Prosecutors erode our rights with show-and-tell indictments like Eric Adams’s

In a 20-minute publicity event, framed on one side by the agents who worked the case and on the other by a color photo of the Turkish consulate building the mayor is alleged to have helped get approved, Williams detailed the charges using phrases such as “luxury travel,” “foreign influence,” “corrupt relationships,” and “grave breach of public trust.” He made sure to describe every dollar exchanged as charged in the indictment. Then he invited an FBI supervisor and a New York City commissioner to jump in and add their claims of Adams’s “perver[sion] of greed, and dishonesty” and breach of “integrity, transparency and dedication.”

All this occurred on the day the charges were unsealed, not the day a guilty verdict was issued. You might be forgiven for being confused.

This sort of trial by lectern or show-and-tell indictment is a lamentable phenomenon that needs to be eliminated — now. It erodes the presumption of innocence and subverts the requirement for a fair trial. By the time a trial starts, would-be jurors have been tainted by hearing the worst allegations against a defendant with no rebuttal, and judges can easily form initial opinions that could carry over to their rulings.

Yet unfortunately, this practice is not the sole domain of the New York prosecutor’s office. Even Attorney General Merrick Garland himself has succumbed to the temptation, most recently publicly announcing charges against Iranians accused of computer hacking who will most likely never come to the United States to stand trial.

It wasn’t always this way. The attorney general who led the Justice Department when Garland first served there had a different practice, of which Garland must have been aware. In 1977, Griffin Bell, Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, issued a directive to all prosecutors: “In order to avoid any unfairness or appearance of unfairness I have directed the department’s Office of Public Information to confine news releases on indictments to the bare essentials of the charge and the defendants without detailing the allegations of the grand jury.”

He went on to explain that other practices “carry a potential for prejudicing a case against a criminal defendant as they do repeat charges which have not been proven in court without offering the defendants any opportunity to dispute them.” If this was his concern about written news releases, you can imagine what he would have thought of the lectern release.

This form of PR event is not the only weapon prosecutors are using. Along with the televised news conference, Williams released the 57-page indictment against Adams with dozens of detailed paragraphs and a new tool — the color photo. In Sen. Bob Menendez’s 2023 indictment for bribery, which I read as his counsel at the time, you can see color shots of gold bars, cash laid out on a U.S. Senate jacket, a Mercedes-Benz and photos of dinners and meetings. Adams’s includes photos of a luxury hotel suite (including the bathroom), the Turkish skyscraper, and texts between him, Turkish officials and his staff. In both cases, the media included those photos — heretofore known as trial evidence — in the articles about the charges.

This practice is not what the rules require; it is the opposite. The federal rule on indictments says: “The indictment or information must be a plain, concise, and definite [emphasis added] written statement of the essential facts constituting the offense charged.” No mention of phrases such as “luxury suites,” nor reference to color photos.

It is hard enough to select an unbiased jury in a criminal case without the task being made nearly impossible because the airwaves and internet are flooded with damning language and the one-sided details and selective photos, chosen by prosecutors, that have never been tested in any legal proceeding. These practices do not just impact the fairness of trials of high-profile defendants. Because crime is always a good media story, whether in a big city or a small town, state and local prosecutors have employed them even in cases of less well-known defendants.

The solution is simple — reissue and follow the policy Bell announced nearly 50 years ago, and enforce the criminal rules written by the Supreme Court and Congress. Prosecutors will get their day at the lectern if and when they get a conviction. In the meantime, our unique rights to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial, which we should never take for granted, will be preserved.