‘PRESUMED INNOCENT’ IS OUT THE WINDOW
OF all the demands made on us as citizens, the presumption of innocence is probably the hardest — so hard, in fact, that the demand is not really made of all of us.
Yes, Americans must presume innocence if we serve on a jury. And officers of the court or workers in the justice system are charged with behaving toward those accused as though they were innocent. The news media are also supposed to follow the rule or pay the price; when we fail to do so, as was the case when a man was falsely accused of being the 1996 Olympic bomber, news organizations can be forced to pony up dearly.
But ordinary people are not violating any law or established practice if they share a personal opinion that someone has committed an offense he denies having committed or of which he has not been found guilty.
Indeed, it’s almost impossible not to develop an opinion on such matters if you read articles and watch newscasts about them. We may know such reports are necessarily incomplete and tainted by the biases (conscious and unconscious) of the people who produce them and the selfish aims of the sources who supply those people with information.
But the information we gather forms a narrative in our heads, and we can only make sense of that narrative by trying to draw a conclusion from the factoids we’ve been fed. That story we assemble, in turn, connects to other stories we have told ourselves, and we will usually find a way to add them to an ever-expanding account of the world we live in.
In the case of the indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone whose opinion grants either man the presumption of innocence.
They have both pleaded not guilty, but this doesn’t seem to matter. And for pro-Trumpers, the offenses with which they are charged might as well be true since nothing they are accused of having done took place at the same time they were officially involved with Trump or the campaign.
More important, for anti-Trumpers, the relationship of the two men to Trump acts implicitly as prima facie evidence of their guilt.
No matter that there are serious observers who see serious problems with the indictments themselves. The former senior federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who has previously expressed admiration for the professionalism of special counsel Robert Mueller, calls the Manafort indictment “a dubious case of disclosure violations and money movement that would never have been brought had he not drawn attention to himself by temporarily joining the Trump campaign.”
If you have come to believe Donald Trump either involved himself directly or benefited directly from a conspiracy with the Russian government to secure an election victory in 2016, you are gleeful at the indictments because they suggest Mueller has Manafort and Gates in a vise.
The leftist reporter Barton Gellman captures the tone perfectly on Twitter: “Classic leverage. He may know what you’re hiding. He’ll scorch you & yours if you lie. Spill and he’ll go easier.”
This presumes it is proper and appropriate for a prosecutor to “scorch you & yours” because he’s on a fishing expedition for other, more damaging information.
I hold no brief for Manafort, whose slimy pecuniary relationships with the authoritarian thug Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian messenger boy Victor Yanukovych I find sickening. But as McCarthy says, while “it is surely a terrible thing to take money, under the guise of ‘political consulting,’ from an unsavory Ukrainian political faction that is doing the Kremlin’s bidding ... it is not a violation of American law to do so.”
In fact, Manafort was indicted not for taking money but for failing to make a proper accounting of Ukrainian money in order to avoid registering as a foreign agent. I doubt one in 100 people following this story closely knows this, or knows the difference, or cares.
And here we can see the genius of a system which depends on the idea that in matters of law we must presume the accused is innocent until proven guilty. In a matter of minutes, Paul Manafort was convicted in the court of public opinion by tens of millions of people who really do not care one whit about him or his case but only about its effect on the standing of Donald Trump.
Fortunately for the rule of law and for elementary standards of fairness and decency, the court of opinion will not decide this case.
In a matter of minutes, Paul Man a fort was ’ convicted in the court of public opinion.