I was under the impression that there was a way for such things to be “scrubbed from the records” so to speak. Of course, they’re never truly completely gone, but there are channels in which you can be “excused” so that you can legally neglect to put, say, your murder trial on the section of a job application where they ask “have you ever been tried for any felony?”
I’m going by what you wrote: “With respect to the results, we could call it “gorp” and “norp” for all it matters, the point is that its a legal term and we can use anything we want. Whatever state we consider a defendant in when found “not guilty” we can assign to the word “innocent” or “norp” if we wanted to.” This seems like an argument that the distinction between the words are meaningless and we can use them interchangeably.
Personally, I feel there is a distinction between innocent and not guilty - and I feel not guilty is the more appropriate term for the situation.
I’ll take this example as a person who was truly found innocent and another suspect was arrested-
If the wrong suspect was arrested the Judge drops it from their record and all DNA swabs, fingerprints, etc. are erased from their record. If they didn’t do the crime and were found innocent without a trial being necessary.
Of course the court case is still there as a record that it was dropped but that would not be made available to employers or people paying for background checks.
The media would likely be the go-to source for murder trials if a case went to trial rather than running a criminal history check.
[This is just from what I’ve seen working in a jail in Florida. Other states may do it differently. There is much attention to deleting records for anyone arrested erreonously]
If a person wasn’t convicted, only arrested and went to trial as long as they answer honestly on a school or job application there should not be a problem. The whole point of a sealed record for juveniles is they get a clean record or other expunged cases. They don’t have to tell anyone. Exactly like Jgraon said. They can neglect to mention it.
As for the matter of guilty vs. not guilty and trial by media that is a whole other issue. People will make up their own minds about guilt. I don’t know if an innocent verdict added in would make a difference but it’s a nice thought.
I like the OPS suggestion because it would add in extra protection for those who find themselves railroaded. It’s another preassure along with 25 to life sentences for people to make plea deals.
Nancy Grace and trial by media is the price we pay for freedom of the press. I recall the French media criticised our “perp walk” after Dominic Strauss Kahn was arrested. It is rather gross the way criminal trials are televised for entertainment.
It would be worse not to have it of course since the media is often the only recourse for the “too big to jail” folks to get any sort of punishment.
I think in criminal law the big decision to be made by the court is whether or not to punish somebody, and the first step is deciding whether they are confidently known to be guilty because we don’t punish people we don’t know are guilty. That’s what the verdict is for.
If the court had some decision to make on the basis of whether the person is confidently known to be innocent or not, we’d need a distinction between “innocent” and “not innocent”, but there’s no such decision.
In civil law where there are decisions to be made even if the underlying truth is not confidently known, we don’t use “not guilty”, we have the court find in favor of one or another of the people before it.
If we step back from the court system and look at the legal system as a whole, there is a distinction between not guilty people and innocent people. Before the trial there is a criminal investigation.
If John Smith is accused of murdering Harry Jones and it’s found that Smith is innocent, then the police will reopen the case in order to find the unknown murderer of Harry Jones.
But sometimes the police will not reopen a case even though the accused was found not guilty. If Smith was the person who killed Jones, there’s no reason to go looking for a different murderer even though Smith was found not guilty at his trial.
This.
“Not guilty” is a better, more precise expression of what happened when a defendant is acquitted than “innocent”. The jury is not there to determine if he did or didn’t do it. They are there to decide if the prosecution has proven that he did beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is reasonable doubt, then you acquit.
As mentioned above, it is shorthand for “not proven to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. Not “he didn’t do it” - “it is reasonable to doubt that he did it”.
Regards,
Shodan
Good point. This IS a good reason to distinguish between not guilty and innocent. Are there other mechanisms in the legal system that do this job?
Sometimes when a conviction is overturned, to get wrongful incarceration compensation, you have to go further than a “not guilty” verdict and demonstrate actual innocence to the court or claims commissioner.
Well suppose the defense said "The reason we are here is that the police have fabricated evidence , I have proved it. "
You’d better be very very sure you have proved it, or else you have set the jury to think "well the reason he tried to say that the police fabricated the evidence is … the evidence says he is guilty ! "… That is,there is a certain logic that the jury may use that tells them if the defendant fails to provide innocence, they’ve admitted guilt.
As a defendant, do you find it easier to prove your innocence, or to merely suggest the prosecution has not proved you are guilty ? I think you would find that the later is easier. As a defendant who was found “not guilty” you’d wish that the system would then pay your lawyers so that you could go to back to court after the “not guilty” and argue “innocent”. But there is a reason this does not occur. If a verdict of innocent was returned, that would strongly suggest that the prosecutor or police had done something wrong personally …
So choosing to have “innocent” as a verdict at any stage would inspire police to corrupt the process so that the evidence was very firm.
However it allows another corruption to the process, which is charges as a form of punishment, charges that from the get go are useless and will end at not guilty, and yet ,eg for spouse/date rape, can go to a jury without previous testing… the trend across the western countries is to avoid having the witness give evidence twice. (???. So they want to spend 10 days for a useless case, instead of attending court for a half day to test it out ? )
As a matter of psychology, I don’t know, but as a matter of law, I don’t see how that is different from any other attempt to debunk the evidence against you. If the jury thinks that there is reasonable doubt about the evidence because it could reasonably have been fabricated, then they should acquit. But that is not much different from any other way of refuting evidence.
I’m not saying that every defendant should be acquitted because the police could have framed him. Just denying whatever evidence is against you doesn’t usually refute a case just because the defendant says so, whether because you claim you were framed or because you claim that the eyewitness was mistaken or you found the bloody knife on the street or whatever.
The police do have to prove that the evidence is valid, of course, and that can involve demonstrating the chain of possession of the evidence to show that it was accounted for from the moment the police arrived to the trial.
IIRC that was one of the problems with OJ’s claim that his DNA was planted. The police recovered his DNA from the murder scene long before OJ was in custody and his blood was drawn. So the evidence couldn’t have been planted unless the police were time-travelers.
Regards,
Shodan
Perhaps we should have three verdicts:
Guilty (obvious)
Innocent (for when they just flat-out got the wrong guy)
Got Clean Away With It (when we all know he done it, but the police and/or prosecution screw the pooch)
But there’s another case of “maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but there’s just not enough evidence to know for certain he’s guilty”.
We could call that one It Depends.
And when we add that to the choices, we’ve got to deal with “She did do something, but it wasn’t bad enough to meet the definition of the crime she was charged with?” (For instance, jury concludes she did hit him, but didn’t mean to kill him, so she’s not guilty of murder)-- in some cases the jury might have the option of convicting on a lesser charge, but in other cases not.
I’m sure there are other possibilities that Dopers could enumerate. The point is, as far as what the legal system does next, they’re all the same – trial over, defendant goes free, can’t re-try the defendant. Why tie up the courts, juries, defendants, etc. making further legally-irrelevant distinctions? It’s not the courts’ job to deal with public opinion.
That would require re-defining an existing word to mean something different. In today’s society, “innocent” very clearly means “I didn’t do it, at all”.
The current system doesn’t find people “innocent” and yes, that may be an issue with the current system - someone charged with a crime, who goes to trial and is found “not guilty”, may well have to live with the stigma that heck, the state couldn’t prove its case, but maybe he did it.
However, your proposal will not change that. You can’t have it both ways - you can’t retain our legal system the way it exists now, and at the same time, insist you are making a difference by using the word “innocent”.
The proposal will do one of two things:
(1) The word “innocent” will simply come to be used in the same way “not guilty” is now - meaning, it will carry the same possibility for stigma; or
(2) The word “innocent” will retain its existing meaning, and the system will change to reflect that - meaning that people will be required to prove their “innocence”.
The problem with this can be summed up in a word: costs.
Good point. Calling somebody like O.J. Simpson innocent would just create doubts about the worth of innocence in the public mind.
In Transformers it is either “guilty” or “innocent”:
