Guilty until proven innocent
At the beginning of every criminal trial, we tell the jury that the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. That the burden of proof is always on the government, and the defendant does not have to prove anything at all. That the burden of proof that the government has in criminal cases is the highest burden of proof in any kind of case, in any courtroom. And yet, the notion that a person would not have been charged with a crime if they were not guilty, that the prosecutor would not be telling us this person is guilty if they were not guilty, is difficult to overcome.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in DUI trials. Lawrence Taylor's Anatomy of a DUI Lynching on his DUI Blog demonstrates this problem by pointing us to a news story about a high school student who was accused of drunk driving and causing an accident which resulted in severe injuries to a 9 year old child, and the comments which were posted below the story. Most of the comments railed against the horrors of this spoiled rich kid who was driving drunk at 7:45 in the morning.
When a follow up story revealed that the driver's BAC as determined by a blood test was 0.00, many of the ensuing comments still assumed that the boy was drunk, and that his rich parents "got him off."
What is concerning is that these people who are writing these comments may be a cross-section of the jury pool in my next DUI trial. The fervor that accompanies DUI, stirred up by MADD and other organizations, soundbytes from politicians, and televised advertising by law enforcement in South Carolina (sober or slammer, you drink and drive you lose) makes it difficult if not impossible to draw an unbiased jury in any DUI case.
