Why argue a position like war or peace, or whether a person should go to jail forever, only one way when with a little effort, a very little effort, amounting to mental laziness, you can argue your position both ways?
Example:
Version 1: This great pile of evidence here points to guilt, therefore let us hang the culprit (or go to war, or stay there).
Version 2: See this great lack of evidence? That means that the culprit is guilty (or we should go to war, or stay there) because what this means, see, is that the culprit is guilty because the evidence has been cleverly concealed so that no one can find it, but it's there, all right.
Some time ago this country went through another period of craziness, a panic. Suddenly accusations of the most horrifying sort about children were turning up daily in the newspapers, on the Oprah Winfrey show, and, of course in the courts.
Everybody loves children. Raising children is our reason for being. We must protect children.
Sometimes we've sacrificed children to keep society going, thinking of the Inca, and Abraham, but we've gotten away from that for some reason.
We sacrificed Socrates for "corrupting the youth," or at least the Athenians did. And when they threatened his student Plato, he took off. "They've already committed one crime against philosophy," he remarked, and he didn't see why he should stick around to be victim of another.
After about sixty years as a colony in New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a religious experiment, allowed itself to be overcome by a hysteria in which the old story about devils witches seemed to come to life. Everyone believed in God, just as we do today in America. After all, those Puritans started Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, our leading universities today. You would expect to see some carryover.
But the Puritans also believed in Hell. We only believe in Heaven, today, I think. At any rate, the lord of the underworld was this fellow called Satan who was a sort of God in reverse. God was good, hence the name, one supposes, and was thus responsible for the good things that happened, the few good things, that is.
The bad things couldn't be blamed on the Good-Guy Himself, so they were attributed to his alter ego, the Devil. The theory was that if your child got sick, your cow died, your roof blew off, or the butter failed to churn, the Devil was behind it. But not the Devil himself. One of your neighbors, who was in league with the Devil, was the actual agent of the mischief. Mishaps were the result of mischief. If you could figure out with neighbor caused the mischief, using the borrowed power of the Devil, you had your culprit.
This is how 19 of the neighbors were hanged and over a hundred more had been convicted in jury trials, or pled guilty in plea bargains that spared them the death penalty. This occurred in Salem, 1692. Those folks were not stupid nor were they superstitious. They were God-fearing Christians.
The good people of Salem called in the town doctor to examine the children who were the accusers, all young girls between ages 7-17. They had taken fits the put them on the floor, stiff. Later, asked leading questions that suggested expected answers, they said what was expected. Dr. Griggs had pronounced them bewitched. That meant they were the victims of child abuse. The only thing left was to find out who the witches were. The witches, of course, were the people that the parents of the girls had been quarreling with, neighbors. Hence the accusations and jury trials.
The accusing authorities were the village magistrates, who were also the town ministers. They were intelligent, versed in legal procedure, well-meaning, and fatal to innocent accused women. All of the accused were women except one man, Giles Corey, and he was pressed to death under a board on which were piled heavy stones because he refused to say "Not guilty." He was protecting his family's right to inherit, lost when you pled. Today we enter a plea of not guilty for defendants who refuse to cooperate with the process. There aren't too many pressing-boards and heavy stones around the Hall of Justice these days.
The magistrates looked for evidence on the bodies of the accused women by having them examined by women serving as expert witnesses. If a mark or wen was discovered on the breasts or groin of the accused, this was taken as proof positive of the place where the Devil was allowed to have intercourse or to suckle.
How did this leap from a mark on the body to the place where the Devil had willing access occur? When you are desperate for evidence, anything can serve. Never underestimate the imagination of a hysteric. I didn't make that up. Someone else said that, perhaps Chadwick Hansen, who wrote on the Salem experience and he was quoting a psychiatrist, as I recall. It's been awhile, over twenty years, since I did the research and began writing about such things.
In the early to mid-1980s, I was asked to defend a number of individuals, teenagers, men, women, and older folks, who were, they said, falsely accused of sexually molesting children, despite the lack of any medical examination or evidence. Some were said to have occurred decades previous to the accusation. All of the accusations occurred in hostile family situations marked by divorce or disruption in the normal relationships among close family members.
Because there was no real evidence of wrong-doing an of these cases, a substitution was made by the accusing body, i.e. the police department's Juvenile Detail, the Department of Social Services, the District Attorneys Office, etc. The reports kept mounting and you could read of them almost daily in the press. Yet so many of the accusation fell apart, while others, including one notable case of mind that was tried for a month, wreaked a heavy toll in emotion, trouble, and expense for innocent people fighting for their lives.
In substitution for evidence we saw the following arguments:
- The child has provided graphic detail, therefore the accusation is true.
- The child is unable to provide graphic detail, therefore the accusation is true, because the reason for the child's failure is because she has been traumatized by the molestation.
- The child is able to provide a narrative of the molestation, therefore the accusation is true.
- The child is unable, because she has been molested.
- The child is able to identify her abuser because she has been molested.
- The child is unable to identify her abuser because she has been reached, or is afraid, because she was molested and fears being further harmed.
- The child remembers this and this and this, therefore the accusation is true.
- The child is unable to remember because of the trauma of molestation...
This list of stuff I'd seen went on and on.
I gave this business where the absence of evidence was taken as proof of the presence of concealed evidence a name.
I called it the "Trick Mirror Approach."
I regarded it, accurately, as a series of logical fallacies. Believe me when I tell you that you are on thin ice in court when you are reduced to arguing that the case of the other side is built on a logical fallacy.
Juries want you to kill the other side, not reason with the other side, before you will win, especially when the other side, representing a child, has won their hearts and minds. When it comes to children's accusations, juries are prone to believing what the little dears say, however falsely.
Today a great deal of research has been conducted revealing how adults plant thoughts in the minds of impressionable children, leading them to condemn a parent, no matter how innocent. Usually the child has to be in the custody of the other parent who wishes to see the accused parent done in by the medico-legal process. You can review the articles I've written about this by checking the list in the lower right margin, or Googling this site using terms such as "children sexual accusation uncorroborated" etc.
What calls this experience to mind is something I've come across this evening in a book on the Iraq war by Thomas E. Ricks called Fiasco ( Penguin, 2006). He is discussing the decision by the Bush administration to take the country to war. Secretary of State and former head of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell has just addressed the UN and the world claiming to have examined the evidence and it is good. It turned out to be false. Yet we went to war on the basis of it:
In military intelligence circles the speech provoked head shaking at the time. "After Colin Powell's address at the UN, my boss and I looked at each other and said, 'What is going on here?'" recalled a senior military intelligence officer. "There was no doubt in my mind how weak the intel was."
An officer on the Joint Staff, steeped in the war planning, was similarly bothered. As he watched the speech he thought to himself that the Bush administration, determined to go to war with Iraq, had constructed a trap in which any evidence or lack of it led to the same outcome.
"If we find weapons [of mass destruction, the stated reason for attacking Iraq] that means Saddam is cheating and that means we go to war."
Conversely, "if we don't find weapons, that means Saddam is cheating, because he is hiding them."
Yet this officer's faith in Powell was such that watching the speech persuaded him to put aside such doubts. "If he believes it, I believe it, because I put a lot of stock in what he says," he recalled thinking after the UN speech. "And I figured that people above me had information that I didn't have access to. P. 92
The Trick Mirror Approach worked to take us to war with Iraq.
Why do you think people are falsely convicted of capital crimes, not all the time, but often enough, or of rape. We frequently read of false convictions.
Are we failing to think critically enough for our own good?
Is it good to put the wrong person in jail? To jail forever an innocent man while a guilty one remains on the street?
Are our courts succeeding in their duty to separate the good apples from the bad?
Is our national government doing any better?