{"id":5452,"date":"2026-08-30T18:09:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:09:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5452"},"modified":"2026-08-30T18:09:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T18:09:46","slug":"is-anyone-really-guilty-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=5452","title":{"rendered":"Is Anyone Really Guilty Anymore?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cJustice delayed is justice denied.\u201d \u201cThe wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.\u201d \u201cBetter that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.\u201d These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system.<\/p>

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The first was clearly employed when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. The President died on September 14, and his killer was executed a month and a half later. As a Facebook contributor noted, \u201cIf the justice system worked the way it did for McKinley, [Tyler] Robinson would have been dead by December, 2025.\u201d More accurately, Charlie Kirk\u2019s alleged killer would have exited this life by Halloween last year.<\/p>\n

The assertion that \u201cjustice delayed is justice denied,\u201d despite its frequent repetition, is a concept honored more in the breach than in the observance. Tyler Robinson\u2019s preliminary hearing, for example, won\u2019t be concluded until September, almost a year after Kirk\u2019s murder. Karmelo Anthony\u2019s trial took over fourteen months after the knife-totting youngster stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet. Recently Anthony\u2019s hearing for a retrial was denied. Appeals will doubtless follow.<\/p>\n

That the wheels of modern American justice \u201cgrind slowly\u201d is obvious, but the \u201cever so fine\u201d conclusion is risible. Jury or judicial politicization is clear in cases involving, for example, O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and thousands of January 6 defendants. Meanwhile, we wait without much hope for justice to be \u201cground out\u201d for the high-profile criminals involved in Crossfire Hurricane and Arctic Frost.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\nSurprisingly, Benjamin Franklin embraced the hundred-to-one, guilty-to-innocent clich\u00e9, an exaggeration of the figure previously articulated by England\u2019s PM William Blackstone, who put the ratio at a more modest ten to one. Practically speaking, anyone who touts Franklin\u2019s formula effectively washes his hands of blood shed on the streets by the scores of criminals who evade punishment for the sake of an unreasonable legal scorecard. Moreover, since criminals tend to reoffend and do so more frequently if the odds of being punished are slight, the number of innocent victims quickly grows to multiples of the initial figure. In short, the assertion of a hundred-to-one standard is a form of \u201csuicidal empathy\u201d or, more accurately, \u201cnarcissistic empathy\u201d — \u00a0i.e., a statement that flatters the speaker\u2019s ego and overlooks victims actually sacrificed for the sake of a rhetorical yardstick.<\/p>\n

Of course, law enforcement and the system of justice should be structured to avoid sending innocent people to prison, but the modern fixation on one side of the judicial and law enforcement equation has devastating consequences. Here\u2019s an alternate aphorism that should gain traction: \u201cThe fewer criminals caught and expeditiously punished, the more innocents will be harmed by criminals.\u201d Conversely, the more criminals caught and swiftly punished, the fewer innocent victims will be harmed. This inverse correlation is all the more relevant since it\u2019s widely conceded that crime, especially violent crime, is largely concentrated in a small portion of the population, typically estimated at five percent or less. El Salvador\u2019s President Nayib Bukele, much vilified abroad but adored at home, totally transformed his country from a gang-ruled hellhole to a playground sanctuary for children by imprisoning one percent of the population.<\/p>

Read more How not to solve the homelessness problem<\/a><\/p>\n

So why has our judicial system changed so much from the days of McKinley\u2019s assassination, when swift justice was the order of the day, to the present, where a plethora of \u201csafeguards\u201d have been placed on law enforcement and within the judicial system to prevent innocent individuals from being falsely convicted of a crime and guilty persons from being convicted based on faulty procedures? The \u201cnot one innocent\u201d mentality is largely the product, I believe, of a therapeutic culture in which the idea of personal responsibility has been drastically attenuated. Villainy has been scaled down to reduced mental capacity or unfortunate environmental circumstances, as the psychiatrist Karl Menninger noted a half-century ago in his book Whatever Happened to Sin.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that such factors are totally irrelevant, but our obsessive desire for non-volitional explanations arises alongside an even deeper desire to deny the reality of evil. Accordingly, those hundred guilty persons theoretically going free are vaguely felt to be victims of biology or society. More specifically, for many females demonstrating outside the Clancy trial in Massachusetts, it\u2019s inconceivable that a woman would knowingly strangle her three young children. It\u2019s just too evil. Thus, the heinous act becomes itself an argument against her criminal culpability, and diffuse responsibility falls instead on medical practitioners and the pharmaceutical industry.<\/p>\n

In short, according to this perspective, evil doesn\u2019t really exist in individuals but rather in institutions and the persons directing those institutions. It\u2019s a fantasy touted by Rousseau, who claimed people are born good but are corrupted by society, a belief that leaves hanging a basic question: How does a corrupt society arise from naturally good humans? That\u2019s not a problem faced by those who believe evil lies within the human heart and that, as Immanuel Kant asserted (albeit in German), \u201cOut of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.\u201d It\u2019s a thought that at least helps explain the legal and human foibles discussed here.<\/p>\n

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California. His book <\/em>Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle , as is his book <\/em>Poetry with a Moral Edge.<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>

Read more Just what is seriously wrong with Zohran Mamdani?<\/a><\/p>\n

Image: Pexels<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cJustice delayed is justice denied.\u201d \u201cThe wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.\u201d \u201cBetter that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.\u201d These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system. 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