Regardless of how flawed an implementation of a system is, "innocent until proven guilty" is the system that has the least baked-in issues. As someone said, it's often impossible to prove something didn't happen because nothing usually doesn't leave evidence.

Here in Canada, Ontario my best friend was assumed guilty by the police for supposedly flashing someone. Then the police connected that to another case where my friend wasn't in the vicinity of at the time. How do you prove you weren't at a location a few weeks ago?

The assumption of guilt is far more flawed than the assumption of innocence. You let a criminal go free, he's likely to get caught doing it again. You jail an innocent person, and the perpetrator never gets caught because no one looks for them.

________________
I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. Too many jars and not enough hands.

I agree with Senrosj and LazyReviewer here. If you accuse someone of a particularly serious crime, the onus is on the accuser to back it up with evidence. Assuming that the accused is always guilty is a recipe for potentially innocent people getting locked up for a crime they didn't commit. Besides, if someone whose obviously guilty got off the first time, they can be tried again for a different crime if they're repeat offenders. After all the stuff Al Capone did, what really did him in was his tax evasion charge from the IRS.

Uh. Do you have any real evidence for this? Everything I have read says this isn't true. However, the irony of you saying this is that that shows you voted for "Guilty until proven innocent."

In regards to the question, the only right answer is "Innocent until proven guilty." However, you have to consider that someone who is a suspect -- assuming a good justice system, which we can't, but I assume the question is philosophical -- would only hold a suspect when they have good reason to believe they should be investigated. Cooler heads should prevail, in my opinion. Wildly pointing fingers and speculation is not actual justice. Evidence and actual thorough investigation is the only way to go -- often times, evidence is hard to come by, as K9ofChaos pointed out with the Al Capone example. Everyone knew what he was doing, but they didn't have anything to nail him with until they brought in a forensic accountant.

Dunno. Are there actual lawyers and/or people well-versed in criminal justice around to give an informed perspective?

Last edited by flowinmyboat at 12:15 pm, Feb 4 2023

________________
http://i.imgur.com/LxhWm.jpg (will reformat this some day…)