The Scoop is archived at by Patrick Combs, cool guy, at http://www.dnai.com/g-think.
_______________________
THE SCOOP for October 3, 1996
Guilty
Can You Spot The Racism Here?
(C)1996 Bob Harris
There's a Jewish guy most folks in New Orleans say killed some people. They also don't think anti-Semitism is part of why they say so.
Dr. Hyman Kaplan, a middle-aged dentist and the sole heir to the Kaplan Department Stores fortune, stands accused of killing his young wife and her Jamaican tennis instructor at the edge of a public park around 6:30 p.m. last December 14th.
Kaplan is one of New Orleans' few Jewish celebrities, famous for his late-night TV ads in which he sells root canals the way Crazy Eddie used to sell boomboxes.
>From the start, the local papers have been filled with lurid gossip, much of it
based on Jewish stereotypes too offensive to repeat. New Orleans Weekly even Photoshopped his mug shot to enlarge his nose and ran the caricature on their cover.
The prosecution has also provided continuous leaks, most of which turned out to be false, designed to sabotage the defense. As a result, most folks think it's an open-and-shut case.
Is it? You decide:
There were no eyewitnesses.
The murder weapon or weapons were never found, much less linked to Dr. Kaplan.
Dr. Kaplan's fingerprints were nowhere at the scene. There were, however, 17 other fingerprints which, strangely, the police refused to try to identify.
Marcus Thompson, the tennis coach, was 26, in prime condition, and trained in karate. Leading medical examiners agree that Thompson fought with his attacker for as long as 5 minutes. That's a real fight. Thompson's knuckles were bruised and skinned, consistent with punching his attacker. Dr. Kaplan, who is nearing 50, didn't have a bruise on him.
Marla Kaplan, a pretty young redhead and former Miss Jambalaya, also apparently fought with her attacker; there was flesh and blood underneath her fingernails. Dr. Kaplan had no matching scratches, and the police have never tried to identify whose blood this was.
Reasonable doubts, anyone?
The crime scene was insanely bloody. Both victims had their jugular veins slashed; Ms. Kaplan's carotid arteries were cut, as was Thompson's aorta. The killer should have looked like an aisle display at Blood Mart, but Dr. Kaplan was seen at home -- miles away -- by a UPS delivery man just after the killings, and there was no sign of blood on his clothes.
The prosecution claims that Kaplan raced home in his Mercedes and washed up in time to accept the UPS package. However, the UPS guy arrived early at Dr. Kaplan's house, and since this was his last delivery and he liked the dentist, he sat waiting throughout the relevant time. The rural side street was silent and almost pitch black, and he didn't see any lights or hear any car drive up.
Meanwhile, almost all of the folks near the crime scene who heard a struggle or shouts place the time of the murders much later than the prosecution's timeline -- at a point, in fact, when the cops say Kaplan was arriving home to establish an alibi.
It gets worse.
As you probably know, the New Orleans police are notorious for corruption and evidence-tampering, and anti-Semitism is rampant.
Guess what? The cop who first entered Dr. Kaplan's home -- without a warrant -- and who alone "discovered" some key evidence -- was a proud anti-Semite who collected Nazi memorablia, openly bragged to reporters about planting and falsifying evidence, and committed perjury on the witness stand.
And while there was blood in the Mercedes and Dr. Kaplan's house, one of the arresting officers has admitted taking blood from Kaplan -- who waived his right to an attorney and volunteered a sample the day after the killings -- not to the nearby crime lab, but directly to the murder scene, twenty miles away. Some of that blood is missing, and much of the blood placed into evidence -- some of it three weeks after the crime -- contains the chemical signature of police preservatives.
If you ignore the newspapers (always a good idea) and actually read the depositions, testimony, and autopsy reports, you might reasonably imagine that the police judged Dr. Kaplan guilty on the spot, did what they thought was right, and stuck by their story even when it fell apart.
That doesn't exclude the possibility that Kaplan -- a pretty lousy guy, it turns out -- is guilty, although the prosecution's version of the killings is clearly wrong.
As it happens, the jury in the case is comprised mainly of Jews, so a lot of folks assume that Dr. Kaplan will walk. After all, they say, Jews protect their own.
That this isn't considered a racist statement tells you a lot about New Orleans.
In fact, even mentioning the possibility of Kaplan's innocence in polite society is about as well-received as flossing your teeth with a piece of linguini.
That Kaplan's guilt has become an article of faith tells you a lot about white liberals.
One last thing you've probably guessed by now: Dr. Kaplan is fictional.
So is the presumption of innocence you and I gave him.
I promised not to write about the real-life Kaplan murders until a year had passed. This is the only ink I'll waste.
I don't know who killed the real Marla and Marcus. Neither do you. And it means squat to our lives either way.
What we do know, and ought finally to admit, is how very much we see the world in color.
____________________
Bob Harris is a political comedian who has lectured at over 250 colleges nationwide.
Original file name: The Scoop- Guilty
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.