I respectfully disagree, Eleni. Running always makes someone seem guilty even if they are not, and the embassy decision to help Kovacevic escape was totally absurd and counterproductive.
I don't know whether Kovacevic is guilty or not. What I do know is that the NY Daily news has already tried and convicted him in the press, in spite of the fact that TWO OTHER PEOPLE, not just Kovacevic, were arrested for the same crime. Yet all the NY Daily News has focused on is "Serbian thug", "Serbian brute", the size differential between the Steinhauer and Kovacevic, etc, which is wholly irresponsible on their part. They have also incited the kind of political grandstanding by Shummer that is just downright embarrassing, given that we haven't even issued a formal request for Kovacevic's extradition!
This whole situation has been so totally screwed up by incompetence by so many, including the Serbian embassy, the media, and our politicians, that now I have grave doubts that the kid can ever get a fair trial here.
Kovacevic is not the first person to escape to a foreign country to avoid prosecution. But he is perhaps the first case where we have indicted an entire country for the acts of a defendant who escaped and embassy workers who were obvious screw-ups, even though the embassy workers who helped Kovacevic escape were fired immediately by the Serbian government. I can't defend Kovacevic running or the acts of the embassy workers -- I think that they were all dead-wrong to do what they did. But I also think that both the media and US politicians are turning this whole thing into three-ring circus of incompetence and stupidity -- and the more that they do, the more reasons they are giving Kovacevic and Serbia to assume that he has zero chance of getting a fair trial here now if he ever had one to begin with.