since Iβm thinking about this instead of studying for bar prep:
people in general tend to assume that a person whoβs been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if theyβre guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.
like, if the police break into an innocent personβs house and look for drugs, we recognize that itβs a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someoneβs house and doΒ find drugs, well, thatβs just what they deserved. weβd all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldnβt mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. itβs not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know heβs the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, thatβs unfortunate but necessary.
there are three problems with this:
You cannot always know with certainty whoβs innocent and whoβs guilty;
A two-tieredΒ βinnocentβ andΒ βguiltyβ legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;
Even guilty people have rights.
this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (itβs also a major aspect of mostΒ βgrittyβ police dramas and almost all comics), but itβs definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when itβs used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman.Β
and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isnβt summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong peopleΒ (that is, innocent people). which, again, you canβt know whoβs innocent and whoβs guilty - lots of innocent people arenβt sweet old ladies whoβve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesnβt mean that they committed thisΒ specificΒ crime that theyβve been accused of.
and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. thatβs whatΒ βinnocent until proven guiltyβ means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal,Β so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules weβve set in place to prevent abuses.Β
like, itβs not that every person whoβs ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. itβs that we have a system that treats people like shit once weβve decided theyβre guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and weβre okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. beforeΒ arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.
and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. Iβm not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings.Β
Iβm just saying that there are implications behind them that are deeply disturbing (βif I decide youβre guilty, youβre less of a person to meβ) and that itβs the primary driving force behind most of the issues in our criminal justice system.