Burden of Proof Be Damned

Attorney General Barr at press conference annoucing the release of the Mueller Report, April 18, 2019.

The Mueller Report is out.  Does it really matter?  No.  Partisans with no “reasonable cause” will still invent cause to pursue their political opponent.  They’ll grasp at any straw to continue the inquisition.  Burden of proof be damned.  The entire course of western civilization is to be turned upside down to get Trump.  That’s it in a nutshell.

There’s a reason for those with the power to take your life or freedom to meet the decency of a burden of proof when they make claims against a person.  Yet, political and media partisans hang their hat on minor and loosely related evidence and even the absence of evidence.

That’s right, the absence of evidence.  The “We cannot reach conclusions” or “We cannot charge” is morphed into “cause” by political partisans to pursue the accused that can’t be accused.  Read the last bit of that sentence again. This is ludicrous.

In other words, “innocent till proven guilty” means something … or is supposed to.  If you can’t prove a charge, then the actions at the root of the accusation are treated as if they didn’t happen.  It’s up to the authorities to prove their case, not the accused to prove they didn’t do it.

The citizen’s right to silence is related.  The target of the charge doesn’t have to say anything.  He or she can just sit there quiet as the people doing the accusing are expected to make the case.  If they can’t, then nothing happened regarding the accused.

That’s our law, and keeps us from exercising Stalin’s show-trial style of justice.  It’s how we avoid the last moments of Bukharin, Kamanev, and Zinoviev beginning with a long walk down a lonely basement corridor and ending with a bullet to the back of the head.

RogerG

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