Perhaps the most disturbing thing about this is to do with a fundamental philosophical question, and on the surface this might seem a callous and spurious question in the face of what is obviously a disturbing and emotive video, but the question remains, and it is this: What happened to the presumption of Innocence? Western civil and criminal law is founded upon the principle of innocence until guilt is proven in a court of law. This principle is enshrined in our legal system for many good reasons, but none more so than the disparity between litigating parties. Often on the one side is the individual, and this individual may be from any walk of life and have access to limited resources for their defence. On the other side is often arrayed the multi trillion dollar and massive state architecture of the legal system. This disparity of power must always lead to the onus being upon the state to prove its case, and that a presumption of innocence exists before any adjudication. This presumption of innocence, demands a form of care of any individual who is taken into custody in regards to any supposed offence, simply because they have not as yet been given Habeas Corpus, in which their body is offered up to a court of law, in which they are Presumed to be innocent, until such time as the state can prove otherwise. So basically what is happening during an arrest, is basically that an Innocent person, is being detained for a fixed period of time in order to provide them with their right of habeas corpus. During this time, adequate care should be maintained in the safety and well being of the innocent person, who has as of yet not been offered up to the court and is still presumed in law to be INNOCENT. This is at the absolute crux of what you are witnessing, for with every abuse of process, and victimization of presumed innocence, the law is being altered to place the onus upon the individual to prove their innocence in the wake of a tide of state power and manipulation, that rests the presumption of innocence away from the individual and places the adjudication of guilt in the hands of those that are charged with simply processing the innocent. Habeas Corpus is under attack, in a subtle and disturbing way, for when the power of the state presumes guilt before the body has been offered up to the court, a dramatic shift in power has taken place, where the presumption of innocence is no longer the rule, but instead the onus has moved to a presumption of guilt. This is deeply disturbing and dangerous, for as John Stewart Mill so sagaciously propounded in his great work, On Liberty, many years ago: Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant -- society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it -- its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism. - John Stuart Mill (on the tyranny of the majority) in On Liberty (1860)
Posted on: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 16:14:24 +0000
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