Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Of course, “innocent until proven guilty” has been at the core of Western judicial systems since biblical times.3 We are indoctrinated so thoroughly that the average person rarely considers whether the phrase is true or not. Yet when we carefully examine the system, we find that it does not function as the government would like us to believe. Beneath the surface of various platitudes, the falsity of the presumption of innocence becomes readily apparent.

Presuming the Presumption

The presumption was first recognized by the United States Supreme Court in Coffin v. United States (1895), in which it stated that “the principle that there is a presumption of innocence in favor of the accused is the undoubted law, axiomatic and elementary, and its enforcement lies at the foundation of the administration of our criminal [law] system”4 (emphases added). Somehow though, this undoubted law of presumed innocence has been tossed to the wayside in the courts, though the government continues to teach it in its classrooms. But what was once elementary is now a complicated and convoluted field of the law.

In 1951, in the case of Stack v. Boyle, the Supreme Court held that “the traditional right to freedom before conviction permits the unhampered preparation of a defense, and serves to prevent the infliction of punishment prior to conviction . . . Unless this right to bail before trial is preserved, the presumption of innocence, secured only after centuries of struggle, would lose its meaning.”5 Yet less than twenty years later, President Nixon signed a bill into law that allowed judges to consider the factor of “danger to the community” in noncapital bail cases, with the Department of Justice “arguing that the presumption of innocence was merely a rule of evidence with no application to pretrial proceedings”6 (emphases added). Apparently, even though one is “innocent until proven guilty,” what the government hides is that this principle applies only during the trial, and that the government believes that defendants are “guilty until trial,” if convenient for the government, under the auspices of community safety.

Does that make any sense? Before you’ve even had a chance to go to trial, pretrial proceedings, which contain much lower protections of the innocent than those of a trial, can drop what is often cited as the most elementary principle of the justice system. Astoundingly, what the Supreme Court had just reaffirmed in Stack v. Boyle as a traditional freedom that secured the presumption of innocence was now being legislatively eroded on the claim that such grand principles do not apply between an arrest and the beginning of the trial, a period of time that is almost always much longer than the trial itself.

Even if we were to accept that people the government deems “dangerous” should be kept separate from the community, they do not deserve to be treated like convicted criminals. Yet even though the government has often claimed that they are not, this is not the reality. Once in jail, there is no distinction made between the “innocent” and the guilty. Instead, the indicted-but-not-convicted prisoners are mixed in with those convicted “in overcrowded jails . . . regularly subjected to degradations and restrictions amounting to punishment.”7

Imagine that, punishment beginning before you have even had a chance to prove your innocence (even though the government should actually be proving your guilt). Is that consistent with the presumption of innocence? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Wolfish v. Levi (1978), certainly did not think so. It held, in this class action suit brought by all persons detained at New York’s Metropolitan Correction Center, that the “restrictions” imposed on innocent defendants were unjustified and violated “their right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty.”8

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court of the United States chose to approve the actions of the government, while attempting to maintain the myth that one is innocent until proven guilty. On appeal, then-Justice Rehnquist wrote that the presumption of innocence did not have any application before trial.9 The result of this, noted by Justice Thurgood Marshall, was effectively the same as if the Court had chosen to decree that the “presumption did not exist at all.”10

These cases, which assume that once you are arrested you will be considered guilty until your trial starts, began the resulting erosion of the presumption of innocence. And while schoolchildren are still taught that this maxim is true (at least in government-owned schools), the government continues its lie, claiming that it has not abridged this right and justifying itself with the constant “for the public safety” argument. These “supposedly innocent” people cannot be judged as such because they may present a danger to society. And whether or not the argument has justification, its outcome still results in people—like little Ansche Hedgepeth—who should be considered innocent under our system being adjudged as guilty and punished before they have the chance to defend themselves. In essence, these people are considered “guilty” until they have a chance to prove their innocence at trial.

If our courts can lose sight of such a presumption of innocence and continue to authorize the police to arrest you at any time for even the most minute crimes, like not wearing a seat belt while parked, or juggling cigar boxes on a sidewalk in Times Square in New York City without a license, or being quietly drunk in a bar in the State of Texas recently, then our rights extend only as far as the police subjectively allow.

Guilty Until Proven Insane

While pretrial presumptions of innocence are allowed to be thrown out the window, the government reminds us that during trial, one is still “innocent until proven guilty.” Strangely enough, this, too, is also not always true. In certain states, when a defendant in a criminal case asserts the insanity defense, the burden of proof as to his insanity rests with the defendant.11 Given that insanity means that you are legally, if not factually, innocent—because you could not have the