Defending The Guilty Quotes

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.

the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she defends herself, she sounds guilty. So I waited some more.

Most people, if they know they have done wrong, foolishly suppose they can conceal their error by defending it, and finding a justification for it; but in my belief there is only one medicine for an evil deed, and that is for the guilty man to admit his guilt and show that he is sorry for it. Such an admission will make the consequences easier for the victim to bear, and the guilty man himself, by plainly showing his distress at former transgressions, will find good grounds of hope for avoiding similar transgressions in the future.

Beheading, burying and burning humans alive are extreme acts of cruelty. Such crimes against humanity must be investigated and the guilty parties brought to justice. May ALL victims rest in peace!

Giving reasons during conflict to justify or defend a viewpoint is just as manipulative as giving reasons to attack that viewpoint. Neither of these routes is an honest assertive I want that can lead to a workable compromise of interests to quickly resolve the conflict.

Providing adequate representation even for defendants who appear guilty is the best way to protect those who are not.

Nine of us now seem to feel that the defendant is innocent, but we're just gambling on probabilities. We may be wrong. We may be trying to return a guilty man to the community. No one can really know. But we have a reasonable doubt, and this is a safeguard that has enormous value in our system. No jury can declare a man guilty unless it's sure. We nine can't understand how you three are still so sure. Maybe you can tell us.

It seems we are often guilty of being more interested in defending God’s Word than in studying it.

We weren’t sure whether to believe the defendant or the complainant. We find the defendant guilty.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea -- the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

When in court, the primary role of lawyers is not to prove or disprove innocence; unbeknown to almost all lawyers and their clients, it is to save the court time.

Judges tell juries: if a defendant lies, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s guilty, but if a woman is crying as she dials triple zero after being raped, she might just be putting on a show.

To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place... It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses, whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now, there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewel was beaten - savagely, by someone who led exclusively with his left. And Tom Robinson now sits before you having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses... his RIGHT. I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime - she has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did. Now, what did she do? She tempted a *****. She was white, and she tempted a *****. She did something that, in our society, is unspeakable. She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young ***** man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards. The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Maycomb County have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption... the evil assumption that all Negroes lie, all Negroes are basically immoral beings, all ***** men are not to be trusted around our women. An assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is, in itself, gentlemen, a lie, which I do not need to point out to you. And so, a quiet, humble, respectable *****, who has had the unmitigated TEMERITY to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against TWO white people's! The defendant is not guilty - but somebody in this courtroom is. Now, gentlemen, in this country, our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system - that's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality! Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review, without passion, the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision and restore this man to his family. In the name of GOD, do your duty. In the name of God, believe... Tom Robinson

It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen: if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin; but how this bears on slavery, I cannot see; as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease. Those who look tenderly at the slave owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter; what a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children — those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own — being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder! And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty...

The question is this—do poor, plainly guilty defendants have a right to a complete defense? I do not believe that the State of Kansas would be either greatly or for long harmed by the death of these appellants. But I do not believe it could ever recover from the death of due process.

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself

A court case is usually a competition to prove the innocence of the innocent … or the guilty.

When we are happy to turn from evil because it is ugly, and causes us distress, then we condone it and become party to its continuance. Little by little, we become as guilty of it as those who commit the act—because we have told them by our silence that it is acceptable.

we are in danger of becoming a society in which prosecutors alone become judges, juries and executioners because the threat of high sentences makes it too costly for even innocent people to resist the prosecutorial pressure. That is why nearly all criminal defendants today plead guilty to “reduced” charges rather than risk a trial with draconian sentences in the event of a conviction.

To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised in and for oneself that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid and guilty in his fellow-beings—for such of course are the things that we keep private to protect ourselves. It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession—a significance known in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: "Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.

One can go on saying for years that one doesn't listen to gossip, that the absent cannot defend themselves from slander, etc., etc.; but, after all, isn't the provocation of so much gossip an offense in itself?

Most courtroom movies feel it necessary to end with a clear-cut verdict. But 12 Angry Men never states whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. It is about whether the jury has a reasonable doubt about his guilt.

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering… since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

When the prosecution is confronted with concrete evidence of a defendant’s innocence during a trial or investigation, or even after a jury renders an erroneous guilty verdict, that prosecutor must come forward, as an officer of the court, to make sure that justice is done. Defense attorneys have no such obligation, even when they know their clients are guilty.

I’m not even feeling guilty about it; I know Deb and she’s talented and aggressive. She’s in the public defender’s office to help the most vulnerable in our society, which means she must have forgotten to take the Glory of Compensation in law school.

Talk of "witch-hunts" conceals an inconvenient fact: men charged with rape stand a better chance of walking free than other defendants. The conviction rate in rape trials – 63 per cent in 2012/13 – is quite a lot lower. Prosecutors are taking a bigger risk when they bring rape cases to court, especially when the alleged offences happened decades ago, leaving no forensic evidence. The Independent, 9 February 2014

The friends believe that Job is on trial—the defendant in a criminal case—and that he has been found guilty. But this is a backward trial. In their assessment, the judge has passed down the verdict, and now they, as the jury, need to try the case and find the evidence to uphold the verdict. To this end, Job is intensely cross-examined.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

A jury could only declare my son 'not guilty', never 'innocent'.

there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law’s little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.

FIGARO. Defending the public good and promoting personal happiness—seems to me, that as schemes go this one, your Lordship, morally speaking, is masterly.

What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she defends herself she sounds guilty.

It would seem that this is a great crime, of which they are all guilty. How frightened hypocrisy hastens to defend itself, and to get under cover.’ He

Most of the time, perhaps 99 percent of the time, the defendant is guilty; his screams are the final protest of a human being about to lost his most precious possession, his freedom.

crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person or idea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit, indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as the emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive acts performed by violent cults. Most violent cults do not openly express their beliefs and practices, and they tend to live separately in noncommunal environments to avoid detection. Some victims of ritual abuse are children abused outside the home by nonfamily members, in public settings such as day care. Other victims are children and teenagers who are forced by their parents to witness and participate in violent rituals. Adult ritual abuse victims often include these grown children who were forced from childhood to be a member of the group. Other adult and teenage victims are people who unknowingly joined social groups or organizations that slowly manipulated and blackmailed them into becoming permanent members of the group. All cases of ritual abuse, no matter what the age of the victim, involve intense physical and emotional trauma. Violent cults may sacrifice humans and animals as part of religious rituals. They use torture to silence victims and other unwilling participants. Ritual abuse victims say they are degraded and humiliated and are often forced to torture, kill, and sexually violate other helpless victims. The purpose of the ritual abuse is usually indoctrination. The cults intend to destroy these victims' free will by undermining their sense of safety in the world and by forcing them to hurt others. In the last ten years, a number of people have been convicted on sexual abuse charges in cases where the abused children had reported elements of ritual child abuse. These children described being raped by groups of adults who wore costumes or masks and said they were forced to witness religious-type rituals in which animals and humans were tortured or killed. In one case, the defense introduced in court photographs of the children being abused by the defendants[.1] In another case, the police found tunnels etched with crosses and pentacles along with stone altars and candles in a cemetery where abuse had been reported. The defendants in this case pleaded guilty to charges of incest, cruelty, and indecent assault.[2] Ritual abuse allegations have been made in England, the United States, and Canada.[3] Many myths abound concerning the parents and children who report ritual abuse. Some people suggest that the tales of ritual abuse are "mass hysteria." They say the parents of these children who report ritual abuse are often overly zealous Christians on a "witch-hunt" to persecute satanists. These skeptics say the parents are fearful of satanism, and they use their knowledge of the Black Mass (a historically well-known, sexualized ritual in which animals and humans are sacrificed) to brainwash their children into saying they were abused by satanists.[4] In 1992 I conducted a study to separate fact from fiction in regard to the disclosures of children who report ritual abuse.[5] The study was conducted through Believe the Children, a national organization that provides support and educational sources for ritual abuse survivors and their families.

The reason that fine points of jurisprudence are unnecessary is that there is no need to clarify whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty: the concept of guilt is an old bourgeois concept which has now been uprooted.

If you’re dealing with a psychopath, it’s a given that they will make unfounded accusations about you at some point—especially if you’re starting to put together the red flags in their behavior. These insults have a very specific purpose: to put you on the defense. Why? It’s actually a lot simpler than you might think. People who defend themselves seem guilty by default. Whether or not they deserve it, that’s the unfortunate truth about how most people think.

They “load up” defendants with charges that carry extremely harsh sentences in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser offenses and—here’s the kicker—to obtain testimony for a related case. Harsh sentencing laws encourage people to snitch.

For a thousand years prosecutors and accusers had never even imagined that the fact of arrest might in itself be a proof of guilt. If the defendants were innocent, then why had they been arrested? And once they had been arrested, that meant they were guilty!

Want to know the coolest thing about the coming? Not that the One who played marbles with the stars gave it up to play marbles with marbles. Or that the One who hung the galaxies gave it up to hang doorjambs to the displeasure of a cranky client who wanted everything yesterday but couldn't pay until tomorrow. Not that he, in an instant, went from needing nothing to needing air, food, a tub of hot water and salts for his tired feet, and, more than anything, needing somebody - anybody - who was more concerned about where he would spend eternity rather than where he would spend Friday's paycheck. Or that he resisted the urge to fry the two=bit, self-appointed hall monitors of holiness who dared suggest that he was doing the work of the devil. Not that he kept his cool while the dozen best friends he ever had felt the heat and got out of the kitchen. Or that he gave no command to the angels who begged, "Just give us the nod, Lord. One word and these demons will be deviled eggs." Not that he refused to defend himself when blamed for every sin of every slut and sailor since Adam. Or that he stood silent as a million guilty verdicts echoed in the tribunal of heaven and the giver of light was left in the chill of a sinner's night. Not even that after three days in a dark hole he stepped into the Easter sunrise with a smile and a swagger and a question for lowly Lucifer - "Is that your best punch?" That was cool, incredibly cool. But want to know the coolest thing about the One who gave up the crown of heaven for a crown of thorns? He did it for you. Just for you.

The Defendant: I am pleading guilty your honors but I'm doing it because I think it would be a waste of money to have a trial over five dollars worth of crack. What I really need is a drug program because I want to turn my life around and the only reason I was doing what I was doing on the street was to support my habit. The habit has to be fed your honors as you know and I believe in working for my money. I could be out there robbing people but I'm not and I've always worked even though I am disabled. And not always at this your honors, I used to be a mail carrier back in the day but then I started using drugs and that was all I wanted to do. So I'm taking this plea to save the city of New York and the taxpayers money because I can't believe that the DA, who I can see is a very tall man, would take to trial a case involving five dollars worth of crack, especially knowing how much a trial of that nature would cost. But I still think that I should get a chance to do a drug program because I've never been given that chance in any of my cases and the money that will be spent keeping me in jail could be spent addressing my real problem which is that I like, no need, to smoke crack every day and every chance I get, and if I have to point people to somebody who's selling the stuff so I can get one dollar and eventually save up enough to buy a vial then smoke it immediately and start saving up for my next one that I'll gladly do that, and I'll do it even though I know it could land me in jail for years because the only thing that matters at that moment is getting my next vial and I am not a Homo-sapiens-sexual your honors but if I need money to buy crack I will suck. . . .

Police throughout the United States have been caught fabricating, planting, and manipulating evidence to obtain convictions where cases would otherwise be very weak. Some authorities regard police perjury as so rampant that it can be considered a "subcultural norm rather than an individual aberration" of police officers. Large-scale investigations of police units in almost every major American city have documented massive evidence of tampering, abuse of the arresting power, and discriminatory enforcement of laws. There also appears to be widespread police perjury in the preparation of reports because police know these reports will be used in plea bargaining. Officers often justify false and embellished reports on the grounds that it metes out a rough justice to defendants who are guilty of wrongdoing but may be exonerated on technicalities. [internal citations omitted]

Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race relations, but then again, nowhere else had so far to go. Mississippi had the most lynchings, the worst Klan violence, the staunchest resistance to the civil rights movement. When the Emmett Till case was tried, the all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty in an hour and eight minutes. One juror said it would have been quicker if they hadn’t taken a break to drink Coca-Colas. Those days are gone now, but inevitably, they bleed through and stain the present.

By the rules of evidence in this trial the verdict is foreordained. If the testimony ... is admitted as competent, the conspiracy is proved. Because it would not be admitted except under the assumption that a conspiracy existed.... Here ... a defendant can be found guilty of being brought to court as a defendant.

But much more often, when those of us in law enforcement see a claim of MPD, it is post-arrest. Though the suspect/defendant may never have given any indication to those around him that he has more than one personality, if the evidence against him is strong and there is no other way to explain his action, he or his attorney will put forth a multiple personality disorder defense. In other words, while his “body” may have committed the murder, it was another personality working within that body that had the motive and mens rea (literally, “guilty mind”). Legally, both the mens rea and the act are necessary components to make up a crime.

The hardest thing of being a man for me is not knowing you have done or said something wrong, but everyday being persecuted for it . A man can never defend himself for any wrong doing, because even the guilty ones claim they are innocent. Yet true innocent ones, always get wrongfully convicted. While guilty ones walk free.

The mere punishment of the defendants, or even thousands of others equally guilty, can never redress the terrible injuries which the Nazis visited on these unfortunate peoples. For them it is far more important that these incredible events be established by clear and public proof, so that no one can ever doubt that they were fact and not fable.

Prosecutors admit that they routinely charge people with crimes for which they technically have probable cause but which they seriously doubt they could ever win in court.71 They “load up” defendants with charges that carry extremely harsh sentences in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser offenses and—here’s the kicker—to obtain testimony for a related case.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know “beyond a reasonable doubt” who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

Sentimentality about Lee's story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee's endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter, Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him. Today, dozens of legal organizations hand out awards in the fictional lawyer's name to celebrate the model of advocacy described in Lee's novel. What is often overlooked is that the black man falsely accused in the story was not successfully defended by Atticus. Tom Robinson, the wrongly accused black defendant, is found guilty. Later he dies when, full of despair, he makes a desperate attempt to escape from prison. He is shot seventeen times in the back by his captors, dying ingloriously but not unlawfully.

Under the cover of the ideology of cultural and ethnic mixing, which has never succeeded anywhere in the world, the intention is to abolish our ancestral culture, which has been judged guilty of existing and being intrinsically perverse. ‘Ethnic identity’ and its defence have been designated as Evil, as the symbol of aggression, according to Laurent Joffrin. In other words, to defend and affirm oneself is racism.

keep me on the payroll, but I could not stay there, not as a charity case. Laurie might be able to go back to teaching, but we would not be able to pay the bills on her income alone. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error. Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies. The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error. We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy - for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same basic policy by which he defends the “truth.” He has identified us with dishonesty, insincerity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth.

There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea—“the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.” That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

In the evening we shall be examined on love.” –St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure out the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.

And it is that faith in process as justice that explains and justifies my role as an advocate. It is what permits me to bat away with ease the inevitable dinner party questions – How do you defend someone you believe is guilty? Have you ever prosecuted someone you think is innocent? – with a nonchalance that belies the gravity of the argument. I am just a cog in the machine. Impersonally carrying out my role is key to ensuring that the delicate justice ecosystem remains in symbiosis.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career. —SUSANNA MOODIE, Life in the Clearings, 1853.

across America, advocates and lawyers representing Black people cannot effectively assist many of their clients without recognizing that, contrary to the legal doctrine, those clients are presumed guilty and burdened by assumptions of criminality that have been shaped over centuries. The job of the advocate then becomes convincing the court and the jurors of a client’s innocence, rather than just defending the client against accusations of guilt, an inversion of the presumption of innocence written into American law.

You say I am innocent, and yet you tell me I am to be condemned as a guilty man, have my gown taken from me, be torn from my wife and children, be disgraced before the eyes of all men, and be made a byword and a thing horrible to be mentioned, because I will not fee an attorney to fee another man to come and lie on my behalf, to browbeat witnesses, to make false appeals, and perhaps shed false tears in defending me. You have come to me asking me to do this, if I understand you, telling me that the archdeacon would so advise me.

In the 20th century, it became more and more the norm for judges to incorrectly instruct juries that they must consider only the facts of the case and whether the defendant was guilty of breaking a law – not judge the law itself. Still, Jury Nullification survived, barely, much diminished, in prohibition cases, anti-Vietnam War cases, civil rights cases (Martin Luther King, for example, quoted St. Augustine in saying an unjust law is no law at all), and drug cases. Only now is there a small but growing movement to revive public knowledge of this essential right.

Roache's statement after his acquittal was dignified but his supporters were angry. They demanded to know why the case was ever brought, claiming that the actor was a victim of the "hysteria" created by revelations about Jimmy Savile. It's a curious conclusion to draw from a "not guilty" verdict; there are courtrooms where the conviction rate is 100 per cent but they tend to be in totalitarian states. In serious criminal cases in England and Wales, the rate is around 82 per cent, and I would be seriously worried if every defendant were to be found guilty. The Independent, 9 February 2014

In criminal court, the defendant is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. These two cornerstones of criminal law, the presumption of innocence and the requirement of a very high standard of proof, are designed to tip the scales of justice in favor of criminal defendants, in recognition of the tremendous imbalance of power between individual citizens and the state. But no equivalent consideration is given to the safety and well-being of crime victims who bear witness in court, despite the very real imbalance of power that so often obtains between victim and perpetrator.

Her last words have been the law of my life: Andrew, if I should not see you again, I wish you to remember and treasure up some things I have already said to you: in this world you will have to make your own way. To do that you must have friends. You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you. To forget an obligation or be ungrateful for a kindness is a base crime-not merely a fault or a sin, but an actual crime. Men guilty of it sooner or later must suffer the penalty. In personal conduct be always polite but never obsequious. None will respect you more than you respect yourself. Avoid quarrels as long as you can without yielding to imposition. But sustain your manhood always. Never bring a suit in law for assault and battery or for defamation. The law affords no remedy for such outrages that can satisfy the feelings of a true man. Never wound the feelings of others. Never brook wanton outrage upon your own feelings. If you ever have to vindicate your feelings or defend your honor, do it calmly. If angry at first, wait until your wrath cools before you proceed.

Question Three: "Why does God demand the death of so many innocent people in the Bible?” Answer: He doesn’t demand the death of any innocent people. He demands the death of guilty people, not only in the Bible, but also on this whole sinful earth. We will all experience the reality of death, because we are all guilty of violating His moral Law (see Romans 6:23). We are also told (among other things) that "God demands that we kill disobedient teenagers.” This is not true. Why would anyone in today’s society instigate the 3,000 year-old injunctions of Hebrew civil law? God demands no such thing of any of us.

​In 2012, George Zimmerman left his home to follow and accost his neighbor, Trayvon Martin, who was walking through their gated community in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, who brought a gun to the encounter, shot and killed Martin because, as he said in his trial, he feared for his life. Zimmerman was found not guilty by a jury. In 2015, less than a mile from my home, four white men wearing ski masks appeared at a peaceful event protesting the recent killing of Jamar Clark by a white policeman. At least one of the four men, Allen Scarsella, carried a gun, which he allegedly described in a text message as “specially designed by Browning to kill brown people.” Protestors, most of whom were African American, noticed the four men in masks, surrounded them, and asked why they were there. They also demanded that the men remove their masks. Scarsella then drew his gun and shot five protestors. At his trial, Scarsella’s public defender explained that Scarsella fired the shots because he was “scared out of his mind.” These and other similar incidents raise some questions. First, under what circumstances is it legitimate to deliberately precipitate a conflict, shoot one or more people, and be considered guiltless because you were scared? Second, if “I feared for my life” or “I was scared out of my mind” becomes a legitimate defense, then can anyone who fears dark skin guiltlessly shoot any Black body that comes near? What about any Black body he or she seeks out, accosts, and shoots? Does your reflexive, lizard-brain fear of my dark body trump my right to exist? A Minnesota jury provided one answer to these questions in February of 2017: It found Scarsella guilty on all counts. He was given a fifteen-year prison sentence. A different Minnesota jury provided the opposite answer four months later: it found Jeronimo Yanez not guilty.

My point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness. Affective realism decimates the ideal of the impartial juror. Want to increase the likelihood of a conviction in a murder trial? Show the jury some gruesome photographic evidence. Tip their body budgets out of balance and chances are they’ll attribute their unpleasant affect to the defendant: “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” Or permit family members of the deceased to describe how the crime has hurt them, a practice known as a victim impact statement, and the jury will tend to recommend more severe punishments. Crank up the emotional impact of a victim impact statement by recording it professionally on video and adding music and narration like a dramatic film, and you’ve got the makings of a jury-swaying masterpiece.45 Affective realism intertwines with the law outside the courtroom as well. Imagine that you are enjoying a quiet evening at home when suddenly you hear loud banging outside. You look out the window and see an African American man attempting to force open the door of a nearby house. Being a dutiful citizen, you call 911, and the police arrive and arrest the perpetrator. Congratulations, you have just brought about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as it happened on July 16, 2009. Gates was trying to force open the front door of his own home, which had become stuck while he was traveling. Affective realism strikes again. The real-life eyewitness in this incident had an affective feeling, presumably based on her concepts about crime and skin color, and made a mental inference that the man outside the window had intent to commit a crime.

This was his glory and his guilt-- that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of a sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force--the mystics and the kings-- the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge cam in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted-- the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man's soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach-- but both were united against his mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans, is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust. Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work. The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. The despoiling ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice.

in one way or another, they all go back to the M’Naghten Rule, formulated by the British courts in the wake of one Daniel M’Naghten’s attempt to assassinate British prime minister Sir Robert Peel in 1843. Shooting at point-blank range outside Peel’s London house, M’Naghten instead killed the prime minister’s private secretary Edward Drummond. M’Naghten, who suffered from delusions of persecution, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and ever since, through multiple interpretations and permutations, the basic legal test of insanity in British and American courts has been whether the defendant could distinguish between right and wrong or was acting under a delusion or compulsion so strong that it negated that distinction.

Q. Do you feel that based upon whatever information you may have accumulated about the case from any source whatsoever that you have already formed an opinion in your mind as to the guilt or innocence of this defendant? A. I would think—yeah, I would think that she was guilty, yeah. Q. You feel that she’s guilty? A. Yes. Q. And let me ask you another question. In the event that you might be selected to serve as a juror in this case, do you feel that you could sit and listen to the evidence and judge it impartially, apply the law the judge gives you, set aside this opinion that you have already formed? A. Yes, I probably could. Q. And then still judge impartially whether she’s guilty or innocent? A. Yeah. Depending on the evidence and all that.

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those "errors" we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants' favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error.

He looked directly at Grant: “I will tell them that I think you are guilty of the murder of three people and that you were the sponsor of the child-pornography smear, and that I think a person of your brand of social pathology—I believe you are a psychopath, and I will tell them that—has no place in the Senate. And I will continue to argue that here in Minnesota for the full six years of your term, and do everything I can to wreck any possible political career that you might otherwise have had.” Grant smiled at him and said, “Fuck you.” The governor said, “Okay, okay, Porter. Now, Taryn, do you have anything for us?” “No, not really. I’ll be the best senator I can be, I reject any notion that I was involved in this craziness.” She looked at Smalls: “As for you, bring it on. If you want to spend six years fighting over this, by the time we’re done, you’ll be unemployable and broke. I would have no problem setting aside, say, a hundred million dollars for a media campaign to defend myself.” “Fuck you,” Smalls said. And, “By the way, I’d like to thank Agent Davenport for his work on this. I thought he did a brilliant job, even if I wound up losing.” Grant jumped in: “And I’d like to say that I think Davenport created the conditions that unnecessarily led to the deaths in this case, that if he’d been a little more circumspect, we might still have Helen Roman and Carver and Dannon alive, and might be able to actually prove what happened, so that I’d be definitively cleared.” Smalls made a noise that sounded like a fart, and Henderson said, “Thank you for that comment, Porter.

Men may profess their yearning to find a modest and sensible girl to marry. But none of you can resist chasing after a golden-haired flirt with a well-endowed figure, all dimples and giggles- without giving a passing thought to how empty-headed she might be." "Guilty as charged," one of the men admitted, and they all chuckled. "She's not empty-headed," Tom said, unable to keep silent. Adelia gave him a piercing glance, her smile firmly fixed. "I forgot- you're acquainted with the family. Don't say Lady Cassandra is a secret intellectual? An unacknowledged genius of our modern times?" Another round of chuckles, this time more subdued. "She's highly intelligent," Tom replied coolly, "and quick-witted. She's also extraordinarily kind. I've never heard her speak ill of anyone." Adelia flushed at the subtle rebuke.

Among the most brazen agents of partisan intolerance in the early 2000s was Ann Coulter. Coulter wrote a series of bestselling books attacking liberals and Democrats in a McCarthyite voice. The books’ titles speak for themselves: Slander (2002); Treason (2003); Godless (2006); Guilty (2009); Demonic (2011); Adios, America! (2015). Treason, published around the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, defends Joseph McCarthy and embraces his tactics. The book claims that anti-Americanism is “intrinsic to [liberals’] entire worldview” and accuses liberals of having committed “fifty years of treason” during the Cold War. While doing publicity for Treason, Coulter declared, “There are millions of suspects here….I am indicting the entire Democratic Party.” The book spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The trial wasn’t the finest hour of American justice as the treatment of the prisoners seemed medieval in its barbarism. Almost all of the male prisoners were dragged into the courtroom with linen masks shielding their faces and chains and heavy iron balls strapped to their ankles. With clanking irons, they shuffled in and, once seated, their hoods were removed. The military commission took testimony for seven weeks and ultimately found all eight defendants guilty, with four of them (Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and George Atzerodt) sentenced to hang while three others (including Michael O’Laughlen) were given life imprisonment and one a six-year term. Mary Surratt, who ran a boardinghouse where Booth colluded with other conspirators, went down in historical annals as the first woman ever executed by the federal government.

The people who support and defend those accused of child sexual abuse indiscriminately, those who join organizations dedicated to defending people who are accused of child sexual abuse with no screening whatsoever to keep out those who are guilty as charged are likewise not necessarily people engaged in an objective search for the truth. Some of them can and do use deceit, trickery, misstated research, harassment, intimidation, and charges of laundering federal money to silence their opponents. Those of us who are the recipients of bogus lawsuits and frivolous ethics charges and phony phone calls and pickets outside our offices must know more than the research to survive such tactics. We must know something about endurance and about the importance of refusing to be intimidated. Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

What are the heights, and depths, and lengths, of human science, with all the boasted acquisitions of the brightest genius of mankind! Learning and science can measure the globe, can sound the depths of the sea, can compass the heavens, can mete out the distances of the sun and moon, and mark out the path of every twinkling star for many ages past, or ages to come; but they cannot acquaint us with the way of salvation from this long, this endless distress. What are all the sublime reasonings of philosophers upon the abstruse and most difficult subjects? What is the whole circle of sciences which human wit and thought can trace out and comprehend? Can they deliver us from the guilt of one sin? Can they free us from one of the terrors of the Almighty? Can they assuage the torment of a wounded spirit, or guard us from the impressions of divine indignation? Alas, they are all but trifles in comparison of this blessed Gospel, which saves us from eternal anguish and death. It is the Gospel that teaches us the holy skill to prevent this worm of conscience from gnawing the soul, and instructs us how to kill it in the seed and first springs of it, to mortify the corruptions of the heart, to resist the temptations of Satan, and where to wash away the guilt of sin. It is this blessed Gospel that clearly discovers to us how we may guard against the fire of divine wrath, or rather how to secure our souls from becoming the fuel of it. It is this Book that teaches us to sprinkle the blood of Christ on a guilty conscience by faith, by receiving Him as sincere penitents, and thereby defends us from the angel of death and destruction. This is that experimental philosophy of the saints in Heaven whereby they have been released from the bonds of their sins, have been rescued from the curse of the law, and have been secured from the gnawing worm and devouring fire.

Be calm! I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough that you seek to increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other, and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous." "Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies. Begone, or let us try our strength in a fight, in which one must fall." "How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow-beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale: when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me: listen to me; and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.

Gentlemen,' he was saying, 'I shall be brief, but I would like to use my remaining time with you to remind you that this case is not a difficult one, it requires no minute sifting of complicated facts, but it does require you to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant. To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. This case is as simple as black and white. 'The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. The defendant is not guilty, but somebody in this court-room is. 'I have nothing but pity in my heart for the chief witness for the state, but my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man’s life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt.

The law isn’t supposed to be about unspoken excuses and behind-the-scenes calculations. The beauty of the system is that judges and juries are allowed to consider only what is seen and heard in open court. In between the white lines of this arena, it’s all supposed to make sense. This is where we all get to be equal again. In the defendant’s chair, rich and poor ride the same roller coaster, face the same music. Case has to match case. Sentence should match sentence. But they don’t match anymore. They probably never did, and probably it was never even close. But at least there was the illusion of it. What’s happened now, in this new era of settlements and non prosecutions is that the state has formally surrendered to its own excuses. It has decided just to punt from the start and take the money which doesn’t become really wrong until it turns around the next day and decides to double down on the less-defended, flooring it all the way to trial against a welfare mom or some joker who sold a brick of dope in the projects. Repeat the same process a few million times, and that’s how the jails in American get the population they have. Even if every single person they sent to jail were guilty, the system would still be an epic fail—it’s the jurisprudential version of Pravda, where the facts int he paper might have all been true on any given day, but the lie was all in what was not said. That’s what nobody gets, that the two approaches to justice may individually make a kind of sense. but side by side they’re a dystopia, here common city courts become factories for turning poor people into prisoners, while federal prosecutors on the white-collar beat turn into overpriced garbage men, who behind closed doors quietly dispose of the sins of the rich for a fee. And it’s evolved this way over time and for a thousand reasons, so that almost nobody is aware of the whole picture, the two worlds so separate that they’re barely visible to each other. The usual political descriptors like “unfairness” and “injustice” don’t really apply. it’s more like a breakdown into madness.

The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distort it to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We’ve gone to events that claimed to be historic fashion shows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. As we heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we had gone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrel show featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called “living history” events really are that bigoted. When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are “just having fun.” What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhaps they are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child who goes home bruised and weeping. It’s time someone stood up for the past. I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every social species, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts. The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with minds sufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; the sum of all interactions determine the nature of societies. At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based around race, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being truly open-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women’s rights, yet have an appallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges are voting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at the idea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirable rights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, “I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”3 Many modern Americans seem to have perverted this to, “I will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.” When we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When we question stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance in general.

There cannot be any hard and fast rules. But there can be suggestions and useful analogies. The most useful, to my mind, is that of the difference between the English and French judicial systems. In England (and America), the task of the court in criminal cases, which it devolves upon a jury, is to arrive at a verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ on the evidence presented by prosecuting and defending counsel in turns. Trials are conflicts and verdicts are decisions; the two sides ‘win’ or ‘lose’. In France, and other countries which observe Roman Law, the task of the court in a criminal case is to arrive at the truth, as far as it can be perceived by human eyes, and the business of establishing the outlines of the truth falls not on a jury, which is strictly asked to enter a judgement, but upon a juge d’instruction. This officer of the court, unknown to English law, is accorded very wide powers of interrogation–of the suspect, his family, his associates–and of investigation–of the circumstances and scene of the crime–at which the suspect is often required to participate in a reconstruction. Only when the juge is satisfied that a crime has indeed occurred and that the suspect is responsible will he allow the case to go forward for prosecution. The character of these two different legal approaches is usually defined as ‘accusatorial’ (English) and ‘inquisitorial’ (French) respectively.

THE DEFENDANT: Thank you, your Honor. I stand before your Honor humbly and painfully aware that we are here today for one reason: Because of my actions that I pled guilty to on August 21, and as well on November 29. I take full responsibility for each act that I pled guilty to, the personal ones to me and those involving the President of the United States of America. Viktor Frankl in his book, "Man's Search for Meaning," he wrote, "There are forces beyond your control that can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation." Your Honor, this may seem hard to believe, but today is one of the most meaningful days of my life. The irony is today is the day I am getting my freedom back as you sit at the bench and you contemplate my fate. I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the fateful day that I accepted the offer to work for a famous real estate mogul whose business acumen I truly admired. In fact, I now know that there is little to be admired. I want to be clear. I blame myself for the conduct which has brought me here today, and it was my own weakness, and a blind loyalty to this man that led me to choose a path of darkness over light. It is for these reasons I chose to participate in the elicit act of the President rather than to listen to my own inner voice which should have warned me that the campaign finance violations that I later pled guilty to were insidious.

Does that sound awful to you? I hear the little voice in your head: Destruction of evidence! Obstruction of justice! You are naive. You imagine the courts are reliable, that wrong results are rare, and therefore I ought to have trusted the system. If he truly believed Jacob was innocent, you are thinking, he would have simply let the police sweep in and take whatever they liked. Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines. Not just false negatives, the guilty criminals who get off scot-free—those “errors” we recognize and accept. They are the predictable result of stacking the deck in defendants’ favor as we do. The real surprise is the frequency of false positives, the innocent men found guilty. That error rate we do not acknowledge—do not even think about—because it calls so much into question. The fact is, what we call proof is as fallible as the witnesses who produce it, human beings all. Memories fail, eyewitness identifications are notoriously unreliable, even the best-intentioned cops are subject to failures of judgment and recall. The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking, and there was no way in hell I was going to trust my son’s fate to it. Not because I believed he was guilty, I assure you, but precisely because he was innocent. I was doing what little I could to ensure the right result, the just result. If you do not believe me, go spend a few hours in the nearest criminal court, then ask yourself if you really believe it is error-free. Ask yourself if you would trust your child to it.

Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children. Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African American victim of the Hearne drug bust.2 You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of your eighteen-month-old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl. This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Emma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation, African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods.

First, remember how Control Dramas get started in the first place. When people feel insecure, they do things to feel better in various ways. We don’t just have to defend against our own hurts and anxieties; we also have to defend against others who we think are trying to put us down or otherwise manipulate us to steal our energy. When someone puts us down, we sense that we are under attack and pay attention to them. Because “where attention goes, energy flows,” they get a hit of energy from us and we feel diminished. So we tend to fight back by putting them down or manipulating them in return to get the energy back. As you read in Celestine, this is the game played by too many, keeping too much conflict and corruption in the world. But this is all Ego stuff, of course, developed initially in insecure families. You already know the cure is to always be Spiritually Connected so we have our own centered inner security, which gives us an endless supply of energy, regardless of who is trying to steal it. We don’t have to play these games any longer. Here is what to do: simply stay connected with the person, giving them energy, and then “name their game.” For instance, if you are facing a “poor me” drama, in which the person wants to make you feel guilty about something you didn’t intend to do, simply say, “I am feeling that I’m being forced to feel guilty.” And stick to that. Don’t defend yourself. Just keep explaining your experience of the situation. Keep sending love. They might need to retreat, but you aren’t affected. You are a giver, secure in yourself. You cleared an inauthentic game by expressing authentic honesty. You offered your experience of the situation. Whether the other person wanted to or not, in response to your authenticity, they will find themselves becoming more authentic as well. And since you aren’t disconnecting, it opens the door to talk about true feelings in a relationship. Sometimes it’s the “aloof” Control Drama you’re facing, and the person is using distancing or mystification to get you to keep asking questions in order to win your energy. Collapse their game by giving them energy anyway and authentically saying, “I feel like I really can’t get to know you because you don’t share details about yourself.” Similarly, if you are facing an “Interrogator” who bids for energy by constantly finding something to criticize about you, simply say that you feel criticized and put down when you are with them. They will feel your energy and authentic sincerity and, again, will grow more authentic themselves, right in front of your eyes. The same name-the-game approach also works for the most aggressive Control Drama, the “Intimidator,” trying to get energy from you by telling you they are going to blow up and do something crazy, literally trying to scare you into giving them energy. Gently name the game, but be careful—sometimes it is more prudent to remove yourself from the situation.

She tilts her head to the side after taking a sip of her tea, studying us. “You know, I can’t get over how beautiful you two are together. One of those couples you love to follow on Instagram, you know, the really cute ones that are so sickening in love that you can’t get enough of them.” Way to drop the love bomb, Mom. Jesus. Thankfully Emory doesn’t show any kind of hatred for the term but instead says, “Like Jennifer Lopez and A-Rod?” “Yes,” my mom answers with excitement. “Oh my gosh, I’m obsessed with watching their stories. The little videos they do together, I just can’t get enough of them. J-Rod,” my mom says dreamily. “Oh gosh, what would your couple name be?” She thinks about it for a second. “Emox . . . or Knemory. Oh I love Knemory. Sounds so poetic.” “Knemory does have a nice ring to it,” I add. “I don’t know, what about Emorox?” “Ohhh, that sounds like a name that belongs in The Game of Thrones.” Taking on a more masculine voice, my mom says, “Look out, Jon, Emorox is coming over the hill, with her fire-spitting dragons, Knemory and George.” “George?” Emory laughs out loud, covering her mouth. “Why George?” “Well, look at the names they have in that show? They’re all exotic names you’ve never heard before—Cersei, Gregor, Arya—and then in waltzes good old Jon Snow. It’s only fair that the dragons have a lemon in the bunch as well.” “Uh, Jon is anything but a lemon, Mom,” I defend. “He was raised from the dead.” My mom’s mouth drops, pure and utter shock in her face. “Jon Snow dies?” Shit. Emory elbows my stomach. “Where the hell is your GOT etiquette? You never talk about the facts of the show until the air is cleared about how far someone is in watching. You are one of those people who spoils everything for someone just catching up to the trend.” *Ahem* “I mean . . . uh . . . he doesn’t die.” “You just said he is raised from the dead,” my mom says. Feeling guilty, I reply, “Well, at least he’s still alive, right?” She slumps against the cushion of the couch and mutters, “Unbelievable.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gentry, that your son is a barbarian and broke your GOT trust.” Pressing her hand against her forehead, my mom says, “You know, I blame myself. I thought I taught him a shred of decorum, I guess not.” “Don’t blame yourself,” Emory coos. “You did everything right. It comes down to the hooligans he hangs out with. There’s only so much you can control after they leave the nest.” “You’re absolutely right,” my mom agrees and leans across the couch to smack me in the back of the head. “Hey,” I complain while rubbing the sore spot. I look between the two women in my life and I say, “I don’t like this ganging up on me shit.” “You wanted us to get along, right?” Emory asks. “Well, I happen to like your mom, especially since she complimented my bosom.” “Ah, I see.” I continue to look between the two of them. “You’re okay with my mom catching you with your shirt off now, moved past the embarrassment?” Emory’s eyes narrow. “With that kind of attitude, it might be the very last time you see me topless.” My mom raises her fist to the air, as if to say, “Girl Power.” And then she says, “You tell him, Emory. Don’t let him push you around.” “I wasn’t pushing her around—” “You keep that beautiful bosom under lock and key, and if you have a temptation to show anyone, just flash me.” “Mom, do you realize how wrong that is?” “Want to go to the bathroom right now, Mrs. Gentry?” “I would be delighted to.” They both stand but before they can make a move, I pull on Emory’s hand, bringing her back down to my lap. “No way in hell is that happening. Jesus, what is wrong with you?

Innocent until proven guilty” is a good rule in a court of law, which has the power to deprive a defendant of liberty or life. But it is mindless and dangerous nonsense to apply that standard outside that context — especially when choosing a President of the United States, who holds in his hands the liberty and lives of millions of Americans.

Rape we all know is the easiest charge to make and most difficult to prove,” Wura paused and sighed again “But with Justice Janus, it’s a whole different issue. Justice Janus has been a prosecution counsel for almost fifteen years before he was appointed by the governor to be judge at age forty two. And for the past six months he’s been trying rape cases like rape is his specialty. And guess what, all defendants always turn out guilty.

It follows from this that it is those who fail to promote religious freedom for all people with the same vigor with which they promote freedom of expression, democratic elections, and the rights of women, and those who invent reasons to demote religion to a lower and optional category of rights and freedoms, who are guilty of special pleading. Such persons often defend human rights of every other kind, but find special, ad hoc reasons for removing religion from normal democratic protections, or depriving religious persons and communities of rights and freedoms to which they have every claim. This kind of special pleading, sadly, is an equal-opportunity myopia, afflicting conservatives and liberals, Muslims and Christians, Hindus and Buddhists, atheists and the indifferent alike.

So, the whole reason you feel “condemned” all the time could simply be your failure to accept and embrace what is written in the Scriptures. On the other hand, there could be a very different reason for the uncomfortable feelings you are experiencing. It could be that the Spirit is dealing with you because of unconfessed, unforsaken sin in your life, but you are mistaking conviction for condemnation. This confusion can be fatal, since conviction is something we must have if we become insensitive to sin. Conviction is good, not bad, something sent from heaven, not manufactured in hell.               If we can continue in sin without conviction, that is a real danger sign. Either our hearts have become so hard that we no longer sense the prodding and reproving of the Spirit, or, worse than that, the Spirit has simply left us alone–an absolutely dreadful prospect. You should thank God when His conviction breaks your heart, fully yielding to the Spirit, since heeding His rebuke always brings life.               Maybe there’s something wrong in your life and you know it. That’s why there is that gnawing pain deep within. Unfortunately, many believers who confuse conviction with condemnation are driven away from the Lord, always feeling rejected and therefore dejected. Other believers, also mistaking conviction for condemnation, react in the opposite way, saying, “That feeling is not from God. I rebuke you, Satan![64] That’s just legalism at its worst.” And so, rather than repent, they run. And this means that neither group responds correctly to the conviction of the Spirit!               What then is the difference between conviction and condemnation? Conviction is like the work of the prosecuting attorney, proving his case against the defendant and exposing his crime.[65] Condemnation is like the judge’s gavel coming down with a final, irreversible verdict of “Guilty!”[66] Conviction says, “You have sinned. Come back to Me!” Condemnation says, “You are guilty. Get away from Me!”               When God convicts the unsaved, He does it to bring them to conversion. As long as they are being convicted, they are not yet hopelessly condemned. When God convicts the saved, He does it to bring His straying saints back to Himself. Conviction for us means that we are still part of the family, since, “If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons” (Heb. 12:9). When we are convicted and even chastised by our Father, that is the time to come to Him and confess our sins, finding mercy through the blood of Jesus and receiving grace to turn from sin. But condemnation is an entirely different story. There is no mercy there! It is a place where judgment rules and damnation reigns. It has nothing to do with us!

interviewer - would you have defended adolf hitler? jacques verges - hell, i'd have even defended bush, as long as he pleads guilty!

In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black Chicago youth, visited a small town in the Delta country of Mississippi. The teenager entered a country store where a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Within a day Till was dead, so savagely beaten that it was beyond the ability of his mother to recognize her son. Two white men were arrested: Roy Bryant, the husband of the white woman, and his brother, J. W. “Big Milam.” An all-white jury quickly found the defendants not guilty, and they were released. The two men immediately provided an interview for Look magazine in which they openly admitted to and bragged about committing the crime.

In Portland, OR, “Jackie,” a homeless former social worker with muscular dystrophy, was hit with a misdemeanor theft charge for charging her phone from a plug on a planter-base on a sidewalk; she spent a day in jail when she missed her arraignment. The electricity she used to charge her phone was worth a fraction of a cent. She keeps her phone charged for her personal safety. Worried that a pleading guilty would put a black mark on her record that would interfere with her ability to get social housing, she pled innocent. After two court dates with two different public defenders, the DA dropped the charge.

THOMAS Guilty Of mankind. I have perpetrated human nature. My father and mother were accessories before the fact, But there’ll be no accessories after the fact, By my virility there won’t! Just see me As I am, like a perambulating Vegetable, patched with inconsequential Hair, looking out of two small jellies for the means Of life, balanced on folding bones, my sex No Beauty but a blemish to be hidden Behind judicious rags, driven and scorched By boomerang rages and lunacies which never Touch the accommodating artichoke Or the seraphic strawberry beaming in its bed: I defend myself against pain and death by pain And death, and make the world go round, they tell me By one of my less lethal appetites: Half this grotesque life I spend in a state Of slow decomposition, using The name of unconsidered God as a pedestal On which I stand and bray that I’m best Of beasts, until under some patient Moon or other I fall to pieces, Like a cake of dung. Is there a slut would Hold this in her arms and put her lips against it? JENNET Sluts are only human. By a quirk Of unastonished nature, your obscene Decaying figure of vegetable fun Can drag upon a woman’s heart, as though Heaven were dragging up the roots of hell. What is to be done? Something compels us into The terrible fallacy that man is desirable and there’s no escaping into truth. The crimes And cruelties leave us longing, and campaigning Love still pitches his tent of light among The suns and moons. You may be decay and a platitude Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life. You may be corrupt as ancient applies, well then Corruption is what I most willingly harvest. You are Evil, Hell, the Father of Lies; if so Hell is my home and my days of good were a holiday: Hell is my hill and the world slopes away from it Into insignificance. I have come suddenly Upon my heart and where it is I see no help for.