Livre d'Or

Yeah, ok, there are some people out there expressing opinions like, oh, they should have just pinned something on him, everyone knows he's a villain. Those people are so very much not on my side, and I can quite see why their presence in the discussion is making people defensive. I think that people can be legitimately outraged about acquittals if they feel that there's a systematic problem (whether that's bad law, police bias, jury ignorance or whatever) leading to criminals getting away with it, but that's not at all the same as arguing that a particular individual should be convicted if there isn't a watertight case against him.

The "following" example was one I made up; what I was actually parodying was discussion somewhere in the Popehat comments where people were saying, harassment shouldn't be a crime because it can't be defined objectively, and someone suggested a definition which included "don't touch anyone without their consent" to which the response was "but what if a child runs out in front of a car, would it be sexual harassment to grab them without asking for consent first?" Which is just making me eyeroll sooooo hard. I agree that some of the internet outrage may lead to con security getting over-zealous for fear of being the next Readercon.

For me the key issue here is, at what level does due process operate? You don't need "due process" to form an opinion that someone is an unpleasant or dangerous fellow. You don't need "due process" to tell your friends of your opinion. Yes, in some circumstances the act of telling people about your opinion may be defamation, but not every negative opinion that falls short of criminal law standards of proof is automatically defamation, and I would regard it as a serious attack on free speech if the law were to shift in that direction. You don't need due process to report someone to the security team for a private event, or to make a complaint to a person's employer. Part of due process is how the security team or the employer or whoever handles that complaint, certainly. But you don't need to put together a case beyond reasonable doubt to even make the report in the first place. And you also don't need a case beyond reasonable doubt to report someone to the police for a crime, and the police don't need a case beyond reasonable doubt to make an arrest or bring charges. Of course, if you are making malicious or frivolous unfounded complaints of criminal behaviour, then you yourself are committing a crime. But if you have a serious reason to believe someone might have done something criminal, reporting that to the police is in fact the first stage of due process.

I absolutely do believe in "innocent until proven guilty". But ultimately that is a standard for the court, to make sure that nobody is punished by the state if there's any reasonable doubt at all they might be innocent. That's not a standard for making accusations, whether informal or formal. Telling people they can't act at all to defend themselves or to inform other people of perceived dangers unless they have already legally proved the accused guilty is again, a corruption of the meaning of due process.