“You don’t have to fake DNA — you issue a press release”.
—Spartan, David Mamet

Some of the French are angry about Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s “perp walk”:

Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry denounced “degrading images” and said France was lucky to have a law on the presumption of innocence that bars media from showing defendants in handcuffs before they are convicted.

When you’re right, you’re right. It’s time for the walk to go the way of the stocks. The practice degrades the accused (even prisoners of war are protected from this) and unfairly incriminates him in the eyes of the public–poisoning the well of his peers from which his jury is drawn. Yet we encourage it, because it’s used on high-profile suspects and for high-profile crimes. Also, human nature being what it is, we tend to presume fire where there is smoke. Legal protections for the accused are there to clear the smoke so that we can verify the fire with our own eyes. The perp walk is a fog machine, smoking up the concert stage.

And staged it is. While it gives police and prosecutors a weapon of intimidation against the accused–play ball or we’ll publicly humiliate and ruin you–this can’t explain their enthusiasm. They do it, of course, to further their careers (it doesn’t help that prosecutors and judges are elected in New York). DSK thus required the supervision of four high-ranking officers for his parading; apparently the logistics of marching a suspect some 50 feet are that great (must be the confusion of so much flash photography). In a photo I saw one appeared to be straining to maintain his tough-cop expression (adapted from television and film, no doubt) and stay in the frame at the same time.

Here they had the ultimate Great White Defendant, handcuffed behind his back (readers of Bonfire of the Vanities will recall the debate between lawyers and cops before perp-walking Sherman McCoy–did he warrant the extra humiliation of cuffing behind-the-back?), and standing in for all those never-to-be-convicted criminal bankers, for the whole of our decadent and incompetent elite. But he’s being thrown into the volcano of popular scorn by that same elite. We should throw him back.