I've never read the journal quoted in this link until today, but someone E-mailed me, personally, a paragraph from it:

Nancy Grace should be so insightful. Judging a defendant before the evidence has been presented is dangerous, especially in the media. The media wields more power of persuasion in how a case is percieved than any court record.

This E-mail, by the way, was accompanied by a smiling picture of Nancy Grace, a graphic with a "marching ants" marquee around it that read "Build a Bridge & get over it!", and a signature quote that read "JUSTICE has no expiration date.....", complete with the non-traditional five-period ellipsis.

The E-mail subject line was "for:posted by Frederick Maryland," which leads me to believe this Nancy Grace business is about a comment I posted on Demagogue about two weeks ago in response to one of Frederick's posts. He was commenting on a profile of Grace and her "guilty-until-proven-innocent-like-you-could-ever-do-that" attitude in the Washington Post. I pointed out that Grace has been cited by appellate courts three times for prosecutorial misconduct - that is, breaking the law to give a defendant an unfair trial because she couldn't win any other way. I kind of forgot about it after Frederick responded with a patronizing comment, one of those "I understand this article and you don't, small child" attitudes that we can all do without.

But the only original part of the message I got today was this question:

You must have thought he was not guilty. IMO you are judging him. What is the difference?

Apparently the "he" is Michael Jackson, who was not the subject of either Frederick's post or my comment, but who is the subject of the journal (that I didn't write) from which the first quote comes. So I have no idea why this person is asking me this question, even though the answer is obvious:

Every defendant is "not guilty" until proven otherwise to a jury of his peers. What you see on Court TV, CNN, or Access Hollywood does not count. It is not "judging" someone to recognize that the constitutional system did not find him guilty. Twelve people did judge him and acquitted him.

Build a bridge and get over it.