Through the legal looking glass - Up front: news and opinion from independent minds - Column

Humanist, May-June, 2003 by C.W. Griffin

To claim that a not guilty verdict isn't equivalent to proof of innocence is technically correct but, more importantly, irrelevant. In the second century, Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius made a gigantic leap forward in criminal law when he ordered that defendants were to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. This pioneering concept reversed several millennia of primitive prosecutions. It took more than another millennium to put this principle into practice in British courts, but it was finally accepted as the basis of all civilized nations' legal systems. Nearly two millennia after the presumption of innocence became an axiom of Roman law, is it possible that death-penalty proponents are still not convinced of its necessity?

C. W. Griffin is a consulting engineer, serving as an expert witness in construction litigation, and an author. This article is adapted from his unpublished book, Law v. Justice: The Case for Legal Reform. He has authored ten books, including Cleaning Out Congress: The Case for Term Limits (1992) and Taming the Last Frontier: A Prescription for the Urban Crisis (1974). He has also published articles in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, the Nation, the Reporter, the Saturday Review, and the Washington Post.