Is anyone else really tired of "Alleged?"

[nichomachus]

34. I never remember the media calling someone a murderer

until he had been convicted in court -- and I was a journalist for decades.

Even if a person is caught with a gun in his hand and covered in blood, he's not a "murderer," until a jury convicts him of murder. It might be clear that he's the shooter or even a killer, but murder is a legal term and is only determined at trial.

Even if he has a gun in his hand and is covered in blood, until there is evidence that he did, in fact, pull the trigger that caused the deaths, it more prudent to say "alleged." We often don't know all the facts.

I covered a story once where there was a melee going on. At one point, the cops saw a young Hispanic guy on top of a cop who was on the ground. The cop was dead. They grabbed the young guy, cuffed him up and roughed him up, and then arrested him for murder. After all, they saw him beating on the cop, which he was.

Turns out on further investigation that the cop, a 30-something guy, had an undetected congenital heart defect and had dropped to the ground in cardiac arrest. The young guy was a bystander who saw the cop go down and was trying to perform CPR, which the other cops prevented him from doing. But until the test results all came back, the good samaritan was known as an "alleged murderer." Good thing they didn't go with just "murderer."