Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Perp Walk

Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Perp Walk

Nicolaus Mills: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Perp Walk

As rumors swirl that former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn will offer a consensual-sex defense to counter the charge that he sexually assaulted an African-immigrant maid at a New York City hotel, it is time to take a longer look at the history surrounding the second issue in his case?the perp walk he was subjected to by the police.

The French find the perp walk cruel and prejudicial, but their objections to it do not, as many seem to think, have deep roots. The French law banning the showing of pictures of a suspect in handcuffs is just a little over a decade old. The law, named the Guigou law for Élisabeth Guigou, the French minister of justice from 1997 to 2000, arises from legislation passed in 2000 that includes a series of protections for the accused, guaranteeing them, among other rights, greater access to lawyers and an easier route to appealing verdicts.

The Guigou law grew out of the French reaction to the shocking photographs that were published in 1995 and 1996 of the victims of Paris bombings and the ugly rush in 1997 by photographers to take pictures of Princess Diana and the other victims of the car crash in which she died. The Guigou law is broad enough to forbid any photos that ?jeopardize? an accused person?s dignity.

The principle behind the Guigou law is not, however, all that different from the practice in America of withholding the name of the alleged victim of a sex crime (this has not been done in France with regard to the name of the woman in the Strauss-Kahn case). The French worry not only over the damage pre-trial publicity can cause but that defendants who win a ?not guilty? verdict at trial can never erase the public?s memory of them in handcuffs surrounded by the police. They are permanently stigmatized. As Guigou, currently a Socialist member of the National Assembly from Seine-Saint-Denis, observed of the French position in a recent interview, ?We have a coherence. We privilege the presumption of innocence.?

Former French culture minister Jack Lang has described the American treatment of Strauss-Kahn as a ?lynching.? Le Monde reports that 57 percent of the French public believe Strauss-Kahn ?is the victim of a plot.? That view is certainly different from America?s; if Strauss-Kahn had not been subject to a ?perp walk? by the New York police, he would have been seen as getting special treatment because of his wealth and status.

But deep within the American soul, there is also a historic repulsion at the kind of thinking that lies behind the perp walk. In the opening of his 1850 masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne provides a distinctly modern critique of the perp walk. The scene in which Hawthorne delivers his critique is one in which his heroine, Hester Prynne, is being punished by the Puritans of seventeenth-century Boston for having a baby out of wedlock. The scene opens with Hester being taken from jail to stand on a scaffold in the center of town. ?It was no great distance,? Hawthorne observes at first, but he then writes, ?Measured by the prisoner?s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.?

But Hawthorne is not content to narrate his story without revealing his own feelings. His compassion extends to the guilty as well as the innocent. He finishes this scene by using his own voice to tell his readers, ?There can be no outrage, me thinks, against our common nature?whatever be the delinquencies of the individual?no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame.?

In its compassion and anti-Puritanism, it is hard to imagine a vision of the law more American and yet more French at the same time.