Thread by @JewhadiTM

The day American justice died unherd.com/2021/05/the-da…

George Floyd was just a man. The facts of his life are indeed tragic, but they are also mundane.

Yet he has been so valourised in death, and the events of his demise so mythologised, that meaningful attempts to reflect on his life by people who only became aware of his existence after he was gone are futile.

He is, like the falling man of 9/11, confined to the reality and context of his exit.

Chauvin, it seems, was pre-judged — exactly the thing our system of jurisprudence was designed to prevent.

The jury’s unusual rush to judgement was also manifest in almost every conversation about Floyd’s death with people who would normally have retained the formality of saying Chauvin was “accused of”, “suspected of” or “charged with” murder.

In this case, however, people simply insisted that Chauvin was guilty of murder.

Perhaps even more unsettling was how this sense of prejudgment was mirrored in the many claims of victory by protestors, rioters and their prominent supporters who, following the verdict, were quick to take credit for forcing the outcome.

In other words, they sought to influence the jury’s verdict, and were sure that they had.

Until recently in America, it was understood that, even when the facts made a person’s guilt seem inescapable, the accused was formally innocent right up until the moment that they were convicted by an impartial jury of their peers.

And conviction in America was no small formality. Our founders bent over backwards to give the accused the absolute benefit of even a single, reasonable doubt.

That counterintuitive structure of our legal system, burdening the state and arming the defence, exists for a crucial reason: to protect citizens from the vast power of the state and its frightening capacity to usurp liberty.

But America allowed itself to skip the formalities when it came to Derek Chauvin; we all knew, thanks to a shocking video, what had happened before any of the considerable exculpatory context was known.

Today, if the mob is convinced and motivated enough, their cause becomes the righteous one.

Whether jurors accede to this out of fear for their own safety, or out of fear of the damage that may be done to innocent people if their verdict reignites violence...

or because they are convinced by the mob that there is some higher principle whose value exceeds their duty to the accused, it must not stand.

The will of the mob has no place in court. Likewise, no conviction that emerges from a mob-influenced court can be legitimate.

Liberty is precious. It is not a privilege granted by the state; it is a right of every citizen, and the power to deprive a person of it carries with it an immense moral burden to ensure that their guilt is “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

That is our Founding Fathers’ brilliant insight; that is the wisdom we now find endangered.

And so the conviction of Derek Chauvin sets a disturbing precedent.

Today, when people are angry enough to demand something — when they are willing to march and burn and disrupt and intimidate — their understanding of events becomes gospel, and a trial is just one more tool at their disposal.

The right to a fair trial is suddenly turned into a mere privilege — something that is only guaranteed so long as the mob isn’t against you.