A criminal mind? A damaged brain? Narratives of criminality and culpability in the celebrated case of Aaron Hernandez

Abstract

This article examines the media discourse surrounding the life and death of former National Football League player Aaron Hernandez, who died by suicide while incarcerated for first-degree murder. As a postmortem analysis found evidence of notable degenerative brain disease, differing explanations and speculations remain about the causes of his criminal behavior. This analysis illustrates how journalistic narratives attribute Hernandez’s criminality to either the material composition of his damaged brain or how his tumultuous background affected psychological makeup. Both narratives minimize the structural and political economic conditions that enabled this particular case of celebrated criminality. Cultural criminological and socio-legal insights aid in elucidating how notions of racialized masculinity and neurocriminology come to constitutively inform framings of Hernandez’s crimes, motivations, and actions while also directing critical attention away from the influence of relevant institutions, particularly sport, and instrumentalizing the role of violence. This article concludes with a reflection on the underpinning tensions revealed through depictions of Hernandez, his mind, and his brain, arguing that they surpass news and media stories and actually implicate debates about the growing influence of neuroscience in understandings of social problems, including crime.

Introduction

The life of former National Football League (NFL) player Aaron Hernandez is often characterized as a cautionary tale of sport and violence. After a standout collegiate career at the University of Florida, Hernandez spent 3 years as a member of the New England Patriots, during which he was considered one of the NFL’s most talented young superstars. In August 2012, he signed a 7-year, US$40 million contract extension with the Patriots—one of the most lucrative deals for someone of his age and playing position. Yet, in the first year of his new contract, Hernandez was arrested for the killing of Odin Lloyd, the boyfriend of his fiancée’s sister. He was subsequently convicted of first-degree murder in 2015 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. At the age of 27, 2 years into his life sentence, Hernandez died by suicide in his prison cell just days after being found not guilty of separate double homicide charges associated with the 2012 killings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado.

Given his celebrity status and the shocking details of the murder cases, Hernandez became the subject of intense media scrutiny and public commentary. This interest reflects a particular form of “celebrated criminality,” which Ruth Penfold-Mounce (2009: 8) has coined to explain relationships between the “cultural product of celebrity” and “the transgressive behavior of crime and deviance.” Following her suggestion to use case studies to unpack these dynamics, this analysis examines how the media coverage of events explained Hernandez’s violent acts, revealing two distinct narratives. On one hand, writers cite Hernandez’s reputation as a player with a penchant for finding trouble off the field, linking his violent acts to perceived “character issues,” histories of drug use, and a cast of objectionable associates from his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut. On the other, journalists and experts depict Hernandez’s criminality as resulting from severe brain damage that had developed throughout his football career, warping his personality and limiting his control over his emotional impulses. We illustrate how both narratives work to reduce complex relationships between bodies, behaviors, and social relations to matters of “fact.” In doing so, they suggest that the explanation for Hernandez’s criminal activities could be exclusively found in either the material composition of his damaged brain or through excavation of how his tumultuous background affected his psychological makeup.

Through the focus on Hernandez as the central actor in these narratives, he, a football player from a working-class background, emerges as a criminal who could have become an American success story—a narrative that has particular purchase in the context of men’s professional sport (see Carrington, 2010; Montez de Oca, 2012)—but lacked the fortitude to do so. The stories around Hernandez, although offering different explanations, reflect a key cultural dimension of neoliberalism and its emphasis on market-based solutions and personal responsibility: a resulting preoccupation with the individual, rather than structures, as the attributable source of his deviance (Ericson et al., 2000). Both lines of reasoning direct attention away from the political economic conditions that facilitated Hernandez’s celebrity status and criminal behavior.

Popular explanations of Hernandez’s behavior, although converging around a unique case, offer a contemporary example of tensions that scholars of crime, law, and popular culture have grappled with for more than 25 years. Richard Sherwin (1994: 47), for instance, states that efforts to narrate truth are not as “easily divorced from fiction” as we might believe; rather, “fictional models permeate factual discourse,” especially when explaining the role of persons implicated in criminalized acts and legal processes. Building criminal cases relies on more than evidence; they harness schemas and referential scripts to structure explanations in the absence of comprehensive knowledge of crime-related events. The resulting tendency is to follow straightforward “casual-linear” logics that draw on commonsensical beliefs and frameworks, which help “organize information in a particular order or sequence” (p. 50) so as to overcome complexities and inconsistencies surrounding cases. Michelle Brown and Nicole Rafter (2013) extend Sherwin’s point; they contend popular culture is actually constitutive—and not simply reflective—of crime as we (think we) know it. Popular culture is a public domain in which we not only engage and make sense of representations of crime, law, and social order, but also commit them to shared memory.

In this article, we build upon these observations by elucidating how both media narratives about Hernandez’s crimes evoke essentialized accounts, even as they attempt to explain behaviors in detailed and nuanced ways. First, journalists propose that Hernandez’s deviant acts were the product of his upbringing and social environment, attributing his delinquency to his surroundings and personal relationships. Yet these explanations draw largely on stereotypical depictions of life in the urban “ghetto,” implicating the vices and depravity of “the street” as the logical source of Hernandez’s violent tendencies. Second, the notion that football-related brain damage altered Hernandez’s mental state to induce violent compulsions reproduces problematic logics of neurocriminology, a field that “adapts neuroscientific methods . . . to make claims about crime, deviance, and aggression” and, in doing so, eschews social and environmental dimensions of crime in favor of internal explanations (Fallin et al., 2018: 2). Critically examining these competing narratives does not require uncovering indisputable “truths” about his life or determining what (or who) was responsible for the events leading up to his death. As David Leonard (2017) writes, “to reflect on the racial scripts and narratives directed at Aaron Hernandez is not about exonerating him or getting into his guilt or innocence” (p. 92). Instead, such an analysis entails deconstructing the production of truth claims in making sense of Hernandez’s actions and circumstances, which is the aim of this article.

In the pages that follow, we outline how analysis of Hernandez’s life and death builds upon and extends cultural criminological and socio-legal insights into the role of discourse, including celebrity, in constructions of crime (see Penfold-Mounce, 2009). We then elaborate upon the two narratives that emerge: (1) a subscription that social and environmental conditions contributed to the cultivation of Hernandez’s criminal mind, and (2) the notion that he could not regulate his behavior due to brain damage. After explaining both, we discuss how they operate to direct critical attention away from the influence of relevant institutions, particularly sport. We conclude by reflecting on epistemological tensions revealed through the analysis, which we argue exceed news and media stories and actually implicate debates about the growing influence of neuroscience in understanding social problems, including crime.

Reading the texts of crime in the case of Aaron Hernandez

Attempts to make sense of Hernandez’s actions and motivations prior to his death reflect broader tensions around how we come to know and understand crime. According to Alison Young (1996), onlookers, including journalists and criminologists, never really “know” crime, because it is not so much tangible as it “imagined.” By “imagined,” she refers to “the written and the pictorial: the linguistic turns and tricks, the framing and editing devices in and through which crime becomes a topic, obtains and retains its place in discourse” (Young, 1996: 16). Crime is thus “mediated as text” (p. 16). As such, and despite attempts to categorize and deconstruct criminal acts, the complex confluence of factors that contribute to actions and circumstances that become crime are often beyond our grasp. Our knowledge of what makes crime “happen” is always partial and incomplete. We therefore begin our inquiry into Hernandez’s crimes by recognizing they materialize through language, images, and ideas. In this particular case, our knowledge comes from interpretations of narratives constituted through media representations of legal proceedings, news and personal stories, and criminological practices.

The texts analyzed here reveal a co-mingling of evidence, including both scientific findings and documented testimonials, with social categories of difference and sport-specific ideologies and beliefs. We heed Jay Aronson and Simon Cole’s (2009: 606) advice that even though law often “perpetuates a notion of ‘science’ as a category of knowledge characterized by epistemological certainty,” it is important to query the authority attributed to science in these contexts, paying particular attention to what kinds of science are rendered as purveyors of truth, as well as how, when, and to what ends. The pursuit of truth is “a consequence of the ways different claims are given credibility” (McMullen, 2007: 26) and is “almost always implicated in political and communicative processes involving perception, representation, and interpretation” (p. 23). With these insights in mind, we maintain a critical focus on the intersectional dimensions of the media narratives surrounding Hernandez, attending to how they selectively render some vectors of marginalization visible (e.g. race, ethnicity, sexuality) while overlooking other considerations. Cultivating an intersectional sensibility (see Han, 2006) is to approach “crime as a constitutive object.” That is, rather than pursue “a complete picture of crime,” intersectionality embraced in this way “forces us to confront race, gender, and crime as ghostly subjects with experiences we cannot know in full” (Henne and Troshynski, 2013: 467).

We adapt an intersectional sensibility using Steven Woolgar and Javier Lezaun’s situated approach to studying how objects come into being. Studying context, they contend, is “too quickly . . . regarded as sufficient explanations of what is happening” (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2013: 327). Objects “cannot be accounted for by reference to the external circumstances of their existence. Rather, objects are brought into being” and “crystallize, provisionally, a particular reality” (pp. 323–324). Woolgar and Lezaun (2013) suggest analysis of the “organization of texts” evinced through news stories and other media can shed light on these constitutive relations (p. 330). We thus examine Hernandez and his crimes as emerging differentially within and across reports, coming into being as new developments, forms of evidence, and knowledge about his past become fashioned and refashioned in and through narrative explanations.

To capture and unpack the ways in which Hernandez’s crimes come into being, we examined 112 news stories clustered around specific flashpoints in his life: his arrest (26 June 2013), trial and conviction (August 2013 to April 2015), death (19 April 2017), and scientists’ announcement that they had diagnosed him with a degenerative brain disease postmortem (9 November 2017). These sources were collected through strategic online searches structured around date ranges corresponding with the key events in Hernandez’s life story listed above. In doing so, we consider them alongside other forms of popular culture they reference, such as the documentary film about his life, Aaron Hernandez Uncovered. These inclusions are important, as Penfold-Mounce (2009: 3) notes, because “media images . . . abound in number and type” conveying “reality and fiction side by side and complicating interpretation, presentation and representation.” Accordingly, the sample includes a range of mediated narratives. The examples presented in the sections that follow best represent the two overarching narratives that emerged as our findings. As such, they tend to be drawn from print media sources, but, even as written textual snapshots, they still reveal how explanations of Hernandez’s acts of crime and deviance changed over time and the cultural conditions that inform them.

A criminal mind: “football’s Al Capone”

Media coverage of Hernandez’s suicide reflects conflicted reactions to his death. Journalists often invoke the language of tragedy but express ambivalence about how to respond to Hernandez’s demise. Breer (2017), for example, writes in Sports Illustrated that Hernandez’s suicide “can’t easily be characterized as a tragedy. A convicted killer taking his own life won’t elicit much sympathy from the public, and quite honestly it shouldn’t.” Finn (2017), a writer for Boston.com, similarly asserts that “Aaron Hernandez is a tragedy, but a self-inflicted one . . . He did this, every last brutal plot-twist, to himself.” These types of responses built upon a larger media discourse that frames Hernandez as responsible for his actions and narrates his downfall as resulting from a series of bad choices. Writing for Sports Illustrated, Rosenberg (2016) describes Hernandez’s older brother, Jonathan, as witnessing all of Aaron’s “. . . poor choices, all the unwise associations that led to murder.” Finn (2017), substantiates this claim: “Hernandez knew right from wrong” and “always tried to cover up the wrongs, but never stopped choosing them.” Such individualized, moralizing explanations depict Hernandez as a “diagnostic object” and employ “vocabularies of the therapeutic” to do so, which, according to Nikolas Rose (1999: 217–218), have “become a staple fare of the mass media of communication.” Furthermore, as other criminologists have noted, neoliberal values reinscribe this individualized focus, which are often reified in media depictions of crime (e.g. Cavendar et al., 2010). Media analyses of Hernandez’s demise reflect a particular attempt at explaining his individual responsibility: by deconstructing his psychological makeup to understand how the life of a football star could take such a catastrophic turn. They thus evince the wider internalization of “psy” disciplines has become a primary mode through which to understand, responsibilize, and govern subjects (Rose, 1999).

Accordingly, many commentators depict Hernandez’s violent, delinquent behavior as evidence of underlying psychological dysfunction. Dolloff (2016) asserts that “[Hernandez’s] mind [was] clearly warped by his apparent criminal instincts.” Writers refer to Hernandez as a “sociopath” (Breer, 2017; Dolloff, 2016; Finn, 2017), “a murderously angry man” (Borges and Solotaroff, 2013), “a bad seed” (Volin, 2013), and a “bad man” who “ran wild” (Breer, 2017). Yet, to reiterate the psychological origins of Hernandez’s violent behavior, these representations often reference popular culture, including comparisons to infamous criminals and sadistic film characters. Finn (2017) calls Hernandez “a 27-year-old ‘Scarface’ wannabe” (referencing the bloodthirsty main character from the film of the same name), whereas Rosenberg (2016) maps Hernandez’s transition from ‘the kid who wanted to be everybody’s friend’ to ‘football’s Al Capone.’ These and similar allusions invoke a form of sensationalized storytelling in which historical figures and fictional characters serve as symbolic benchmarks for the depth of a criminal’s malevolence.

These types of sensationalized renderings, according to Calavita (2010), “permeate cultural vernacular in the United States” (p. 30), informing not only how we relate to and understand crime and justice, but also those who we see as perpetrators. As Leonard (2017: 93) explains, representations of Hernandez as “inherently evil” and “a ticking time bomb” are co-constructed with racialized ¹ characterizations of him as a “gangsta” and a “thug.” Leonard compares these representations of Hernandez, a heavily tattooed and physically imposing man of Puerto Rican heritage, to media coverage of former South African Olympic and Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, a White Afrikaner man who was convicted of shooting and killing his White girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp (see also Biber, 2018). According to Leonard (2017), journalists offer a more sympathetic depiction of Pistorius’ downfall: it was a tragic shift from heroic Olympian to convicted killer, a fall from grace precipitated by an unfortunate one-off event. The initial depictions of Pistorius are thus a stark contrast to the racialized portrayals of Hernandez, which frame his criminal acts as an unsurprising outcome of his life of drugs and violence. Highlighting these differences is not meant, as Leonard explains, to dispute the relevant autobiographical details associated with each case, but rather to demonstrate how they are represented through a racialized lens, one that depicts Hernandez as inherently prone to violence.

Indeed, some writers drew explicitly from racial stereotypes when explaining Hernandez’s deviance (e.g. Borges and Solotaroff, 2013; Whitlock, 2013), while other accounts more subtly foregrounded details about his drug use, fascination with guns, and friendships with ex-convicts. Autobiographical details make strong allusions to race when situated within journalists’ attempts to trace Hernandez’s demise back to his troublesome upbringing in his hometown of Bristol. They reflect a shortcoming that Anthony Ellis (2016) observes in relation to explanations of masculinity and crime more generally: that they tend to attribute criminality to rational subjects or the unfortunate poor who are conditioned through social labeling. Consider, for example, how Borges and Solotaroff (2013) in Rolling Stone underscore how Hernandez spent time as a teenager in a “roughneck stretch” of town and referred to members of his social circle as “thug-life cohorts from Bristol.” Pennington (2017) calls Bristol Hernandez’s “hardscrabble” hometown and refers to Hernandez’s “Bristol associates” as “small-time ne’er-do-wells [Hernandez] knew from the old neighborhood.” Through these representations of Hernandez’s story, Bristol is essentialized as a socio-spatial signifier for a set of cultural ills and nefarious characters that negatively impacted his life. Borges and Solotaroff (2013) reinforce this rationale when they ask, “why does Bristol, the town that time forgot, keep landing in the middle of this lurid story?” Here, “Bristol” stands in for the collection of spaces, people, experiences, and behaviors that seemingly reinforce Hernandez’s ties to his hometown. Breer (2017) writes that at the University of Florida, “Hernandez’s coaches knew what lurked back in his hometown and tried to keep him in Gainesville during breaks in the school calendar,” whereas a former college coach of Hernandez explained to Rolling Stone that “Bristol had [Hernandez] for 17 [years] before he came to [the University of Florida]” and that his objectionable upbringing had “trumped” any positive lessons imparted by coaching staff. As Rosenberg (2016) summarizes, “If you believe Aaron Hernandez grew up to be evil, then the murder of Odin Lloyd began here [in Bristol].”

The situating of Hernandez within an undesirable urban landscape draws on broader symbolic processes through which place and space are actively racialized (Bonnett and Nayak, 2003). These framings exemplify the “ghettocentric logics” through which Black and Brown athletic bodies are unproblematically assumed to be products of the US ghetto, a fetishized space romanticized for generating fearless, street-tested athletes yet demonized as responsible for athletes’ patterns of illicit behavior (Mower et al., 2014). Yet these portrayals of Hernandez’s life in Bristol also reproduce a form of “perilous masculinity” observed in criminology (de la Tierra, 2016). According to de la Tierra, the racialized script of perilous masculinity suggests that men who come into adulthood in “the street” are socialized to respond to their precarious existence through performances of violence, crime, and male chauvinism and are therefore predisposed to poor life outcomes.

Media portrayals of Bristol frame Hernandez as the embodiment of perilous masculinity, implying that his spatial and cultural location was largely to blame for his delinquent lifestyle and criminal mind. When offering his version of the events that precipitated Hernandez’s violent acts, Shawn Courchesne notes that Hernandez’s family “didn’t live in the best area of Bristol and they weren’t wealthy,” and asserts that “obviously if you live in an area like that there are going be [negative] influences” (Kahler, 2017; emphasis added). That the connection between Hernandez’s geographic location and harmful influences is obvious for Courchesne exemplifies the logic of perilous masculinity, in which the values and vices of “the street” are ever-present factors negatively shaping men’s lives. Journalists also evoke perilous masculinity as an explanation when explaining Hernandez’s reaction to the untimely death of his father, Dennis, who died following routine surgery when Aaron was 16 years old. Writers depict Dennis’ death as an emotionally devastating and traumatic event that irreversibly shaped Aaron’s personality and outlook on life.

Members of Hernandez’s family also acknowledge that Aaron began using drugs to help himself cope with the loss of his father. Rather than delve into relationships informing these transformations, media representations cast Aaron as choosing street life in the absence of a father figure. Articles outline how Dennis was primarily responsible for protecting Aaron from the violent, “unscrupulous” (Breer, 2017) individuals who lived in their neighborhood; these stories assert that, without Dennis’ guidance and protection, it was seemingly inevitable that Aaron would be swept up into Bristol’s seedy underbelly of violence, drugs, and crime. ² As de la Tierra explains, representations of perilous masculinity do not capture the complexity and diversity of masculinities across urban spaces and instead construct specific types of deviant behaviors or actors as representative of life within “ghetto” communities.

As a foundational schema used to make sense of Hernandez’s actions, perilous masculinity underlies journalists’ attempts to untangle the psychosocial roots of his demise. Collectively, these explanations render the source of Hernandez’s deviance as his early exposure to problematic values and behaviors he then carried with him throughout his adult life and football career. Such narratives revolve around the perceived influence of powerful external social forces that irreversibly shaped Hernandez’s life, as he internalized them and developed abnormal psychological traits. This form of storytelling parallels criminological attempts to connect criminal behavior to psychosocial development, with journalists mobilizing narrative devices that draw on larger cultural scripts regarding the origins of deviance. Yet these versions, represented as “factual” accounts of Hernandez’s life, are stories, revealing how “fictional models permeate factual discourse” (Sherwin, 1994: 47). In this instance, tacit beliefs about perilous masculinity are not simply deployed to bolster causal links; they also aid in co-constructing crime and criminals. In other words, Hernandez, as a criminalistic figure, becomes through texts—which, as we discuss in the next section, are not limited to psychosocial explanations.

A damaged brain: “Is CTE a defense for murder?”

In September 2017, 5 months after his death, neuroscientists from Boston University announced that Hernandez had been diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative condition linked to repetitive brain trauma that can currently only be identified postmortem (see McKee et al., 2015). While the capacity to connect CTE pathology to lived symptoms is still developing, individuals diagnosed with CTE have commonly exhibited noticeable cognitive and emotional decline, as well as problems with aggression and impulse control (Baugh et al., 2014). CTE’s connection to sports has intensified through the suicides of several well-known athletes, including football players Junior Seau and Dave Duerson, who were diagnosed with CTE postmortem. Some experts, however, fiercely contest any perceived causal relationship between CTE and sport-related brain injury; they claim that not enough is known about CTE to draw conclusions about its prevalence among athletes or confirm that the disease is a direct result of brain trauma (see Ventresca, 2020). The status of CTE as a condition clouded by scientific uncertainty has not disrupted the broader notion that observed neuropathology can explain deviant behavior. Hernandez offers an exemplary case in point, as scientific explanations became grounds for attributing biological reasons for his wrongdoings.

Hernandez’s diagnosis was based on postmortem analyses of his brain conducted by Ann McKee, the neuropathologist whose work has been central to the development of CTE as a neuroscientific and cultural phenomenon. Two months after the initial announcement, McKee held a press conference, revealing that Hernandez was classified with Stage III CTE (with Stage IV being the most severe) and that his brain represented the most extreme case of the disease her lab had observed in a person under the age of 46. Media coverage of the announcement emphasizes this distinction: CNN, Associated Press, and Washington Post ran stories about the press conference with almost identical headlines, declaring that Hernandez suffered from “the most severe” (Kilgore, 2017), “most extreme” (Associated Press, 2017), and “worst” (Kounang, 2017) CTE ever diagnosed in someone his age. Throughout McKee’s presentation, images of Hernandez’s brain flashed on the large projector screen behind her. The Washington Post reports that audience members gasped in disbelief with the appearance of each new slide displaying the extent of damage to the brain tissue (Kilgore, 2017). Brain images are central to neuroscientific discourses as they support truth claims, which scientists often make and explain in relation to data (Dumit, 2004). Images accompanying stories about the press conference showed McKee standing in front of the screen, which displayed a slide juxtaposing Hernandez’s atrophied, discolored brain tissue with the larger, healthy brain of a “normal” 27-year-old. In doing so, as Dumit (2004) notes, the meanings attributed to brain images changed when mobilized in these media narratives: they became proof rather than supplementary information. Here, the decontextualized images of “normal” brains served as the basis for provocative visual comparison through which lay audiences could see the magnitude of McKee’s findings in the absence of comprehensive scientific data. The power of these images reinforced the gravity of the scientific claims McKee made in the press conference.

Accounts describe how McKee highlighted the severe degeneration specific to the brain’s frontal lobes, explaining that these regions are “very important for decision-making, judgment, and cognition” (Kilgore, 2017). They also emphasize how she elaborated that Hernandez did not show evidence of other brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, and that every aspect of their analysis uncovered what she described as “classic CTE” (Kounang, 2017). McKee did, however, add a caveat: she indicated that she could not confirm whether the damage to Hernandez’s brain was responsible for his violent actions, stating that neuropathological findings alone do not explain Hernandez’s behavior. Yet, when doing so, McKee commented that while she was not going to “connect the dots with his behavior or difficulties during life,” she could confirm that individuals with CTE of the severity found in Hernandez’s brain “have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses for aggression, emotional volatility, [and] rage behaviors” (Kounang, 2017). Thus, even with this caveat, her words reinforce an explanatory narrative that follows a causal-linear logic (Sherwin, 1994). Despite journalists’ mention of McKee’s unwillingness to “connect the dots” between Hernandez’s criminalistic behavior and his CTE diagnosis, the framing and tone of the coverage imply strongly that the extent of damage to his brain matched the severity of his crimes.

Media stories connecting Hernandez’s crimes to his CTE diagnosis followed these announcements. Hernandez’s attorney, Jose Baez, features centrally in much of this coverage. Articles often quote Baez as expressing regret for not introducing arguments around CTE during Hernandez’s murder trials and stating that, in hindsight, he had witnessed Hernandez display many behaviors characteristic of CTE symptoms. An editorial in the New York Times, written by law professors Amy Dillard and Lisa Tucker (2017) and published under the provocative headline, “Is CTE a defense for murder?,” similarly argues that information about the behavioral manifestations of CTE could have swayed the jury’s thinking in Hernandez’s 2015 murder trial. Their commentary questions whether Hernandez should be held responsible for his actions when CTE is known to comprise a person’s cognitive and emotional state, concluding,

Because of the post-mortem CTE diagnosis, we now know there was substantial evidence that Mr. Hernandez should not have been convicted of first-degree murder. Given the conclusive diagnosis of Stage 3 CTE, it is likely that a lifetime of playing football—not Mr. Hernandez’s will—was to blame.

These comments reflect Spivak’s (2018) assertion that the Hernandez case has facilitated movement toward CTE’s incorporation into a version of the insanity defense, with neuroscientists serving as expert witnesses to establish (or refute) a defendant’s diminished capacity or responsibility.

CTE has yet to be deployed successfully as a criminal defense, but the impact of the “CTE Defense” may be more substantial in informing cultural imaginings of criminal behavior. Indeed, immediately after Hernandez’s April 2017 death, months before McKee’s formal diagnosis, journalists speculated about how a future CTE diagnosis might change his status under the law (e.g. McCann, 2017). More recently, journalists reported on the possibility that lawyers might incorporate CTE into their defense of Kellen Winslow Jr, a former NFL player convicted of sexual assault, rape, and kidnapping (e.g. McCann, 2018; Perez, 2018). Although Winslow was 35 years old and had not been formally diagnosed with CTE, the notion that brain damage could contribute to reduced mental capacity is a focal point of media coverage of his trial. The viability of such a legal strategy for Winslow is almost always articulated through comparisons with Aaron Hernandez, as both men’s crimes seemed particularly egregious and lacking in self-control.

These developments are part of a wider shift in understandings of the brain and its capacity. Neuroscience and neuropathology are gaining explanatory traction across a range of social problems, legal adjudications of culpability, and studies of crime (Fallin et al., 2018; Pitts-Taylor, 2016). It is a trend often referred to as “neurocriminology,” the proponents of which posit “knowledge claims that stress the neurological dimensions of crime in order to position themselves in opposition to mainstream criminology” (Fallin et al., 2018: 3). As part of a revival in explanations of crime “preoccupied with human differences” (Rafter, 2008: 246), neurocriminology, according to Mallory Fallin et al. (2018: 2–3), has notable consequences in which

the bio eclipses the social . . . The result is an account of crime that transforms a multitude of social, environmental, and behavioral processes into neurological dysfunction. Among other things, this depoliticizes crime and elides the interaction between the criminal justice system and social structural factors . . . Consequently, along with producing knowledge, neurocriminologists simultaneously produce ignorance regarding the social.

Following neurocriminological reasoning, and in contrast to the established narrative linking Hernandez’s violence to psychosocial factors, commentators hold up the football player’s damaged brain as evidence for a different accounting of events. The convergence of scientific, legal, and media discourses effectively re-coded Hernandez’s crimes and re-positioned him as victim of violence in addition to perpetrator. For some writers, Hernandez’s CTE diagnosis facilitated a new understanding of his culpability through which issues of morality became translated into ones of capability. His damaged brain not only became an indicator that he could not be held fully responsible for his actions, but also became physical evidence that could potentially implicate institutions, such as the NFL and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), that arguably failed to protect him from the harms of football (Gregory, 2017). This change in subject position, however, flattens the social and political contexts of crime as Fallin and colleagues describe, reducing complex cultural processes to matters of the brain.

Some reports did contest suggestions that CTE played a role in Hernandez’s downfall by reasserting the significance of his longer history of delinquency and attributing them to psychosocial factors. Commentators issue reminders about the complexity of human experience, especially when dealing with atypical or extraordinary circumstances. The Hartford Courant quotes NFL spokesperson Joe Lockhart who acknowledged that Hernandez’s “personal story is complex. It doesn’t lend itself to simple answers” (Doyle, 2017). In a similar vein, Alan Schwarz (2017), in a piece for Deadspin called “The ‘CTE drove Aaron Hernandez’ narrative is too convenient, and dangerous,” writes that “behavior at the individual level is too complicated, deriving from one’s parents, environment, trauma, experiences, genetics and so much more, to let CTE or anything stand alone as the explanation for their actions.” Statements about the complexity of CTE and violence as neuropsychological phenomena reflect broader media discourses portraying the science around CTE (and any cause-and-effect relationship between football and brain damage) to be uncertain (Ventresca, 2019). These explanations indeed disrupt a neurocriminological reading of Hernandez’s demise, openly questioning the notion that brain degeneration was exclusively—or even principally—responsible for Hernandez’s acts of violence. Instead, causal inferences about CTE were supplanted by more complex, non-linear frames suggesting that Hernandez’s psychology and social environment offer alternative—and arguably superior—explanations regarding the origins of his deviance.

Yet these challenges to the explanatory power of CTE return to familiar narratives that foreground the psychosocial determinants of his criminality. Schwarz (2017), for example, cites Hernandez’s “long-time sociopathy” as evidence that his violent behavior was not exclusively induced by the gradual degeneration of his brain. Tomase (2017) writes that there may be “an element of truth” to the suggestion that CTE shaped Hernandez’s behavior, but the more realistic explanation for Hernandez’s violent acts is that he was a “psychopath.” In a Sports Illustrated article titled “Don’t be so quick to label CTE as the reason for Aaron Hernandez’s behavior,” Rosenberg (2017) argues that in the death of Dennis Hernandez, possible post-traumatic stress disorder, associating with “a different crowd,” drug use, and “character concerns” were more likely than CTE to have contributed to Aaron’s violent dispositions. Whitley (2017) concurs, concluding his article titled “Aaron Hernandez had a criminal mind before CTE,” by declaring “. . . Hernandez would have been a thug if he’d never played a down [of football] after high school.” Taken together, these statements reaffirm a narrative that reiterates Hernandez’s individual culpability for his actions. Most definitively, Tomase (2017) argues for greater recognition that “perhaps Hernandez played a role in his downfall,” had “some personal responsibility for his actions,” and “deserves blame for his life choices.” Although dispelling the logics of biological determinism and neurocriminology, such explanations revert to causal-linear trajectories of a different sort, pinpointing specific characteristics, events, or circumstances as leading to Hernandez’s downfall while obscuring other factors. While attentive to some dimensions of social context and the complexity of human experience, these narratives selectively draw their evidence from individualized tropes of criminality, perilous masculinity, and athletic success.

Reading Hernandez as a body of evidence: football and failed redemption

Thus far, we have mapped out two narrative explanations within the media discourse around Hernandez’s criminality. What we have not yet explored is how these portrayals of Hernandez’s downfall, which tend to focus on his individual mind/brain and body, take front stage in ways that draw attention away other institutional considerations. In particular, they relay a functionalist conceptualization of sport; that is, sport goes unquestioned as a positive and progressive force, one that can provide poor athletes of color an opportunity for social mobility if they work hard, play by the rules, and demonstrate upstanding moral character. Sport, at least within the US cultural imaginary, is often envisioned as enabling individual transformation by nurturing values of masculine strength and toughness and as fostering positive character development by promoting determination, discipline, and respect for authority (Messner, 1990; Oates, 2017). Films, such as The Blind Side, reinforce these stories of redemption by celebrating athletes of color portrayed as taking advantage of opportunities in sport to escape not only poverty and marginalization, but also the social ills of their past lives in undesirable communities (Montez de Oca, 2012). These tales of individual achievement, however, locate football outside forms of structural and institutional racism that shape opportunities for social and economic mobility, within and beyond sport. Conveying colorblind ideologies of achievement through fortitude, they render athletes’ failures to take advantage of the socioeconomic promise of sport as resulting from poor choices or a lack of work ethic and self-discipline (Carrington, 2010; Mower et al., 2014). Collectively, these ideologies, also observed in socio-legal spheres (e.g. Crenshaw, 1988), hegemonically reinforce myths about social mobility: they reframe people of color’s systematic oppression as if it is the result of individual decisions and actions made free from the constraints of structural marginalization. In short, they reinforce tacit beliefs in racialized inferiority. In this case, as we discuss in this section, Hernandez is not so much a fall from grace story, but an unsurprising failure, one that media stories depict as an unfortunate return to his seemingly “true” self.

These ideological tensions surface in representations of Hernandez’s football career, which often construct important life milestones as central to his pursuit of redemption and self-transformation. Many articles document how Hernandez’s late selection in the fourth round of the 2010 NFL draft was a result of teams dismissing him, despite his immense talent, because of perceived immaturity and “character issues” (Borges and Solotaroff, 2013; Hohler, 2018; Kilgore, 2017; Rosenberg, 2016). When Hernandez was drafted by the New England Patriots, his career trajectory becomes entangled with the mythology of coach Bill Belichick and “The Patriot Way”—a set of values largely credited with the team’s continuous success under Belichick. Often depicted as a cerebral coach with a revered coaching philosophy, Belichick is renowned for his ability to rehabilitate players with histories of bad behavior. While formal articulations of the Patriot Way are hard to come by, it is often represented as promoting internal competition, accountability, selflessness, and winning above all else (Faulk, 2017). The logic behind the Patriot Way is that players, even those with blighted personal histories or “character issues,” fall in line because they come to embrace the promise of success and adopt Belichick’s unique philosophy of putting the team first.

Consider, for example, the coverage of Hernandez’s US$40 million contract extension in 2012. Many stories quote him speaking to the transformative potential of the Patriot Way (e.g. Reiss, 2013):

[Being a New England Patriot] changed me as a person, because you can’t come here and act reckless. I was one of those persons. I came here and might have acted the way I wanted to act. But you get changed by Bill Belichick’s way. You get changed by the Patriot Way.

Hernandez also explains that his engagement to Shayanna Jenkins and birth of their daughter, Avielle, inspired him to break his pattern of reckless behavior (Hughes, 2012). As such, the signs of him “settling down” take on explicitly heteronormative contours, with the move toward establishing a nuclear family operating as a symbol of responsibility and stability.

Following Hernandez’s arrest and ongoing rumors of his homosexual tendencies, his actions and past assertions become read as evidence of betrayal. Writers would frequently cite these and similar statements following Hernandez’s arrest proof that he had manipulated the Patriots and their fans into believing he had undergone such a transformation and abandoned the reckless ways of his past (Bishop, 2013; Breer, 2017; Healy, 2018; Kahler, 2017; Leonard, 2017; Reiss, 2013). Articles include quotes from Patriots’ owner Bob Kraft, who declared that he and the entire Patriots organization had been “duped” by Hernandez. In comments reflecting the power of sport-based narratives of redemption, Reiss remembers that Hernandez’s perceived transformation “seemed like a feel-good story at the time,” whereas Breer writes that he, too, had “bought the story that [Hernandez] had turned his life around hook, line, and sinker.” Others, such as Wetzel (2017), characterize Hernandez as “turning his back on a dream life in the NFL,” while Finn (2017) affirms that Hernandez “deliberately snuffed out” his own potential as an athlete. Some accounts at the time offer retrospective investigations into Hernandez’s days at the University of Florida, speculating if his behavior there predicted his eventual ruin (Borges and Solotaroff, 2013; Breer, 2017; Kilgore, 2017). Borges and Solotaroff even claim that Hernandez’s inability to change under the guidance of devout leaders, such as coach Urban Meyer and teammate Tim Tebow, demonstrated the depth of his immaturity and psychological dysfunction.

Dominant representations of the Hernandez story tend to render football as a space that provided him with opportunities for mentorship, social mobility, and self-transformation. Acknowledgment of any destructive or harmful influences related to his football career is largely limited to the severity of neurological damage afflicting his brain. While some journalists criticize individual coaches, such as Belichick and Meyer, for willfully turning a blind eye to Hernandez’s patterns of bad behavior (Borges and Solotaroff, 2013; Breer, 2017; Whitlock, 2013), few writers interrogate the structures and values of American football as contributing to Hernandez’s fate. Dominguez (2017), a notable exception, does write that Hernandez’s trajectory “cannot be divorced from the institutions that shaped him, from his family to his football teams, and the values they instilled in him.” Specifically, Dominguez details how Hernandez gravitated toward a “dangerous ideology of self-reliance and toxic masculinity” during his time at the University of Florida, framing the corporate structure of college football as enabling him to act upon his violent, aggressive impulses without consequence. University of Florida powerbrokers, according to Dominguez’s account, were inclined to protect Hernandez from reprimand “as long as he was an excellent player and a good employee.”

Some writers pick up this critical line of inquiry into institutions of professional sport and their influence on Hernandez’s trajectory. For example, articles from the 2018 Boston Globe Spotlight investigation into Hernandez’s death similarly highlight how the corporate culture of the NFL negatively shaped his life (Hohler, 2018; Hohler and Wen, 2018; Pfeiffer, 2018). Hohler and Wen (2018) represent Hernandez as a “damning example of the indifference big-time football often shows to the price some of its players pay.” Pfeiffer (2018) extends the analysis, including comments from sociologist Jeffrey Montez de Oca, who affirms that Hernandez’s descent demonstrates how “individual players and their wellbeing are not a priority for the NFL” and that Hernandez became “the product of an institution (the NFL) that’s highly exploitative of poor young men.” Although making similar observations as other excavations of Hernandez’s life, these select few reports challenge dominant narratives of redemption through sport. Specifically, they illuminate how football, as an institution, relies on exploitative practices that create harmful environments for athletes in precarious circumstances. As few journalists interrogate how football’s celebration of hyper-masculine dominance and aggression might have affected Hernandez’s toxic relationship with violence, depictions of the sport’s culture of self-discipline and hard work emerge unproblematically as an antidote to Hernandez’s reckless deviance.

Coverage about Hernandez’s sexuality reinscribed his deviance from sport norms and values. After his death, as reports that Hernandez had a long-standing history of sexual relationships with men surfaced, journalists speculated about how questions about his own sexuality might have shaped his violent dispositions. Published investigations largely focused on internal contradictions that impacted Hernandez’s psychology. Pfeiffer (2018), for instance, describes Hernandez as being “conflicted with his sexuality”; Healy (2018) similarly writes that “Hernandez also projected contradictory sides of himself. For a young man grappling with his sexual identity, he was prone to going on homophobic rants.” Hohler and Wen (2018) relay comments from Aaron’s brother, Jonathan, who, in light of revelations about his brother’s sexuality, lamented how the Hernandez home environment was “deeply homophobic.” Mostly absent from this media discourse were attempts to situate Hernandez’s navigation of his sexuality within the culture of hegemonic masculinity and compulsory heterosexuality within professional football, a discriminatory context that has been well-documented by sports scholars (e.g. Brody, 2019; Oates, 2017). Furthermore, such an analysis would require considering how challenges facing non-heterosexual athletes intersect with gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities that shape life as an elite football player.

Instead, the narratives that inform the Hernandez story selectively and strategically explore issues of socioeconomic inequality and structural violence. Even when journalists probe elements of the social conditions surrounding Hernandez’s downfall, their stories support causal-linear narratives reliant on tropes of perilous masculinity, neurocriminological reasoning, or sport-based stories of redemption. In doing so, these accounts—like Hernandez’s life and actions—are both etched and shaped by structural, discursive, and embodied terrains of violence. How Hernandez navigated these entangled forms of violence is arguably more complex than reporting suggests. Take, for example, his suicide note, the language of which suggests he chose to die so that his fiancée and daughter could receive remuneration through his remaining football contract. His death appears to be a calculation: acquitted of double homicide and appealing another charge, Hernandez could be deemed “innocent” at the time of death and thus in compliance with the terms of his agreement with the Patriots. ³ His suicide can therefore be understood as a final agentive act, one that was arguably not possible in life, as he died believing he was innocent before the law.

The narratives analyzed here provide mere glimpses into the violence Hernandez managed and exercised in life. They fail to attend to how they can be understood as constitutive of who Hernandez was in both life and death. For instance, in reports, the violence of football is primarily actualized in the form of brain trauma, not as an inherent and multifaceted dimension of sport (see Dunning, 1999; Young, 2019). Violent crime is cast as something perpetuated by individuals, that is, rooted in their minds and brains, not in social problems linked to structural inequalities. The roles of racism, homophobia, social class, and masculinity operate as scripts that aid in understanding Hernandez’s pathology, not as oppressive systems of which Hernandez too was a victim. In short, discourse articulates violence as an instrumental issue, not as a systemic concern.

Conclusion

This article offers a critical attempt to make sense of Hernandez as a criminalized celebrity who embodies a particular form of celebrated criminality and to illustrate how his crimes become attributed to his mind and brain. Although one narrative reflects a stronger psychosocial emphasis and the other is a neurocriminological one, they both reduce a complex story to one of two key assumptions: that his violent actions were the result of pathological mind influenced by a troubled upbringing linked to a specific cultural environment or brain damage. The absences within both become particularly important. They provide gaps for readily available scripts and schemata to fill in seemingly logical ways, as Sherwin (1994) explains, and they also eschew complicated manifestations of violence, including sport, that inform Hernandez’s life and death, which Fallin et al. (2018) suggest is symptomatic of neurocriminological explanations. Moreover, both reflect neoliberal cultural tendencies that emphasize individuality in relation to one’s failure or success within capitalistic enterprises, of which professional football is a clear exemplar in the United States.

As these narratives fail to interrogate the epistemological or ontological assumptions on which they rest, we conclude by reflecting on their implications. Explanations that render deviant behaviors as located in the brain and perilous masculinity as a predeterminant of violence depoliticize crime and delinquency at a hegemonic level. Drawing on commonsensical frameworks, they, for the most part, focus on criminalistic manifestations in the body as evidence of deviance rather than query how institutions enable (and even celebrate) certain kinds of delinquency, masculine violence, and exploitation. In short, they foreclose a deeper interrogation of conditions to which political and social interventions could respond. Moreover, despite the causal assertions found within the narratives analyzed here, some details remain awkwardly unexplained, particularly around Hernandez’s motives and their possible connection to his sexuality. In fact, ambiguity still circulates around the reasons behind his actions. Hernandez remains what Young (1996) describes as an unruly body, a criminalized figure that “displays itself as non-juridical, outside the realm of legal rules” (p. 77). This unruliness carries over into the challenges of trying to explain Hernandez’s criminality. He embodies contradictions of sport, violence, and masculinity, and his actions in life transcend the scripts ascribed to them.

As such, we believe the struggle to make sense of Hernandez offers a productive disruption, especially in light of assertions about the growing influence of neurocriminology. Some scholars contend the focus on the “neuro” (as opposed to the “psy”) has given way to a materially grounded emphasis on the brain. Fallin et al. (2018) argue that it contributes to an increasing disregard of the social, while Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) contend it is symptomatic of a larger ontological shift that erodes the cultural subscription to a mind/body divide. This analysis of Hernandez reveals that these scholarly observations are perhaps not as palpable as they suggest. Instead, the imaginings of crime—explored here through media narratives—are resistant to a wholesale embrace of material explanations of crime. Neurocriminology may substantiate some responsibilizing narratives, but authors do cast doubt on the extent to which they can explain Hernandez’s crimes. Brain-centric explanations of crime gain traction when they resonate with existing popular cultural references, narrative arcs, and tacit beliefs about perilous masculinity. Writers contest them when they appear overdeterministic or depart from accepted scripts and schemata. It is perhaps not surprising then that the trope of perilous masculinity retains its purchase, for it seems to convey complexity while still reinforcing naturalized beliefs about race, class, masculinity, and sport.