The Virginia Pilot seems to be very biased toward Ryan Frederick

A little while ago, I wrote a long blog post about how the Virginia Pilot wrote an amazingly unbalanced report on the initial events surrounding the case of Ryan Frederick. If you haven't read it, check it out because it is such a perfect example of media bias and irresponsibility that it's worth having around to prove how much the 4th estate often acts like a government attack dog, rather than a watchdog for the people against the government.

Kerry Dougherty, writing for the Virginia Pilot, has gone to great lengths to condemn Frederick, even though there is ample reason to sympathize with his situation and feel that he is a victim of systematic injustice. For more background that gets into the nitty gritty of how things have morphed on the government's side of things, read some of The Agitator's posts about the case.

She writes:

In a jailhouse interview, Frederick said he was in bed when the police came to his door about 8:30 p.m. Awakened by his barking dogs, Frederick said, he thought his house was being invaded. He didn't know the police were the cause of the commotion, he said.

Even so, it's troubling that a man charged with first-degree murder - for allegedly killing a cop, no less - has generated an ardent fan club. If you Google "Ryan Frederick" and "Jarrod Shivers," you'll get more than 1,000 hits and an eye-opening lesson in wild Internet rumor-mongering and misplaced hero worship.

Here are some facts that have caused the public support for Ryan Frederick. Three days before the raid, he was the victim of an incident of burglary. There is reason to believe that the police not only confessed to him that they knew about this before unprofessionally executing a raid that could be easily misconstrued as the burglar returning to the scene of the crime, but that the burglar might have been their informant. I don't need to remind any decent human being out there that not only was raiding his home at night so soon after a burglary stupid and unprofessional, but if it is true that their informant was the perpetrator, then that condemns the ethics and professionalism of the team who executed the raid.

By any reasonable standard, Frederick was fearful of his life.

Oh, please. Ryan Frederick is right where he belongs - in jail. Until the matter is adjudicated, anyway. Even so, some are begging the system to spring him, fueled by the half-truths and outright lies spreading through cyberspace that portray Frederick as a "drug war victim."

Later in the article, Dougherty will tell us that we need to wait until the facts have been sorted out. Many of the facts that have been sorted out are sufficient to give good reason for sympathy. It is ironic that Dougherty condemns him, while his neighbors and associates are saying that he was a stand up guy who is no cop killer. Who are you going to believe? The people who knew him as a man, and knew his character from regular interaction with him, or an editorialist who only knows a police report? Given the shifting nature of precisely where Shivers was when he was shot, the outright lies so far are coming from the police department and prosecution, not Frederick's supporters.

When was the last time you heard a defense lawyer, in a highly publicized murder case, no less, say that he does not want a change of venue?

"No, no, he has too much support here," said Frederick's attorney, James Broccoletti, when asked if he'd like the trial moved.

If it's unfair to have a jury pool skewed toward conviction, it should also be unfair to have one awash in sympathizers.

If you believe in the rule of law, and constitutional principle of "innocent until proven guilty," this is not the case. Many of his supporters sympathize with him because they know him, and have said that based on the man they know, they know he is no murderer. This is a far cry from the rent-a-mob that goes to whatever location a black thug gets the support of cretins from the modern "civil rights movement." Not only that, but there is no proof that he even had the grow operation that he was accused of running in the first place. To put that in a more recent perspective, it would be akin to finding out that the Jena 6 not only didn't beat up Justin Barker, but had merely warned him that he would get his ass kicked if he brought a bunch of his friends around to beat up the Jena 6. Simply put, when you read up on the case of Frederick, it becomes clear that the man is not the dangerous drug dealing cop killer he is made out to be in the media, but rather is a casual drug user, who was the victim of very bad circumstances that no professional cop should have put him through.

We can all agree that this is a sad and troubling case, one that raises serious questions about Chesapeake police procedures. Yet it raises equally vexing questions about the duties and responsibilities of private citizens who choose to exercise their Second Amendment rights.

Serious questions? You think? The department might want to splurge on some credits from a nearby university for Human Psychology 101 if it has no idea what went wrong that night. This case raises no vexing questions about the role of guns and gun rights in our society, either, as this could have happened to any other regular citizen. What happened that night was pure human nature in action, and if Dougherty would not have shot at unidentified men bashing in her door at night, then shame on her for taking the risk of becoming a victim of a violent crime.

Here's the plain and simple truth about how the police conducted the raid. It was unprofessional, and dangerous to the public. All they needed to do was send a uniformed police officer to his house after he left for work to search his garage for the alleged grow operation. If they found it, all they had to do was wait for him to come from work, or show up at his workplace and arrest him. The reason we are supposed to trust police with greater firepower and lattitude to use it than the public, is that they are, on paper, supposed to be intelligent and professional in how they use it. What they did was not only inappropriate and dangerous, it smacks more of testosterone-high teenage boys with guns reenacting a scene from a war movie on a minor criminal's house, than what one would expect from seasoned law enforcement professionals. 50 years ago, that level of idiocy and inability to discern when and how to use a loaded weapon in public would have had the police chief personally filling out the termination papers of the entire group responsible.

The tragic part of this story is not that this young man is behind bars. He'll have his day in court. The true tragedy is that a young woman has been widowed. Three children are fatherless. And Chesapeake lost a cop in the line of duty.

A widow can remarry. Fatherless children can get a new father. A police force can hire a new police officer. Yet, how can a man who behaved as any normal man would in that situation, get his life back if he spends most of it behind bars or is executed? What is at stake here is the life of a man who did not behave in a way that ought to bring him before a court on murder charges, and who very well may lose his life figuratively by spending most of it behind bars, or by being put to death.

If you believe marijuana should be legal, call your state legislator and demand that it be decriminalized. Don't blame the cops for enforcing Virginia's laws.

The primary concern is how they enforce them. She even admits that there are "troubling questions" about the police procedures used in cases like this. What bothers many of us about this case is the willingness of the police to use military-levels of force on petty criminals, but their unwillingness to conduct proper reconaissance before the operation. This case was predictable because they were quick to use outrageous levels of force, but didn't have the time to make sure that their target warranted it.

I don't know if Ryan Frederick is guilty of murder or of anything else. Neither do you. None of us has all the facts.

I do know this. He is not guilty of murder 1, as there was no premeditation, and he probably can't be legitimately declared guilty of murder 2 either because he had no intent to kill anyone except in normal self-defense when he thought it was a burglar coming straight at him.

So here's a thought: What do you say we all hold our fire until the defendant goes on trial?

Read: "I've already declared him guilty, and damned everyone who supports him. I've been long on accusations, and short on evidence, whether in the text, or in citations. But hey, let's not jump to conclusions. After all, hell might freeze over and prove my wild accusations and inuendos total bullshit."

After the aforementioned publication at the Virginian Pilot, which was overwhelmingly slanted in favor of the police side of the story, this comes along. It's pretty clear that if Virginian Pilot does not have a bias against him, there seems to be people at the Pilot who are keen to see him hung. Given the left-wing bias of the mainstream media, I would not be surprised by either of these things. To them, it'd only be natural to assume that anyone who shoots a cop is a violent extremist unfit to live in a peaceful, tolerant society.

The people at the Pilot who are doing these things ought to be ashamed of themselves, and recuse themselves from further reporting on this case. They have shamelessly made themselves an uncritical parrot of prosecutorial and police propaganda, rather than a voice for critically analyzing the case from both sides.

**UPDATE** 7:30 12/26/2008: Roger Chelsey has a more balanced opinion piece in the Pilot here. Still, that one editorial doesn't excuse what has been done already.
**UPDATE** 5/29/2008: As more information has come out on this case, the Pilot seems to be doing a better job now of calling some of the facts of this case into question. More here.