On June 19, 2009, two Bear Stearns executives were arrested at their homes, handcuffed, fingerprinted at FBI headquarters in Manhattan, and led off to be arraigned at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Their departure from FBI headquarters was photographed and videotaped, and received widespread replay in the press. The so-called “perp walk” was no surprise, as executives too numerous to mention had preceded them in the walk of shame. In fact, the perp walk is a long-standing practice in criminal cases. It was used by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1930′s,1 and its use in white-collar criminal cases is popularly credited to Rudy Giuliani’s tenure as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980′s, when four executives were arrested, handcuffed in their offices, and paraded before the waiting cameras.2
Commentators have noted that the perp walk traces its roots to much earlier in American history, going back to the Puritan practice of shaming,3 in which, for example, “[a]n adulteress would be condemned to forever wear a scarlet “A”; a Puritan man convicted of having relations with a woman before marriage would be placed in the stocks or pillory.”4 But the Puritan practice of shaming and today’s perp walks are different in one critical respect. The shamed Puritans had already been convicted; today’s perp walkers have only been arrested and are theoretically cloaked with the presumption of innocence. Indeed, charges against two of the defendants in the first Giuliani perp walk were dropped, and the defendants in the Bear Stearns case were acquitted.
