{"id":13544,"date":"2011-01-06T11:46:19","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T16:46:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/01\/06\/13544.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:58:32","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:58:32","slug":"proven-guilty-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/01\/06\/proven-guilty-or-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Proven Guilty, or not"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Joe Posnanski is my favorite sportswriter, and one of my favorite bloggers on nearly any topic. I don’t link to his stuff very often here in this Tohu Bohu, often because I don’t have anything to add to it. His recent note on The 40th Anniversary of the Washington General’s win<\/a> was lovely, for instance, but other than recommending that people read it, even if they aren’t interested in sports, I don’t have anything to say about it. I do have some things I could add to his excellent recent Hall of Fame pieces, and perhaps I will write about them at some point.\n

But of course what actually gets me to write about something is disagreeing with it. And I disagree with some of his Innocent Until Proven Guilty<\/a> post. Actually, I don’t disagree with the main point, which is that it is preposterous to refuse to vote for a great player’s inclusion in the Hall of Fame because he might<\/i> have used steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. But the discussion, which was sparked by an essay by Ed Price<\/a>, centers on whether innocent until proven guilty<\/i> is a legal idea or a more general idea. Mr. Posnanski calls it “a fundamental right of society”. And I disagree. Or, at least, I don’t entirely agree.\n

I suspect that the disagreement is over the word proven<\/i>, and might be washed away by defining our terms somewhat better. Mr. Posnanski does concede that a legal reasonable doubt<\/i> standard might not be appropriate for the Hall of Fame, but insists that the basic concept must hold anyway. I’ll quote:\n

If an employer charges you with stealing petty cash, if your parent charges you with breaking the living room vase, if your friend charges you with backstabbing her at a party, don’t they need at least SOME standard of proof? Every single day of our lives, we are faced with some test of innocent until proven guilty, and it seems to me that those words are not about legalities, they are about common decency.<\/blockquote>\n

And yet I lock the door to my house when I leave. Every day when I walk around the library that employs me, I curse the imbeciles who leave their valuables lying around where anyone could pick them up. Yes, it is nice to assume that the whole population of the library or of my metropolitan area is honest and immune to temptation, but seriously? Not. I assume that somebody out there is guilty, and I do so without proof.\n

You can argue that these are general cases, and that he is talking about the specifics. That’s a legitimate distinction—I may be traducing people in general, but I am not traducing anyone in specific, nor does any honest person lose anything when I lock my door or carry my laptop to the men’s room. Or if I assume that anybody driving after dark on New Year’s Eve is drunk and high, altogether without evidence. But I think that in many ways that skepticism is as important to society as the common decency that Mr. Posnanski encourages.\n

And it does apply to individuals. If I am hiring a babysitter, do I assume the hopeful candidate is capable and honest, or do I get references? I get references. My current employer got references when they hired me; they didn’t assume that I was honestly describing my work history. We often require some evidence that a person deserves hiring, promotion, dessert, a good grade, a vote, a roll in the hay, a handout, a smile. The standard of evidence is going to be different for different things, as it should be. But there should be one.\n

Now, it is very important that the skepticism I’m talking about be held in tension<\/i> with the innocent until proven guilty<\/i> value. That's why it's so incredibly important to apply it to legal matters, and not just in criminal court but across the government. The assumption of innocence is an absolute bedrock to equality under the law. And (as we see in times of crisis) when we are willing to give it up as a more general social value, it will deteriorate in the government as well. And to that extent, Mr. Posnanski’s rant is a valuable one, a necessary one, a good deed. But it’s not all there is.\n

Back when there was a good deal of discussion of whether Clarence Thomas created a hostile work environment for Anita Hill, many people said that he was innocent until proven guilty, and that therefore it would be wrong to deny him lifetime tenure on the Supreme Court. I said that it would be wrong to imprison him, perhaps, or to fine him, and frankly wrong to fire him from the seat he held on the bench at the time without some more formal and rigorous investigation, but that it was perfectly reasonable to withhold promotion. That was politically motivated, no doubt, but I think it’s still a reasonable stance. But then, I do think that the preponderance of evidence was against him, so perhaps that’s the standard I was holding for that matter. Or even a lower more-likely-than-not standard. And given that a plaque in the Hall of Fame is permanent, and that being denied it doesn’t really damage a modern player very much, perhaps a where-there’s-smoke standard is defensible.\n

But my point, really, is that even a Big Hall guy like me should assume that any given player—Kirk Rueter or Roger Clemens—should not<\/i> get a plaque until there’s some proof that he should.\n

And that you shouldn’t leave your laptop lying on a table in the library. Even if you are just going to the restroom.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger constantly tries to accept that whatever happens, can happen to YHB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19278,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13544\/revisions\/19278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}