Covering the Front and Back Pages of the Newspaper
September 29, 2005
LAW: Presumed Innocent Until Proven Guilty
Another thing on CNN last night was a panel discussion on Larry King on the DeLay indictment, featuring, among others, left-wing pundit Katrina vanden Huevel of the Nation. King gave her a lot of rope, but at one point he was badgering her repeatedly with the question, "but you do presume that DeLay is innocent until proven guilty, right?"
Too many people misunderstand the role of the presumption of innocence. It's a legal rule, which applies to juries, instructing them not to find guilt without sufficient evidence, and to start by assuming the defendant is innocent until that evidence has been presented. In that context, of course, it serves a valuable role.
But the presumption of innocence, even as a social norm, shouldn't preclude pundits - who after all get paid to look at facts and offer opinions about them - from saying they think a public figure is guilty, if the available evidence supports that conclusion. Vanden Huevel would be quite within her rights to explain why the evidence Ronnie Earle has on DeLay shows that he did what he's accused of doing.
On the other hand, if the presumption of innocence means anything in the realm of opinion journalism, it means that you can't assume someone is guilty just because the government says so; an indictment alone isn't proof of guilt, especially when the prosecutor in question has a track record of indicting Republicans without a sufficient basis to do so.
So, if you want to argue that the evidence against DeLay shows he's guilty as sin, go ahead. There's nothing un-American about that at all; to the contrary, we all get to have an opinion about our leaders. But if you want to persuade anyone that he's guilty, it has to be based on something besides the existence of the charges themselves.
UPDATE: A commenter notes that Democrats like to point out that Democratic Travis County DA Ronnie Earle has indicted more Democrats than Republicans. I'll let John Fund, writing in today's OpinionJournal's Political Diary (subscription only - no link)
His defenders point out that the 63-year-old [Earle] has indicted 15 public officials in Texas in the course of his three decades as a prosecutor, of whom 12 were Democrats. But that ignores the fact that until the mid-1990s, very few Republicans were elected to public office in Texas and many of the Democrats he prosecuted happened to be bitter adversaries of his.
Reading between the lines here, Richards was and is a liberal, and Bullock was known to work across party lines with George W. Bush, so I'm guessing that some of this history is about the spilt between the Richards/Jim Hightower liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, and the rapidly-dying conservative wing that produced people like Martin Frost, Phil Gramm, and Charles Stenholm, with Earle being allied with the liberals. Maybe someone more knowledgeable on Texas politics can weigh in on this.