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Confusion may have arisen because Freeh was switching signals with the field while Jewell was sitting in the FBI interview room. According to several sources, the FBI agents and prosecutors in Atlanta initially decided that they did not need to read Jewell his Miranda warning. Case law has held that a person who is speaking to the federal investigators voluntarily and who is not being detained need not be read his rights. Partway through the interview, however, Freeh called Atlanta and said agents had to give Jewell a Miranda warning. While there are conflicts about what was said when the agents did so, this much is clear: the agents did broach the subject of Miranda to Jewell--at which point Jewell decided he needed a lawyer, clammed up and left. Inside the FBI, there is criticism of Freeh's intervention. Agents speculate that if the Miranda warning had not been introduced so abruptly, Jewell might have chatted on and said enough to resolve the question of his guilt or innocence.
Instead, Jewell became the subject of an investigation that dragged on for three months, even though not one piece of physical evidence was produced. And his interrogators at the FBI will themselves face an intense internal probe, which could last a year or longer. The problems in the Jewell case only add to the bureau's recent difficulties. Last week E. Michael Kahoe, a senior FBI official, pleaded guilty to having shredded an embarrassing internal report about the mishandling of the siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where the wife and son of white supremacist Randy Weaver were killed.
There is also a second internal investigation of the Jewell case going on at the FBI, and it concerns a practice that no one there defends: leaking information to the press. This investigation was launched by Freeh on Aug. 1 and aims to uncover the person or persons who tipped reporters that the FBI suspected Jewell. Freeh decreed early in his tenure that leaking is forbidden and could result in dismissal. Some have charged that the FBI was trying to use the press to squeeze Jewell, but agency officials argue persuasively that the leaks actually hurt their cause. If Jewell had not learned through the media that he was under investigation, they say, he might have been profitably strung along.
But if the FBI detests leaks, journalists live by them, and press conduct is the other great issue of the Jewell affair. Is it right to print in every newspaper and broadcast on every television station in the world the name of a man who anonymous sources have said is the subject of an investigation but who has not been arrested or charged? Is it right to explore every aspect of his life, to sit outside his home with TV cameras for weeks on end? Is it right to sacrifice an individual's privacy to the abstract principle of the public's right to know?
"This should be a day, week and month of introspection among all parts of the media," says Tom Goldstein, a professor at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "The presumption of innocence seems to have eroded, and that's the responsibility of both law enforcement and the media." It hardly matters, in Goldstein's view, that most outlets mentioned again and again that Jewell was only a suspect. "Once you put out a name, the caveats tend to get lost in the shuffle," he says.