I apologize for
recommending last week that you watch Paula Zahn Sunday night on Ray Krone's case. I of course did not then know how the show would be, especially since I'd never seen any other of Zahn's episodes. In my judgment, the show sucked.
It was an uncritical, exploitive act of pandering to emotion. The repetitive re-enactments, done in a dramatic, grainy, documentary style, quickly became tiresome. Paula Zahn didn't seem to be interested in much besides the obvious sentiments of the case.
Netflix has a category for shows like
On the Case with Paula Zahn:
tearjerkers.
The person whom I quoted as having told me that Paula Zahn "is definitely someone that public officials don’t want in their offices, much like Mike Wallace or Dan Rather"
must have been thinking of someone else. Zahn on Ray Krone's case let the prosecutor get away with about as big a lie as gets uttered in the criminal justice context. "Justice was served." How can justice have been served when an innocent man was wrongfully imprisoned for ten years and his family and friends suffered all that loss and pain? Not to mention the family and friends of the victim, who mistakenly assumed for ten years that Kim Ancona's murderer had been prosecuted and sent to prison for the crime.
Zahn had a juror on the show, but she failed to bring out the real reason for the second jury's ignoring the copious doubt ("Shadow of Doubt," the episode's title, was a gross misrepresentation) and finding Ray Krone guilty. That reason, I think, is that they were more afraid of
failing to convict someone who might have committed the crime than they were
of convicting someone who didn't do it. Some juries can't stand the thought that they
might possibly let a criminal go free. It's the same fear thing, I think, that politicians (especially Republicans these days) depend on to stir up voters' emotions and win elections.
Jim Rix could have made much better use of thousands of hours (and tens of thousands of dollars) than by traveling all over and writing
Jingle Jangle if true justice had been served and the real killer(s) prosecuted for the murder of Kim Ancona. In case you didn't already realize it,
Jingle Jangle's subtitle,
The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out, refers not only to the fact that the likely killer(s) are still at large, but also to the crime of justice's-not-having-been-served, and to the fact that the police and prosecutor (and their hired forensic "expert," whose mission was to hoodwink the jury into buying their foregone conclusion) got away with the crime for all those years (and of course will never be held accountable for it).
I have to hand it to Paula Zahn, though.
She sure can act. She
really seemed to care when she looked at Ray and Jim
so awfully sincerely and asked them
how they felt about what happened. I wondered whether she took lessons from Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey.
The only solace I derived from the show (which aired on the Investigation Discovery channel) was that it acknowledged Ray Krone's heroic and stoic acceptance of his incarceration, and saluted Jim Rix's generous devotion to the cause of freeing a cousin he'd never heard of until his mother told him he had a cousin on Death Row in Arizona. "And he's innocent," she'd told him, although he didn't believe it at first.
But the
show's failure to serve justice (even to the extent of reflecting some of Jim's book's criticism of our criminal justice system) was appalling. The fact that it merely exploited Ray and Jim's story to titillate viewers and try to sell them merchandise and services leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
For therapy to recover from watching the program, I think I'll re-read Jim's book.
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