Happy Birthday, America!

     Today's the day we told the British Crown we were leaving.  The King wasn't happy about that, resulting in eight years of spirited disagreement, death, injury, disease and various treaties.  But we persisted, and won, something George Washington, who was in a position to know, described as "little short of a standing miracle."

     We kept a few things from the mother country, like notions of jurisprudence that included the presumption of innocence.  In the 1760s, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

     While this can mean that a man who can afford very good lawyers is especially likely to escape being found guilty, the broad principle is aimed at preventing harm to the innocent -- and any malefactors who squeak by are likely to either mend their ways or commit further crimes, for which they will be arrested and face the possibility of punishment in due course.

     There's a guy running for President right now -- he'd love for me to mention his name -- who's been preloading public expectations if he wins and begins the mass deportations he has promised.  He's saying the media will single out the one lovely, otherwise-innocent mother who gets deported while ignoring the ten or a hundred presumed horrible, awful criminals swept up in the same dragnet and removed from the U.S., literally inverting Blackstone's ratio.  Meanwhile, he is benefiting from the presumption of innocence in criminal trials while availing himself of some of the best attorneys money and power can afford.

     You can listen to Founder and Framer Benjamin Franklin, or you can listen to that other guy.  One of them was there at the beginning, and knew the score.  The other?  He's mostly riffing, with no real thought of tomorrow.

By Kazvorpal - Photoshop CS5. This file was derived from: Benjamin Franklin 1767.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23104980