Cruel to Jewell.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: TILTING at windmills - Richard Jewell - Brief article

You may be unaware that Richard Jewell died recently. Jewell, you will recall, was the security guard at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when a bomb exploded, killing one woman and injuring 111 people. Many more would have died or been injured had not Jewell discovered the bomb minutes before it detonated, and started moving the crowd away.

He was briefly hailed as a hero, but then was transformed into the number one suspect by incompetent FBI agents desperate to break the case and by one of the first of the media frenzies to which we have now sadly become accustomed.

Cox Enterprises and its newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the number two culprits close behind the FBI, managed to escape a libel suit they...