Innocent Until Proven Guilty

I meant my post a couple of days ago to be my last Michael Jackson post. The memorial’s over, after all, and there are lots of other things to blog about. But I find one thing still nagging at me.

Case #1: Someone I’m following on Twitter, the night before the Michael Jackson memorial, decides this is a great occasion to make cracks about black people. E.g., Obama’s bussing unemployed people to the memorial, ha ha ha. I take him to task, unfollow him, and grumble on Facebook. But one particular combination of cracks, on his part, stays with me. It’s this: first, he had stated that Michael Jackson was a pervert, and second, he had joked that Tawana Brawley was going to be prominently featured at the MJ memorial.

Why it sticks with me: First, I made the mistake of pissing myself off further by doing a web search, that showed that a whole bunch of other people were making the same “joke” (although Tawana Brawley has long since faded into the obscurity of private life, and never did have anything particular to do with the Jackson family). Second, what’s the humor of the “joke”? Well, it’s a dig at Al Sharpton, of course, and it is, like the “Obama is bussing unemployed people” joke, a way of mocking the memorial by associating it with everything you find trashy about black people.

But, beyond that, what’s wrong with Tawana Brawley? It’s that she lied about her rape, a fact that should be self-evident to all right-thinking people because, well, because the grand jury found it likely, right?

And why call Michael Jackson a pervert? It’s because he was guilty of child molesting, a fact that should be self-evident to all right-thinking people, because, well, because he was put on trial and acquitted, right?

Which brings me to …

Case #2: Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee stands up at the Michael Jackson memorial, and announces, to cheers, that the Constitution holds a person innocent until proven otherwise. And that she’ll introduce legislation honoring Michael Jackson for his artistic accomplishments (which are real) and his humanitarian efforts (which are also real). Raising the question of how one should vote on legislation honoring the humanitarian efforts (and therefore, implicitly, the character) of someone who was acquitted of something grave that many people believe he actually did.

Now, I don’t want to get into the evidence of this particular trial, other than to say that, yes, the business of unrelated boys in his bedroom was, at best and assuming he was actually innocent, really, really, really lousy boundaries (and I, personally, admire the guy as an artist, rather than as an example of virtue and an all around well lived life), and that, at the same time, even if he was guilty, it seems from what I’ve read that the actual evidence presented at that particular trial cast enough doubt on the credibility of the prosecution witnesses, and offered plausible enough defense testimony that acquittal does sound like the right legal verdict. That particular evidence just doesn’t meet a “proof beyond reasonable doubt” standard.

But I’m more interested in what acquittal actually means. A few thoughts.

• Innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt is a legal standard that determines whether you’ll be sent to jail. And very properly so. People should not be sent to jail for any weaker evidence. But, in the very nature of things, it can’t also be the standard for whether people think you’re guilty when they’re talking around the water cooler. After all, precisely because we have that legal standard, we know that at least some people are acquitted for whom the evidence points more toward something like the Scottish “not proven” verdict than toward actual clear cut innocence.
• On the other hand, if civil society were to act, in any thoroughgoing way, as if people who were acquitted were really guilty (if, say, everyone acquitted of child molesting had his or her career ruined), then that would kind of make a mockery of “innocent until proven guilty.”
• And yet, in at least some private interactions, you absolutely should not be using an “innocent until proven guilty” standard. I’ve said that there’s no way I’d have trusted Michael Jackson enough to leave a child alone with him. Part of that is that the sleepovers of unrelated boys set off alarm bells for me, as it did for a lot of other people. But another part of it has to do with what responsibility we have for children in our care, whether we’re parents, or grandparents, or aunts or uncles or teachers. That responsibility is not to trust people until they’re proven guilty; it’s to be more cautious than that.
• I’m unable to see the combination of pulling out Tawana Brawley as the canonical self-evidence rape hoax example and making Michael Jackson the canonical self-evident example of someone who was falsely acquitted as anything other than a sign that the person speaking is eager to believe any sexual accusation against a black man, and unwilling to believe any by a black woman against a white man.
• At the same time, the way in which this combination crosses a line for me takes some nuancing. It is not the statement that Tawana Brawley lied (after all, there’s a grand jury conclusion on that side). It isn’t, either, the conclusion that Michael Jackson was guilty; as I’ve said, our system guarantees, quite properly, that some people who are actually guilty won’t be found to be proven so, and innocent until proven guilty doesn’t, to my mind, extend to refraining from private judgments about which defendants got lucky rather than actually being innocent. Some people (OJ, Claus von Bulow) get acquittals under circumstances that still leave them forever under a cloud of suspicion. It’s not even holding both beliefs simultaneously; maybe you looked at the evidence (as I haven’t bothered to, in the Tawana Brawley case, and have only done in a sketchy way, in the Michael Jackson case), and concluded that the one jury was right and the other wasn’t.
• No, the point where the line is crossed is somewhere else. Partly it’s in the rhetorical use of Tawana Brawley, that, out of all women who made accusations that didn’t get born out in trial, she in particular gets to be the poster child, in particular in cases where I see that all your other rhetorical examples are similarly racially charged, and partly it the business of treating both conclusions as self-evidently true to all right-thinking people. If acquittal means anything at all, at least it means that it’s not self-evidently true to everyone that the person acquitted did the deed. He may in fact be guilty as hell, but at least some people hold the rational belief that his guilt isn’t proven. It cannot, therefore, be assumed that everyone who fails to shun the person as you think he should be shunned fails to do so because they know damn well that you’re right about his guilt, but, moral delinquents that they are, just don’t care.
• Getting away from Michael Jackson (or Tawana Brawley) in particular, and back onto general principles, I’ll note that another way people misuse acquittals is to count any acquittal (or any failure to bring to trial) in a sexual offense case as evidence that the alleged victim was lying. This isn’t legitimate. In some particular cases, a very few particular cases, there’s enough evidence to draw that conclusion. But there are other reasons that accusations don’t all result in convictions. Sometimes, for example, a woman really was raped, but under circumstances that don’t allow her to make a reliable identification. Witness identifications can be unreliable (a fact so well known among psychologists as to be part of basic introductory psychology courses). I think, in fact, that honest but unreliable witness memories probably lead to more false convictions than outright lying witnesses. Other times, the guy may be guilty but the evidence insufficient. It’s unsatisfying to treat someone as innocent while not treating his accuser as a liar, but it seems to me that in many cases that’s the most ethical response to a criminal case, as it would be unjust either to find the alleged criminal guilty unless proven or to judge the alleged victim to be lying unless that’s proven.