Often when someone says "I was misquoted," they really mean "I wish I hadn't said that." Getting misquoted can be painful, but getting quoted correctly when you said something that sounds dumb can be even more painful. A couple of days ago I got quoted correctly, but I'm afraid I sounded less than intelligent. I was being asked about the sounds of someone calling for help on the Zimmerman/Martin 911 tape, and the reporter quoted me as saying "It would be nice to know who was doing the calling for help, but identifying the caller is not necessarily going to definitively identify the wrongdoer, [but s]ituations sometimes arise where it is the wrongdoer calling for help." I started to elaborate on my comment, but decided I didn't need to further confuse the issue with additional comments.
The point I was trying to make was this: Sometimes the wrongdoer gets himself/herself into a pickle that he/she didn't anticipate and consequently starts calling for help. The incident I had in mind when I made the comment was the arrest of Ted Bundy in Pensacola. When David Lee attempted to handcuff Bundy, Bundy resisted violently and wound up getting pummelled. Bundy's cries for help did not exonerate him, and to decide the propriety of his arrest based on who was calling for help would have badly skewed the truth seeking process. Another example of this sort of thing comes from Genesis 39:6-20. When Potiphar's wife attempted to seduce Joseph, he ran away and she cried for help claiming that Joseph had tried to rape her.
You can read my comments in context here: (http://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2012/04/02/media-take-on-police-like-role-in-martin-case).
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