ANDREW McCARTHY: Prosecuting Charlie Kirk's alleged killer in the social media age

It is hard to fathom how much the media climate especially the social media climate has altered the coverage and populace understanding of big legal cases over the past years The occurrence of Charlie Kirk s alleged murderer Tyler Robinson is a powerful illustration In I ran the terrorism prosecution against Omar Abdel Rahman the Blind Sheikh and members of his jihadist cell They had bombed the World Pact Center then in the aftermath plotted what they anticipated would be simultaneous bombings of New York City landmarks the UN complex the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the FBI s lower Manhattan headquarters Abdel Rahman himself was particularly interested in strikes against U S military installations Naturally various conspiracy theories were peddled about our incident Maybe it was an inside job by the FBI a pretext to harass Muslims Or maybe Saddam Hussein s regime had orchestrated it Maybe the Egyptian intelligence services had a hand in it Or because no conspiracy theory would be complete without this maybe it was the Mossad The difference between then and now There was no social media CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATION LEGAL EXPERT UNPACKS DEFENSE CHALLENGES AND WHY EVIDENCE SECRECY COULD BE CRUCIALFox News with its emphasis on reporting rather than proselytizing was a fledgling challenger to the leftward bent of establishment media But that media milieu still fit the tradition that had grown up over decades a handful of television setup news divisions and the big print press The New York Times the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal The aftermath Conspiracy theories had a tough time getting traction There wasn t a instant flow of ground-up communications from millions of people greater part of whom had no reliable sources There weren t siloed internet communities to which people with particular eccentric interests were drawn cauldrons of conspiracy theory There was no texting and even the email services were still progressing No X Twitter no Facebook no TikTok or Blue Sky It was a different society As a practical matter that meant our Manhattan federal courthouse was the center of gravity If you wished to know what developments there had been in a criminal study if you sought to know who the persons of interest were what the proof against them was what the contested legal issues were likely to be you had to rely on the society filings in the development and in-court pretrial proceedings ACCUSED CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSIN WANTS TO DITCH JAIL CLOTHES FOR UPCOMING COURT APPEARANCESThat s been turned on its head nowadays Kirk was killed by gunfire on Sept at Utah Valley University A sparse days later Robinson was placed under arrest after turning himself in As is often the circumstance the arrest resulted in an outpouring of official information about the inspection and the subject Indeed there was more information disclosed than is often the scenario likely for two reasons First so much misinformation had been peddled in the shooting s aftermath that the personnel perceived the need to be expansive to give the inhabitants confidence that the scenario was strong Second the Kirk murder is a state prosecution The Utah County district attorney s office is not as familiar with the national spotlight as federal leadership they went the extra mile to show that the incident was in good hands TAXPAYER COST FOR SUSPECTED CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSIN'S DEATH PENALTY INCIDENT PREDICTED BY UTAH COMMISSIONERStill after that initial burst of evidentiary detail the official sources went dark Naturally this has irritated press outlets thanks to the new media surroundings there are plenty of more of them in the present day than there were in the Nineties Nevertheless it s not that surprising This is a capital murder scenario American judges at the state and federal level tend to be graduates of elite U S law schools of a progressive bent They are often hostile to the death penalty it is one of the big disconnects in our country between elite and popular opinion The DAs and police are well aware that capital cases are scrutinized more rigorously than ordinary criminal prosecutions If representatives are suspected of leaking information or doing anything to prejudice Robinson s fair trial rights the death penalty and perhaps even the affair as a whole could be jeopardized While the press pushes the court for more disclosure we are witnessing a troubling phenomenon of the Information Age ALLEGED CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSIN TYLER ROBINSON'S DEFENSE COULD COST UTAH TAXPAYERS 'EIGHT FIGURES' EXPERTSLike anything else information hates a vacuum In high-profile cases if our curiosity is not satisfied by a steady stream of solid information from law enforcement defense attorneys and the court then the void will inevitably be filled by social media speculation conspiracy theories and hateful political rhetoric I m sure that s why Kirk's widow Erika was driven to refute the crazy talk in a moving interview conducted by Fox News s Harris Faulkner The conspiracy theorizing about her husband s death would have seemed outright bizarre in September after prosecutors described the mountain of evidence that supported the charges against Robinson But while nothing seemed to be happening in the formal legal proceedings crazy and frequently offensive commentary has been given three months to fester Understandably Mrs Kirk felt compelled to respond CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONHopefully the pernicious chatter has a short shelf life There was a standard pretrial hearing in court on Thursday at which the issue of media access was to be discussed More consequentially what we call a preliminary hearing is scheduled in mid-January In multiple states and in federal law based on U S constitutional mandates the prosecutors must obtain an indictment from a grand jury this requires a showing of probable cause for the charges sufficient for the matter to be bound over for trial In Utah however the state generally proceeds by preliminary hearing the probable cause showing must be made before the court rather than the grand jury As a product as we move into we are likely to see and hear much more information authoritative information worthy of courtroom proof about the Kirk murder Back in the Nineties that was pretty much all we had In the modern day when it must compete with social media noise authoritative information is what we need to make sense of a very crucial prosecution CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ANDREW McCARTHY