.
It is the position in which society holds the rich and famous that makes tragedies involving them so fascinating, says Samuel A. Guiberson, a Houston lawyer who served on the legal team that defended Timothy McVeigh on charges of bombing a federal office building in Oklahoma City. .
"Our celebrities are aristocrats in the way we relate to them. It's difficult to conceive of the rich and famous as being victims, and the fascination with that is the perception of whether it was their celebrity or wealth that somehow brought them to this pain," Guiberson says. .
History may not have curbed the media's appetite for courtroom drama. But the massive growth in news coverage since the Hauptmann trial has sparked growing concern about the nation's ability to balance its commitment to the concepts of fair trial and free press. .
While in the Lindbergh case the victim's fame raised questions about the defendant's ability to get a fair trial, in the Simpson case it was the defendant's celebrity that challenged the justice system. .
"The threat is that the public attention politicizes the process and the outcome becomes larger than the case itself," Guiberson says. "It's a real challenge to everyone involved. We seldom get good justice when the whole world is watching." .
Courting Social Justice .
When celebrities aren't involved, however, it sometimes takes the watchful eyes of the public to monitor the justice system. .
The nine black youths known simply as the Scottsboro Boys have come to symbolize the vigilantism of parts of the South in the early 1930s. .
When the deputy sheriff of Scottsboro, Ala., charged the young men with raping two white girls, who later admitted lying to hide their prostitution, the news prompted a mob of several hundred to storm the jail seeking to avenge the girls' honor. .
The mob was held at bay, but the series of trials that followed the 1931 arrests initially resulted in death sentences for all but one of the defendants.
