Suspect.
The term is often used in the newspapers and on TV to refer to the criminal, the person who committed the crime. “The suspect shot four people at the meeting, and then ran outside and into a subway to avoid capture …”
The police originally used “suspect” to avoid impugning guilt to a person they had in custody. It meant a person who was suspected of committing the crime, but who might be innocent. But the meaning has degraded with time. It has become synonymous with “the guilty but unnamed perpetrator of the crime”.
At some point, I expect a defendant to claim that his trial is prejudiced by the fact that he was referred to as a suspect. It is not hard to gather numerous quotes from news reports that illustrate the word typically refers to the guilty person, not to a person whose guilt has not yet been established. Take the example I gave above: can we substitute “The person who may not be guilty shot four people at the meeting, and then ran outside and into a subway to avoid capture …”
I expect that the Oxford English Dictionary, in their next edition, will include “the person who committed the crime” as one of their definitions for the word “suspect”, since they deduce their entries by looking at large numbers of publications to see how a word is actually used by educated people.
Read other answers by Richard Muller on Quora:
- What's something a lot of people do that angers you?
- How can I make sure that those wrongdoers suffer as much the pain as they inflicted in my life?
- Why should one be curious?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2hFTFd0
No comments:
Post a Comment