Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Is it just me -- either my definitions being a bit off or my being the only one who notices -- or does it strike else as odd that television news reporters and anchors keep referring to those known to have committed crimes as "suspects", and to those merely suspected or accused of comitting crimes as "alleged suspects"? Shouldn't that be "perpetrators" and "suspects", respectively? I've been thinking about this for quite a while; posting at just this moment in particular was trigerred by turning on the television for the noon news and hearing "alleged suspect" as one of the first phrases I caught.

It seems to me that a person of known identity (to some deegree of 'known') under investigation and suspected of having perpetrated a crime, or perhaps already charged but not yet tried, is a suspect, and that the person of known partial description according to the victim, but unknown identity so far, is an unidentified perpetrator (or possibly "alleged perpetrator" if the victim's description is suspect). And when all that's known is that somebody done somethin' wrong but nobody has any idea who it was yet, that unknown person is the mysterious, unknown perpetrator but there are not yet any suspects. Hearing an unknown perpetrator's known acts described as what "the suspect" did when there are no leads and no suspects yet sounds Rather Strange to me.

What to call the person who has been tried and convicted and later (or earlier) admitted that sie did do what sie was accused of, is another question. If you take the epistemological approach and wish to emphasize that only the accused (and, if not the same person, the actual perpetrator) knows for sure whether the conviction was just and the admission truthful, I suppose you could continue to describe hir as "the suspect". But in many cases I would feel more comfortable simply saying "the perpetrator" (or, if the accused still denies guilt and has even a shred of credibility, "the alleged perpetrator").

A more interesting case, by the way, is when there is no doubt as to who did what but the question of whether what was done broke the law is still being sorted out. "Perpetrator" sounds prejudicial in that circumstance, but "suspect" appears to indicate uncertainty as to the who rather than the uncertainty regarding the law. Is there a legal term-of-art for that?

So: am I clinging too hard to etymologies, having fallen behind evolving usage, or am I right and the reporters wrong? Is the usage on crime dramas (where the cast may start out with a dozen suspects and spend the episode trying to determine which suspect is the actual perpetrator and which are innocent) the distortion, rather than the news reporters' usage being the one that's wrong? And if I'm right and they're wrong and neener neener neener and all that, is this just a Baltimore thing, or has it become common elsewhere as well?