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The death of the teenage jogger Chelsea King near San Diego has inspired scaremongering and inflammatory reporting from ABC's Terry Moran and CBS' Ben Tracy. Tyndall Report complained (here and here) about their reckless generalizations concerning parole registries of released sexual offenders.
Kudos, then, to Armen Keteyian for his Investigation on CBS into the case of Cleveland 's Anthony Sowell. Sowell is an ex-con who happened to be listed in a sexual offenders' registry. He stands accused in the serial murders of eleven women, charges to which he pleads not guilty. Yet Keteyian's reporting, admirably, confined itself to the specifics of this case. Unlike Moran and Tracy, he did not insinuate that all 700,000 ex-cons on registries nationwide deserved the scrutiny that Sowell failed to attract. Instead, Keteyian accused the Cleveland sex crimes unit of a simple failure to perform basic detective work. Almost a year before the eleven corpses were discovered in Sowell's home, he had been arrested after a complaint of attempted rape. He was released when detectives concluded that the woman's allegations were "unfounded." Keteyian cited statistics showing that Cleveland has the highest rape rate of any major city yet 65% of the cases go unsolved. Keteyian has a strong track record of investigating police failures to investigate rapes thoroughly. He exposed forensic shortcomings in testing rape kits (here and here) last November and inspired follow-up Senate hearings.
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