Backlash On The Staircase
We just finished watching ‘The Staircase’, a documentary about the high-profile murder trial of novelist Michael Peterson. Directed by academy award-winning filmmaker Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the film documents both the trial itself and the initial preparations by both the defense and prosecution.
The film is chilling in it’s depiction of a gross and cynically orchestrated miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the corrupt police, vindictive district attorney, and the backward, narrow-minded and ignorant citizens of Durham, North Carolina. I’ll cheerfully add this city, and perhaps the entire state of North Carolina to the growing list of places I’ll never visit.
We watched a porcine district attorney and his assistant, a screeching fishwife with an outlandishly bad makeup and fashion sense, drone portentiously about homaseckshuls and pure-dee filth. But more than that, we saw yet another righteous attack by the god-fearing silent majority against what they perceive as the tax-hiking, government expanding, latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, New York Times reading, body-piercing, Hollywood loving, God-mocking left-wing freak show.
Michael Peterson, a wealthy, urbane, sophisticated and cultivated man, had the double misfortune of losing his beautiful and loving wife to a tragic accident at home and then being mis-cast as a murderer and falsely convicted on limited evidence by a prosecution willing to stoop to the very lowest depths to play to the very worst instincts and prejudices of what might as well have been a rural, small-town jury.
Peterson, a successful writer, was forced to spend over $800,000 to defend himself against malicious and trumped-up charges entered against him by a vindictive and deeply bigoted prosecution. He was then convicted of first-degree murder in the absence of a murder weapon, witnesses, motive, or any compelling forensic evidence. In North Carolina, the penalty for first degree murder is life in prison without possibility of parole. Today, Michael Peterson is in prison, where he has already been hospitalized as the result of an assault by other inmates, and where he will remain for the rest of his life.
Michael Peterson wasn’t convicted of something that he’d done. He was convicted of something he might have done, could have done, or possibly wanted to do, based on who the prosecution and jury considered him to be. He was convicted because of who he was, and the atypical life that he led.
Michael Peterson, born in 1943, was the son of a career military officer and moved around quite a bit while growing up. In the early 1960s, Peterson studied political science and was editor of the student newspaper at Duke University in Durham NC, graduating in 1965 with a degree in political science.
Peterson dropped out of law school and took a job in 1966 researching arguments in favor of increased U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. The research led to Peterson’s four-year enlistment in the Marine Corps, He later saw combat in South Vietnam.
After the war, Peterson worked as a government consultant and lived overseas for 11 years.
In 1989, the Peterson family moved to North Carolina. Between 1983 and 1998 Peterson published three novels informed by his experiences in Vietnam: “The Immortal Dragon,” “A Time of War” and “Charlie Two Shoes and the Marines of Love Company.”
Peterson’s books received little critical acclaim, but they enabled him to buy a large house at the corner of Cedar and Sycamore Streets in a wooded, upper-middle class Durham neighborhood. Peterson continued researching and writing fiction while writing a column for the local daily newspaper, the Herald-Sun.
In the mid-1990s, Peterson met Nortel executive Kathleen Atwater, and her teenaged daughter Caitlin. Peterson’s children say they accepted Atwater because they saw a love connection between their father and Kathleen that their parents never had.
Leveraging the name recognition he had from his books, his community involvement and newspaper columns challenging the Durham establishment, Peterson made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Durham in 1999. In his columns and during the campaign, Peterson pointedly challenged both the Durham District Attorney’s Office and the Durham Police Force.
The Petersons were relaxing and enjoying a few drinks on a Saturday night in December of 2001. Sometime after Saturday night became Sunday morning, Kathleen decided to go to bed, while Michael stepped outside to check the pool lights. As she started up the narrow back stairway, Kathleen, tipsy on valium and wine and wearing flip-flops, tripped and fell backwards down the steps, hitting her head multiple times on the door jam and steps as she went down, resulting in several bloody scalp wounds. As she attempted to right herself, she slipped on her own blood and fell a couple more times, further injuring herself. Michael Peterson found her an hour or so later on his way to bed, and immediately called 911.
The medical examiner on the scene ruled the death an accident, but by the next day, the Durham police department had characterized the accident as ’suspicious’, obtained warrants, searched the Peterson residence during Kathleen Peterson’s Wake, and removed 66 pieces of evidence, including computers and data.
The Durham Police have a richly deserved reputation for incompetence and corruption. Witness the latest Keystone Kops escapades surrounding the alleged rape of a stripper by members of the Duke University lacrosse team. If a rape actually occurred, the slipshod investigative practices of the Durham police would frustrate bringing any actual perpetrators to justice.
As a journalist working for the Durham Herald-Sun, Michael Peterson was highly critical, often abrasively so, of the Durham District Attorney’s office and the police force.
Michael Peterson was also a known bisexual, apparently preferring male prostitutes for casual sexual contacts, while maintaining a loving and mutually satisfying relationship with his wife and immediate family, who were aware of his extra-marital activities and sexual orientation.
The Durham police, who probably had anecdotal evidence of Peterson’s bisexuality, wasted no time in going public with the details of Peterson’s sex life as it was verified by the data and email on the computers collected during the search of the Peterson home.
But even though it was proven that Peterson infrequently had sex with male prostitutes on a pay-to-play basis, no evidence of any kind was introduced that would indicate a love triangle between Peterson, his wife, and any other person, either male or female, that would serve as a motive for homocide.
The issue of Peterson’s bisexuality was cynically introduced by the prosecution as a manipulative device to shock and prejudice the jury against Peterson and the defense.
Homosexuality, real or perceived, is the new race-baiting. Witness the 2004 election. Gratuitous anti-gay marriage legislation was introduced on ballots in key swing states to mobilize a base of conservative evangelical voters known to be sympathetic to the Republican Presidential ticket.
The Peterson trial represents one of the most egregious, unvarnished and ugly examples of bigoted and ignorant backlash against an innocent person who had the misfortune or audacity to be different than or threatening to a socially conservative status quo.
The big question in my mind is why the ordinary people on the Peterson jury, and to a lesser extent, the ordinary people in the Durham Police Department and District Attorney’s Office felt so threatened by the mere existence of Michael Peterson that they were willing to ignore the rules of evidence and the obligation to impartiality that comes with jury duty, not to mention common decency to railroad a man who had already suffered one of the most damaging losses a person can experience. Michael Peterson will be in prison for the remainder of his life.
Onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer explained it to The New York Times like this: “Joe Six-Pack doesn’t understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn’t have a say in it.”
Thomas Frank, who is considerably younger, smarter, and better looking than I am has a partial answer to this question in his books ‘The Conquest of Cool’, and ‘What’s The Matter With Kansas’. He’s currently working on another book, due out in 2008, that further explores the question. I’ll be delving some into his take on backlash, as well as my own in future blog entries.