In the US, the Democratic Party and its celebrity and media allies,
through the vehicle of its #MeToo campaign, are waging a battle against
the presumption of innocence. By seeking to whip up hysterical moods
surrounding allegations of sexual misconduct, they are trying to
popularize the idea that those accused of sexual assault should be
presumed guilty. This campaign is, in its essence, reactionary and
should be opposed.
The proponents of this view have put forward four primary arguments:
1. All accusers must be believed, and doubting any accuser is
tantamount to “victim blaming” or “rape apology.” The actress Rose
McGowan said in December 2017, “I would challenge the media to stop
using the word ‘alleged.’ My beef is really with all the people who are
complicit. It’s the first time in history women are being believed, even
though we get slagged.”
2. The impact of such crimes on victims is so devastating that basic
protections for the accused are obstacles in the way of justice, not
only for the particular accuser, but for women as a whole. Hawaii
Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono recently said the presumption of
innocence “is what makes it really difficult for victims and survivors
of these traumatic events to come forward.”
3. It is a mark of unfairness and gender bias that the accused have
the right to cross-examine their accusers, which #MeToo proponents such
as the International Socialist Organization call “put[ting] rape victims
on trial.”
4. The presumption of innocence is not a democratic principle but a
mere legal technicality, and as such it applies only in a criminal
prosecution. As New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said, there
is “no presumption of innocence” in the case of Supreme Court nominee
Brett Kavanaugh because “it’s not a legal proceeding. It’s a fact
finding proceeding.”
When considered in a historical context, the anti-democratic
character of these arguments emerges. For centuries, proponents of the
democratic right to the presumption of innocence have fought against
powerful moods, based on appeals to emotion, mob justice and
irrationalism, which view the presumption of innocence as an obstacle in
the way of exacting immediate revenge against the alleged perpetrator.
Proponents have always insisted that the principle is meaningless unless
it applies universally, even to (and especially to) individuals who
find themselves in the crosshairs of official public opinion.
The #MeToo campaign’s arguments against the presumption of innocence
have reared their heads before, including at the ugliest moments in US
history. They run counter to the centuries-long historical struggle for
due process and the rights of the accused.
The origins of the presumption of innocence
The right to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is
among the foundational principles upon which many other significant
legal protections depend. If the accused are presumed guilty, then the
right to counsel, the right to cross-examine witnesses, and the right to
remain silent would be substantially weakened.
According to the attorney François Quintard-Morénas, as early as the
4th century BC the Greek orator Demosthenes put forward the position
that “one merely accused of murder cannot yet be called a murderer, for
no man comes under that designation until he has been convicted and
found guilty.” In 212 AD, the constitution of the Roman Emperor Antonin
enshrined the legal maxim
actori incumbit probatio, or, “he who wishes to bring an accusation must have the evidence.”
It was in the 13th and 14th centuries with the development of the
jus commune, however, that the presumption of innocence first crystalized into a fundamental legal principle. The adoption of
jus commune
marked a revolution in legal forms, replacing the unwritten
custom-based European law of the high Middle Ages with a more advanced,
written common law system that combined a revitalized Roman legal
framework based on procedure with Catholic canon. It was the French
lawyer Johannes Monachus who first used the phrase
item quilbet presumitur innocens nisi probetur nocens—“a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Johannes Monachus
As Catholic University law professor Kenneth Pennington notes, this
principle “summarized the procedural rights that every human being
should have no matter what the person’s status, religion, or
citizenship.” It “protected defendants from being coerced to give
testimony and to incriminate themselves. It granted them the absolute
right to be summoned, to have their case heard in an open court, to have
legal counsel, to have their sentence pronounced publicly, and to
present evidence in their defense.”
Pennington explains that the presumption of innocence came under
attack in the late medieval and early modern period. During the
Inquisition, many European Jews were accused of sexually assaulting
Christian women and were burnt or otherwise killed.
In one such case in 1398 or 1399, Papal Judge Johannes de Pogiali
took the rare step of conducting an investigation into the facts
underlying the accusations. Discovering that the particular accusations
were false, de Pogiali concluded: “It was better to leave a crime
unpunished than to condemn an innocent person.” Pennington adds, “Many
will recognize in these words ‘Blackstone’s ratio:’ ‘the law holds that
it is better that ten guilty persons escape than one person suffer.’”
In the 15th through the 17th centuries, the right to the presumption
of innocence was affirmed in papal letters requiring that Jews be
granted the right to counsel and to know the names of their accusers.
The emergence of presumption of innocence coincides with the earliest
development of bourgeois law. The presumption was advanced in
opposition to the medieval torture chamber, where the accused person was
simply tortured until he “confessed.” Under this regime of torture, the
court proceeding consisted merely of the confessed sinner being brought
before a tribunal to acknowledge his confession.
“Must we assume that witches are guilty?” asked German Jesuit
professor Friedrich von Spee, an early opponent of torture, in his 1631
work
Cautio Criminalis. “I assume that no one can be
condemned unless his guilt is certain: an innocent person ought not be
killed. Everyone is presumed innocent, who is not known to be guilty.”
Friedrich von Spee
In the 18th century, the revolutionary European and American
bourgeoisies were determined to deliver a blow against centuries of
feudal backwardness and arbitrary dynastic rule. Their chief
ideologists, schooled in the ideas of the rational Enlightenment,
recognized the presumption of guilt as a characteristic of tyranny that
is wholly inconsistent with democracy and the rule of law.
The revolutionaries rejected the notion that rights could be granted
or rescinded by the state at will. Rather, rights were vested in “the
people” themselves, and the maintenance of the rule of law meant
protecting them from the power of the government. In this sense, the
American Declaration’s “right to revolution” is incompatible with the
presumption of guilt. Strong, repressive states justify their existence
based on suspicion of the population and the need for social control.
It was a rejection of this reactionary view that guided the
revolutionaries and led John Adams to remark in relation to the
presumption of innocence that “there was never a system of laws in the
world in which this rule did not prevail.” Benjamin Franklin expanded
Blackstone’s ratio by a factor of ten, declaring “it is better 100
guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should
suffer.”
Similarly, during the French Revolution, Quintard-Morénas explains
that the third estate viewed the monarchy’s use of torture and its
belief in the presumption of the guilt of its subjects as an indication
of the regressive character of the Bourbon dynasty:
“The relative indifference of the population to the plight of accused
criminals, combined with the widely shared opinion among jurists that
torture was not a punishment and that humanizing criminal procedure
would encourage crime, contributed to maintain a practice that
increasingly fell into disuse in France at the end of the seventeenth
century.”
The representatives of the third estate who gathered at the
Estates-Generals in 1789 “referred to the presumption of innocence to
request a better treatment of suspects and their complete absolution in
the event of insufficient evidence.” The presumption was enshrined in
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and serves as the foundation
for the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
A legal formality or essential democratic principle?
Particularly prominent today is the argument that the presumption of
innocence is a legal technicality that applies only in a court of law
and otherwise has no broader applicability. These arguments evidence an
ignorance of history and the absence of democratic consciousness on the
part of those who have been swept up in this campaign.
When hundreds of people were dismissed from government jobs or
positions in Hollywood based on allegations they were spies for the
Soviet Union because of sympathies for left-wing politics, they were
provided no opportunity to challenge their persecutors.
As Robert Goldston noted in his book
The American Nightmare: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Politics of Hate,
a victim of the McCarthyite witch-hunt was “presumed guilty until he
could prove his innocence. He was not permitted to know who his accusers
were or to face them… He was not even permitted to know what the
specific charges were against him! He was simply to know that he was
considered disloyal unless he could prove his loyalty.”
Supporters of the #MeToo campaign presumably have no objection to
this regime, since after all, these were not criminal proceedings and
the presumption of innocence does not apply.
In the US Supreme Court’s milestone 1895 decision
Coffin v. United States,
the convictions of two men were overturned because the judge failed to
specifically instruct jurors about the presumption of innocence.
The US Supreme Court ruled that even though the judge had instructed
the jury that the prosecution had to prove the defendants’ guilt beyond a
reasonable doubt, if the jury did not properly understand the
fundamental importance of the presumption of innocence, the process
would be fundamentally unfair and in violation of due process. The
Supreme Court called the presumption of innocence “the undoubted law,
axiomatic and elementary.”
The Supreme Court explained that without an understanding of the
presumption of innocence, no jury could fairly determine a defendant’s
guilt beyond a “reasonable doubt” because the presumption of innocence
is not merely a
status but is rather
evidence that
tends to show the innocence of all accused of crimes. By failing to
instruct the jury about the presumption of innocence, therefore, the
lower court judge was withholding evidence of the defendants’ innocence
from the jury. The Supreme Court wrote:
The evolution of the principle of the presumption of innocence, and
its resultant, the doctrine of reasonable doubt, make more apparent the
correctness of these views, and indicate the necessity of enforcing the
one [the presumption of innocence] in order that the other [the
requirement that guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt] may continue
to exist. While Rome and the Mediaevalists taught that wherever doubt
existed in a criminal case, acquittal must follow, the expounders of the
common law, in their devotion to human liberty and individual rights,
traced this doctrine of doubt to its true origin—the presumption of
innocence—and rested it upon this enduring basis.
In an 1897 article in the
Yale Law Journal, Professor James Bradley Thayer argued against the
Coffin
decision and wrote, “The presumption of innocence has been overdone in
our hysterical American fashion of defending accused persons.”
According to Thayer, the presumption of innocence should not require
special jury instruction because it makes conviction far too difficult.
It was a mere legal technicality, he argued, and not evidence in favor
of the accused. It “plays a very small part indeed” in American life and
should provide no further legal or social protections for the accused.
By requiring that jurors be specifically instructed about the
importance of the presumption of innocence, the Supreme Court, in an era
where it could still articulate essential democratic conceptions, was
explaining that the presumption of innocence must be broadly grasped in
social consciousness if it is to retain any significance, even in a
criminal legal setting. It is a bulwark against all forms of jury bias,
including racial prejudice. Democratic rights are hollow if they are not
understood by jurors and potential jurors. Every jury pool will be
tainted if the presumption of innocence is not recognized in social
consciousness.
As Quintard-Morénas writes:
[The presumption of innocence] challenges the very foundation of a
social contract in which society, by prohibiting private vengeance and
guaranteeing the right to be tried by an impartial jury, acknowledges
that there is a time for innocence and a time for guilt. All too often
suspects are treated as guilty by a society that owes them protection,
even in light of the appalling nature of the alleged crime. But one
cannot expect society to treat the presumption of innocence as an
‘article of faith’ outside the courtroom if those in charge of applying
the law overlook the rationale for the maxim.
The US Supreme Court ultimately scaled back the presumption of innocence, including in a 1979 case titled
Bell v. Wolfish,
which allowed pre-trial detention of those accused but not convicted of
crimes on the grounds that the presumption of innocence does not apply
until the time of trial. This decision is responsible for drastically
expanding the size of the population detained in local jails while
awaiting trial. Justice Thurgood Marshall denounced the
Wolfish majority opinion at the time, writing that “the Supreme Court decided the presumption didn’t exist at all.”
Source: Prisonpolicy.org
By hollowing out the presumption, #MeToo is paving the way for future
frame-ups and convictions, in particular of the millions of poor and
oppressed who are often caught up in the gears of the criminal system
and become the victims of prejudices—racial and otherwise—of juries who
do not understand the presumption of innocence.
The absence of the presumption of innocence and lynch law
The proponents of the #MeToo campaign attempt to present the position
that all accusers must be unquestionably believed as a “left-wing”
view. They characterize as “progressive” the idea that those who defend
the accused are “rape apologists” and that requiring an accuser to
subject herself to cross-examination is unfair and “places the victim on
trial.” These are presented as basic principles of the struggle for
women’s rights.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This is not the first time
in American history that such arguments against the presumption have
been made.
According to the Tuskegee Institute, 3,446 African-Americans were
lynched from 1882 to 1968. The instigators and participants of lynch
mobs acted under the belief that the legal system failed to believe
accusers and slowed justice by providing unnecessary protections for the
accused.
Frank McManus, lynched on accusation of rape in Minnesota, 1882
Sexual assault of white women was a common accusation levied against
black men during this period. Because rape and sexual assault are among
the most brutal and degrading crimes, accusations generated a degree of
emotional fervor that made the facts underlying each accusation
irrelevant for those involved. Appeals to due process were viewed as
“tricks” by lawyers to give the guilty free reign to rape and defile
white women.
In his 2017 book
The Republic For Which It Stands: The Untied States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896,
Stanford Professor Richard White wrote of the fight by civil rights
leader Ida B. Wells to expose the use of rape and sexual assault
accusations as a mechanism for murdering black men.
White wrote:
[Wells] discovered that no matter what the original reason for mob
violence, newspapers turned them into stories of the rape of a white
woman by a black man. Wells showed that in some cases the rape
accusations disguised consensual sex, and in most other cases the
original reasons for the lynchings had nothing to do with rape at all.
Accusations of rape were, she wrote, “an old racket.” Her attacks struck
at the core of the mythic South: the purity of Southern womanhood and
homes threatened by black men. Memphis papers attacked her “obscene
intimations” and a mob destroyed her press and threatened to kill anyone
who tried to resume publishing.
One of Wells’ chief opponents was the prominent feminist temperance
movement leader Frances Willard, who supported racial segregation and
claimed that lynch justice was a lamentable but necessary way to protect
white women from “great dark-faced mobs.”
In 1894, Wells denounced Willard when the latter claimed that white
women must be believed when making accusations of sexual assault or
rape. White wrote:
Willard attacked [Wells] for slandering Southern white women by
saying that not all accusations of rape were true. The WCTU [Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union] resolution of 1894, although lamenting
lynching, indicated that it could not be banished until “the unspeakable
outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness [i.e., sexual
assault and rape allegations] shall be banished from the world, and
childhood, maidenhood, and womanhood shall no more be the victims of
atrocities worse than death.”
To Wells, the presumption of innocence was what stood between life
and death for thousands of black men across the South. She dedicated her
career and risked her life to defend this presumption against the
hysteria of moralists who claimed that any black man against whom an
accusation was levied must be guilty.
Ida B Wells
In an 1893 article titled “Lynch Law,” Wells wrote that 269 black men
were murdered by mobs after being accused of rape between 1882 and
1891. She wrote, “This crime is only so punished when white women accuse
black men, which accusation is never proven… Investigation as to guilt
or innocence of the accused is never made.”
In 1900, Wells wrote an article titled, “Lynch Law in America,” which
warned against condemning a man “upon the unsworn and uncorroborated
charge of his accuser.” The article continued: “No matter that our laws
presume every man innocent until he is proved guilty; no matter that it
leaves a certain class of individuals completely at the mercy of another
class… if a white woman declares herself insulted or assaulted, some
life must pay the penalty, with all the horrors of the Spanish
Inquisition and all the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The world looks on
and says it is well.”
In 1892, Wells denounced those who claim accusers should be protected
from testifying because of the trauma they have allegedly endured as
victims of sexual assault. She attacked a Southern bishop who said those
“who condemn lynching express no sympathy for the white woman in the
case.” Referring to a lynching in Chestertown, Maryland, Wells wrote:
When that poor Afro-American was murdered, the whites excused their
refusal of a trial on the ground that they wished to spare the white
girl the mortification of having to testify in court.
This cry has had its effect. It has closed the heart, stifled the
conscience, warped the judgment and hushed the voice of press and pulpit
on the subject of lynch law throughout this “land of liberty.” Men who
stand high in the esteem of the public for Christian character, for
moral and physical courage, for devotion to the principles of equal and
exact justice to all, and for great sagacity, stand as cowards who fear
to open their mouths before this great outrage. They do not see that by
their tacit encouragement, their silent acquiescence, the black shadow
of lawlessness in the form of lynch law is spreading its wings over the
whole country.
Wells demanded that accusers stand before their accused and answer
difficult and perhaps embarrassing questions about their accusation. She
rejected the idea that white women were too fragile or emotionally weak
to explain themselves. She denounced those in the press who undercut
the presumption of innocence and helped make it possible for mobs or
juries to convict innocent men.
The decline of democratic consciousness and the war on terror
The fact that such arguments could find such a broad hearing today
among the oligarchy and the affluent upper-middle class testifies to the
advanced state of decay of democratic consciousness. An important
experience in setting the conditions for this degeneration is the
ongoing “war on terror.”
The “war on terror” involved an attempt to whip up mass hysteria that
could be used to undermine democratic rights, presenting the public
with a great evil that was supposedly too extreme, too horrible, and too
urgent to justify maintaining basic democratic principles.
Detainees in the war on terror
Pursuant to the “war on terror,” countless individuals were abducted,
imprisoned, and tortured without ever having been convicted of a crime.
Once they were designated as “unlawful enemy combatants,” they could be
held indefinitely without trial. The presumption of innocence, of
course, was unavailable to the victims of the Guantanamo Bay torture
camp and the CIA’s network of black site prisons around the world.
This applies to individual terrorist suspects as well as entire
societies. Alongside individuals like José Padilla and John Walker
Lindh, the entire nation of Iraq was presumed guilty of involvement in
the September 11 events as well as producing “weapons of mass
destruction.” The war that was launched on this presumption of guilt
resulted in the deaths of over one million people.
The outlook of the US government in prosecuting the war on terror was
epitomized by George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who said he
still supported the use of torture against suspected terrorists
although 25 percent of torture victims were later proven innocent.
“I’m more concerned with bad guys who got out and released than I am
with a few that in fact were innocent… I have no problem as long as we
achieve our objective… I’d do it again in a minute.”
The timeline of events following September 11, 2001 shows how the
government used widespread confusion and emotional sympathy for the
victims of the attack to whip up blind nationalism and belief that those
accused of terrorism did not deserve to benefit from constitutional
protections.
On November 13, 2001, the Bush administration issued an executive
order allowing “individuals… to be detained, and, when tried, to be
tried for violations of the laws of war and other applicable laws by
military tribunals,” instead of held pursuant to the Geneva Convention,
which mandates the humane treatment of prisoners of war.
At the Guantanamo Bay prison as well as a network of black site
prisons around the world, the US government engaged in the systematic
torture and brutalization of “unlawful enemy combatants” whom it held
without charge.
A new category of super criminal—“terrorist”—was promoted by the
corporate media and the political establishment. A powerful campaign to
generate jingoist and pro-war sentiments brought immense pressure to
bear against anyone who defended the democratic rights of suspected
terrorists. These rights were presented as burdensome obstacles to
thwarting the “next 9/11.” All those who questioned the government were
labeled as “anti-American” or subject to state surveillance under the
PATRIOT Act.
The signing of the PATRIOT Act
In 2006, the Democrats and Republicans passed the Military
Commissions Act of 2006, which held that enemy combatants who were not
US citizens could not seek habeas corpus relief and had no right to
challenge their detention. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled in
Boume diene v. Bush
that military commissions were acceptable and that detainees did not
have to be tried in criminal court, but that detainees did have the
right to file habeas corpus petitions.
Under the administration of Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, the
attack on the presumption of innocence reached unprecedented levels. The
government set up a secret “kill list” comprised of targets of drone
strikes.
On September 30, 2011, the military-intelligence agencies
assassinated a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen without a warrant
or trial, presuming him guilty based on briefings from an intelligence
file. Two weeks later, the Obama administration murdered al-Awlaki’s
16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. The Obama administration also
kept the Guantanamo Bay prison open, and the prison has detained a total
of 779 people since January 2002, many of whom were innocent.
The anti-democratic impact of the ongoing war on terror has poisoned
and degraded all aspects of official political, legal and cultural life.
As Washington University law professor Leila Dadya Sadat said in a 2008
speech titled “A Presumption of Guilt: The Unlawful Enemy Combatant and
the US War on Terror:”
This dehumanization of a whole category of human beings—the
“suspected terrorist” or “unlawful enemy combatant”—has had pernicious
effects upon the American legal system and severely harmed America’s
international standing. These doctrines and the propaganda supporting
them have led to the systematic use of torture and cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment used on prisoners detained in the legal limbo known
as Guantanamo Bay, Kandahar prison in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq, as well as the rendition of terror suspects to third countries
and to “black sites” scattered around the world for detention,
interrogation, mistreatment and sometimes death. Although most (but not
all) of the individuals subjected to this regime have been foreigners,
the impact of this Executive Activism has been on the American legal
regime and the American psyche, for it has been US investigators, US
courts, and US lawyers, that carried out the government’s plan. Indeed,
these policies have turned US legal principles upside down, resulting in
a presumption of guilt applicable to anyone accused of acts of
terrorism by the government.
The powerful anti-democratic tendencies unleashed by the government
in the conduct of the war on terror have advanced the erosion of
democratic consciousness and seeped into all aspects of domestic law.
Thousands of victims of police murder in the US do not receive the
benefit of the presumption of innocence. They are presumed guilty as a
result of living in “high-crime areas,” where the police shoot first and
ask questions later. Instead, police on the beat, armed with the latest
weaponry from the battlefields of North Africa, the Middle East and
Central Asia, serve as judge, jury and executioner and are hardly ever
punished.
Tens of millions of undocumented immigrants, whose very presence in
the US has been deemed “illegal” by the same laws aimed against
“terrorists,” can be dragged out of their homes or off the job,
separated from their loved ones, thrown into cages and forced to face
physical and sexual abuse in detention centers for months or years on
end.
Immigrants detained in US detention centers
Eight million people are either in prison, jail or on parole or
probation. That arrestees who have not been convicted of a crime can be
held in jail while they await trial is no longer even a matter for
debate.
Who can claim the United States suffers from
too much attention to the presumption of innocence?
Postmodernism, identity politics and the presumption of guilt
The abandonment of progressive attitudes toward due process and the
presumption of innocence is most pronounced among affluent sections of
the upper-middle class. For this privileged layer, identity politics and
postmodernist philosophy have become key theoretical vehicles for the
attack on the presumption of innocence.
Proponents of this view have leapt to defend the accusers in several
instances where the accusations were false. In the Tawana Brawley, Duke
Lacrosse and University of Virginia
Rolling Stone cases, the media and supporters of identity politics assumed that the accused must be guilty because they were white men.
In a recent comment in support of the #MeToo campaign on their blog,
the ex-radicals Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner sum up the reactionary
marriage between identity politics and postmodernism. Brenner denounces
the WSWS for “harping on due process in a thoroughly bourgeois
legalistic manner” by defending the presumption of innocence for those
accused of sexual misconduct.
Due process may be warranted, Brenner writes, but “a
far greater legal concern
is the way in which women who bring sexual assault accusations to court
are subjected to character assassination in order to undermine the
credibility of their accounts,” which, he says, allows “perpetrators” to
“walk free.” (Emphasis added). He praises the #MeToo campaign as a
“spontaneous upsurge of the masses” that challenges the fact that “we
have a category of crime where a great many women (and some men) are
being abused, often scarred for life, and yet few perpetrators are ever
brought to justice.”
Employing the language of the police by referring to “perpetrators”
who must be “brought to justice,” Brenner invents a “right” of the
accuser to be believed without question and explains that this is of
“far greater legal concern” than due process for the accused. He appeals
to the emotional damage suffered by “a great many women” and claims
that women should be spared the humiliation of raising their accusations
in court, where women face “character assassination”
—i.e. the Sixth Amendment right to cross-examine witnesses.
Brenner is making an argument for lynch mob justice. He is opposed to
the fundamental conception that rights are intended to protect the
population from state repression. Instead, he views the right of the
accuser to be protected from uncomfortable questioning to be of “far
greater legal concern” than the right to question whether the accuser is
telling the truth.
Appeals to the “identity” of the alleged victim share much in common
with the lynch mob instigators of the late 19th century, who claimed
that no white woman would ever lie to a jury and that accusers should be
protected from the embarrassment of giving testimony under oath. In
this warped postmodernist view, the actual facts underlying the
allegation are of no consequence.
In an earlier period of US history, progressive attitudes in defense
of the right to the presumption of innocence found a wide cultural
audience in beloved novels like Walter Van Tilberg Clark’s
The Ox-Bow Incident and Harper Lee’s
To Kill A Mockingbird, as well as in popular songs like Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” and Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane,” and films like
Twelve Angry Men and
Inherit the Wind.
If the promoters of the #MeToo campaign had been present at the trial
of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s novel, they would have denounced
Atticus Finch as a “rape apologist.” They would consider the “right” of
Mayella Ewell to be believed to be “of far greater importance” than the
right of Robinson to be presumed innocent. Finch would have been
attacked for “harping on due process” in his appeals to the jury. When
Finch posed difficult questions to Mayella and accused her of lying, the
attorney would have been slandered for having engaged in “character
assassination.” Brenner would say that Finch was helping “perpetrators”
escape being “brought to justice.”
Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch cross-examines Mayella Ewell in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird
The modern-day opponents of due process can claim all they want that
they wish only to presume the guilt of the rich and powerful, not the
oppressed. But the common law is based on precedent, and instigators of
attacks on democratic rights do not have the luxury of deciding whose
democratic rights will be violated and whose will not.
Whatever rules are established against the wealthy will be brought
down upon the backs of the poor and defenseless with the ruthless force
of the power of the state and public opinion.
In cases like the Scopes Monkey trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti
frame-up, the Dreyfus Affair, the trial of Oscar Wilde, the Leo Franks
case, the Leopold and Loeb trial and the frame-up of the Scottsboro
Boys, the political left rejected calls for blood and vengeance and
sought to expose the powerful interests fanning the flames of passion
and prejudice.
Today, socialists reject the efforts of the proponents of the #MeToo
campaign to undermine democratic consciousness and attack the
presumption of innocence with all the old arguments of the extreme
right.
