrest suspects. We file charges. We hold hearings. We allow lawyers to argue, judges to rule, witnesses to testify, and juries to deliberate. The process can take years. Felony cases often crawl through the courts at the speed of an arthritic mule. Appeals can last decades.
That is simply too slow for the modern bloodthirsty crowd. They do not want evidence. They do not want nuance. They do not want constitutional rights getting in the way of a good televised hanging.
So we replaced the old vigilance committees with the new version: the true-crime Internet mob.
And sitting on the throne, wearing the crown, banging the gavel, and lighting the torches is Nancy Grace.
Grace, the former Fulton County prosecutor, left that office under a cloud that has never exactly sparkled in the sunlight. Her record drew appellate criticism involving improper closing arguments, defense-related evidence issues, and misconduct tied to misleading or false testimony. Not exactly the résumé of Lady Justice. More like Lady Vengeance with a microphone and a production crew.
But television has a remarkable cleansing effect. Old appellate opinions disappear into the dust. A prosecutor with baggage becomes a crusader. A controversial legal career gets repackaged as moral authority. And Nancy Grace, through sheer volume and theatrical outrage, promoted herself into a true-crime folk hero.
She became the dean of the modern lynch mob.
Her routine is simple. Every suspect is guilty. Every accused person is a monster. Every case is obvious. Every penalty must be maximum, brutal, and delivered before the next commercial break. Presumption of innocence? Please. That is for law books, not ratings.
The real damage is obvious. She is not merely entertaining viewers. She is poisoning potential jurors across America. She turns criminal cases into public blood sport, then acts shocked when people show up at courthouses ready to burn the defendant at the stake.
That circus was painfully obvious during the Scott Peterson case in Modesto, California. The mob atmosphere around that courthouse was no small thing. The screaming public demand for conviction was everywhere. I have little doubt that jurors felt the heat from that mob, because only a fool would pretend that kind of pressure disappears at the jury room door.
And the truth is, the case against Peterson was far weaker than the mob ever wanted to admit. To this day, nobody knows exactly how Laci Peterson died. The theory that she was murdered, and that her philandering husband did it, was treated as gospel by the cable-news mob long before the evidence had finished breathing.
Peterson was convicted and sentenced to death. Grace and her followers cheered like villagers after a public execution. Then, as always, the legal system continued doing what the mob hates most: reviewing, questioning, and refusing to shut up.
I personally went head-to-head with Nancy Grace on her show in the capital case of Debra Jean Milke in Arizona. Grace arrived armed with her usual rage cannon, blasting away with the same old hate-filled certainty. I countered with the ugly facts: Milke had been convicted through the testimony of a despicable detective, wrapped in perjury and prosecutorial misconduct.
It took 25 years, but Debra Milke was finally and fully exonerated.
That is the part the mob never wants to hear. Sometimes the monster is not the defendant. Sometimes the monster is the system. Sometimes it wears a badge. Sometimes it sits at counsel table. Sometimes it smiles into a camera and calls itself justice.
Modern civilization is not nearly as civilized as we pretend. Not when people like Nancy Grace can gratuitously contaminate every potential jury pool in America, one televised tantrum at a time.
The old mobs carried ropes. The new mobs carry smartphones. Same appetite. Better lighting.
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