“Like Fetching Water with a Bucket Full of Holes”: High-Profile Cases and Perceptions of System Failure

High-profile trials are often held up as emblematic of social justice causes, but this often obscures rather than clarifies justice issues for the public. Trial outcomes may be seen as proxies of much deeper, structural problems, though media coverage routinely focuses on singular, criminal justice outcomes. This study uses a press analysis of two high-profile cases to investigate how these dynamics restrict our cultural understandings of justice outside the context of formal criminal justice responses. Specifically, we use three forms of media discourse to examine public discussion following the verdicts in the Stanford rape case in 2015 and the killing of Philando Castile by Officer Jeronimo Yanez in Minnesota in 2016. We find that both cases elicited diverse narratives, including those calling for alternative justice processes and penal populist ones. We explore these narratives under the framing of system failure, examining three different articulations. We conclude by theorizing the implications each case raises for how media negotiate ideas about what constitutes justice.