One of these days I'm going to put up my accusations blog in which I plan to treat of accusations that arise in different contexts.
One of them will have to be where a person is accused of siding with the enemy but where the accused is also closely related to us.
How do you sort out which side the person is on when s/he may be working for both? Or just have a 'bad class background,' as the Chinese under Mao liked to say.
There's a saying for this, too.
It originates during the Crusades, when, according to what I've read (no, don't bother asking for the cite, if I could recall everything I've heard or read that makes sense I'd be the world's greatest combination computer storage device and search engine) when the question arose as to whom to kill, the pope is said to have replied, "Kill them all; let God sort out the innocent."
I saw the modern variant on a T-shirt in a military goods store outside Camp Pendleton years ago: "Kill them all, let God sort them out."
The Marines are a fighting organization in which ordinary American boys who were taught not to hit, and especially not to hit anyone smaller, are taught to kill. After they come back from war, American soldiers are sometimes messed up. They've killed, and not necessarily only enemy combatants, but sometimes, women, children, and old men, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The soldiers have few people they can share their feelings with and they can't sleep well at night. A drink seems to help. The spiral goes downhill from there. It is a shame. No, I don't know what to do about it. Killing harms the killers, sometimes, as it does those killed. This is a good reason to condemn the death penalty as an anti-crime measure.
In the account below, a woman with friends on both sides of the Cold War, in Korea, got way too close to the fire and paid with her life.
As accusations go, and trials, there seems to be something missing. Let no one call it justice. The facts may not have been all in before the woman was executed..