Kent Alexander called it “the most difficult letter to write in my career,” explaining that it took days, and he recast it dozens of times. Curiously, when he finished, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia signed his name below just three sentences.
Alexander’s succinct but painstaking correspondence was penned to Richard Jewell’s lawyer, informing him that his client was not considered a target of the criminal investigation of the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
Jewell was an unemployed small-town cop working as a security guard at Centennial Olympic Park. In the early hours of July 27, 1996, he spotted a suspicious backpack under a bench in the crowded park. Jewell acted quickly, and with the help of a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent, cleared the crowd away from the explosive device. Ten minutes later, it detonated and two people died. But Jewell’s actions unquestionably saved scores of lives.
Jewell was proclaimed a hero. CNN, USA Today and television’s Today came calling. But then law enforcement turned the tables and began to suspect Jewell as the bomber. His name was leaked to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a suspect. Three days later the hometown paper’s front-page headline screamed: “FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb.” Boom, just like that, Jewell was reviled by the media, shredded by late-night comics and all but convicted in the eyes of the public. Alexander, following a massive FBI investigation, cleared him three months later. But Jewell’s old life was never coming back.
As the feds’ top lawyer in Atlanta, Alexander was in the middle of it all. “After the bombing, the FBI became my second home,” he tells me in an interview by phone. “All of us were singularly focused on finding the terrorist before he struck again.”
Alexander’s behind the scenes account of Jewell’s story is told in The Suspect, co-authored with former Wall Street Journal editor Kevin Salwen, who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the bombing. The authors also take readers inside law enforcement’s seven-year search for the real bomber, Eric Rudolph, who pled guilty to the Olympic bombing and three subsequent ones. Rudolph is serving life in prison.
“I knew I was going to write this book a week-and-a-half after I wrote Richard Jewell’s clearance letter,” Alexander, 61, says. “It was a great story, and I wanted to figure out what really happened.”
He also wanted to examine what lessons could be learned from an experience that ruined an innocent man’s life. For that, Alexander’s 20-plus year delay, in keeping his promise to himself, proved handy.
“Much of what happened in 1996 applies even more today. Now it’s so easy for the ‘Jewell effect’ to happen on any given day,” Alexander says.
As a result, it acted through litigation. “My predecessor,” Hutt explains, “had to make all new law by bringing cases against the [food and drug] industry for violating his interpretation of the law. I got in there, and I said, ‘That’s the most inefficient way of doing things.’”
Hutt, in need of a more effective way to achieve his objectives for both food and drug regulation saw the law differently. He was of the opinion that it “authorized FDA to propose and enact binding substantive regulations.”
In other words, Hutt explains, his interpretation gave the FDA the power to engage in so-called “substantive rulemaking.” It led to a “total transformation of FDA,” he says.
But in the case of the nutrition label, Hutt needed one more ingredient to get them onto foods.
Rulemaking, he says, can only be used to implement a statute. “So what provision in the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act would I implement?” Hutt recalls asking himself. “There wasn’t a single provision about nutrition in the statute.”
He says he seized upon an “obscure provision that I don’t think FDA had ever used before,” which he paraphrases as “the failure to reveal material facts is as much a misbranding as an actual falsehood.”
So “I said ‘aha!’ I’ll create the nutrition label and argue that the failure to have this label is the failure to reveal material facts—since the nutrition composition of the food is very, very material to the health of the country.”
But didn’t food and drug companies see the FDA’s use of substantive rulemaking as an unlawful power-grab? I ask Hutt.
It was never challenged, he tells me. Those companies, he says, were “concerned about FDA being forced [by Congress] into legislation that would be infinitely worse than what they and I and the consumer groups—I always included them—would be willing to negotiate.”
Hutt’s work established that there was a “path forward” for the nutrition label. But then came six months of work to “put the whole superstructure into place,” he says.
Numerous decisions remained for the FDA, such as which nutrients would be included on the label, where to place it on products, in what manner to express the information and its font size. Hutt chose at least 1/16 of an inch. That number remains today.
But don’t blame Hutt for those paltry serving sizes. That came later, with the enactment of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which required the FDA to establish serving sizes. “FDA went out,” Hutt says, “and did an absolutely impeccable survey that found the average amount that everybody ate of all kinds of foods. And that’s what became the mandatory serving size.”
Getting food and drug law into the classroom
In the late 1970s, Hutt was enjoying success practicing food and drug law. But still something bothered him: He was concerned that food and drug law would be a “backwater of legal scholarship.”
The solution, he believed, was to get the subject into law schools. And to do that required a case book. Ironically, in the only text available, the subject of food labeling was now obsolete, thanks to the changes Hutt made during his tenure at the FDA.
Without a case book, Hutt says, food and drug law “would be taught only in a few law schools where resident professors had a unique interest or local practitioners taught based on their personal work experience.”
In 1980, Hutt co-authored the first edition of Food and Drug Law: Cases and Materials. The fifth edition was released in 2022. The text had the desired effect. Classes on food and drug law began to appear in law schools. Hutt tells me the subject is now taught in about 60 law schools across the country.
Hutt can count himself among those who teach it. Next month—as he has done since 1994—he will return to his alma mater to teach food and drug law during the school’s winter term.
The class moves at a brisk clip. Hutt will instruct students for three-and-a-half hours five days per week for three weeks.
“I love it. And I put on two beer parties,” he says. “Nobody believes I’m 90.”
The challenge in writing the letter, Alexander explains, is that it had to appease different audiences. Richard Jewell expected full clearance, but instead was described as a so-called “non-target.” Nonetheless, Jewell and his legal team knew the media would portray that as an exoneration. On the other hand, Alexander says, there were some in law enforcement who still thought that Jewell was the bomber or complicit in some way. “So, the FBI was satisfied because it was not necessarily a clearance letter,” he says.
“Deciding how to write that letter really took some thought,” Alexander tells me. “Every single word in there was deliberate.”
Alexander says the Richard Jewell case offers an opportunity for law enforcement and the media to step back and consider: “How fast do we need the news, when does the suspect’s name need to be outed, and what kind of effect does a rush to judgment have on an individual?” He points to similar cases, such as the Duke University lacrosse players falsely accused of rape in 2006 and Sunil Tripathi, the Brown University student wrongly suspected of being the 2013 Boston Marathon bomber.
I tell Alexander that I’m skeptical that this lesson can ever be learned. Thanks to the internet, I offer, we have more journalists than ever. Some legitimate and some whose newsroom is their parents’ basement. But all of them have the same goal: get the story first.
Alexander says he’s not expecting “wholesale change, ‘oh the world’s going to slow down and everybody’s now going to be much more careful.’ ” But, he says, “If you can put a name on an issue, and Richard Jewell is very much a name,” it may cause people to pause. If someone is starting to leak a name of a suspect, they may say, “ ‘Remember Richard Jewell.’ ”
In addition to selling the book rights to Hollywood, the co-authors served as consultants on the film. It brought some memorable moments, Alexander tells me. During a meeting with the film’s producer, Alexander and Salwen were asked if they had “time to meet with Clint Eastwood next weekend.” Alexander, laughing, tells me that he pulled out his iPhone. “I don’t know, let me check,” he replied.
“The whole thing was a ‘pinch-me’ experience,” Alexander says. “How could you be anything but awed in Clint Eastwood’s presence?” But besides making his day, Alexander says he was “very impressed with how sharp he was and with how much he was really directing this movie. It wasn’t like anyone was propping [89-year-old] Clint Eastwood up. He was engaged and in charge.”
Alexander offers an entertaining side-note. At the time, Nancy Grace, the well-known legal commentator, was a 36-year-old assistant district attorney in Atlanta. She appeared on Good Morning America to give her two cents on the case. Blunt and accusatory, Grace speculated that Jewell’s arrest was imminent. She even denied that Jewell enjoyed a presumption of innocence since there was no jury trial on-going, Alexander recalls.
After a near all-nighter at the FBI, Alexander says he was awoken by an early-morning call from Washington. A loud and fast-talking Deputy Attorney General had a simple directive: “That woman is the face of justice. Get her off of there.” Alexander called Atlanta’s D.A. and he promised to take care of it.
But while Alexander achieved the unimaginable—putting a gag order on Nancy Grace—he may have also played a part in launching her second career. A short time later, Grace resigned from the prosecutor’s office and joined Court TV as a commentator. “It was clear to me going forward” Alexander says, “that Nancy aspired for a future in the media, not the D.A.’s office.”
Alexander has sat behind a variety of desks since graduating from the University of Virginia Law School in 1983. He jokingly described his career as “professionally unfocused.” The Atlanta native, in addition to over 10 years in the U.S. Attorney’s office, has made stops at King & Spalding as a partner, Emory University and its healthcare system as senior V.P. and general counsel and served as GC for international humanitarian organization CARE. Alexander also put a toe into politics as chief of staff for Michelle Nunn’s 2014 unsuccessful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia. Alexander is currently working on his next book, a narrative nonfiction story that runs from the 1980 Cuban Mariel boat lift to the 1987 “Marielito” Atlanta Penitentiary riot and takeover.
Alexander and Jewell ran into each other at the Atlanta courthouse where they had both come to watch Eric Rudolph plead guilty to the Olympic bombing. It had been nearly nine years since the former U.S. attorney had written the letter that cleared the falsely accused security guard.
Alexander reached out to shake hands. Jewell surprised him with a hug. The former prosecutor thanked him again for what he did at the Olympics and told him that this day was a long time coming.
“In the end, of course, he was no bomber at all. He was a hero.”
Jewell died in 2007 at the age of 44 of complications from diabetes.
