http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/Commodore%20Skahill/Colin%20McEnroe%20Show%2005-20-2011.mp3
One of our cops and robbers traditions -- as static as Kabuki -- is the perp walk.
The idea of marching an arrested suspect across a line of flashing cameras is probably about 100 years old. One theory says it may have started when there was a camera with a fast enough shutter. By the 1920s, J. Edgar Hoover was using perp walks to gin up enthusiasm for his crime wars.
Of course, they don't always go that well. Lee Harvey Oswald was killed during a perp walk, and in 1962, when photographers missed the first photo op, New York City cops re-staged a perp walk and posed the suspect for them.
Most of us kind of like perp walks and look forward to them, but they seem out of communion with our notion of justice. Why should a defendant, still presumed innocent until convicted, have to go through this pageant?
That and more about the DSK story, the Schwarzeneggers and the End of the World on today's show.
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