An Open Letter to a Few Friends
This week’s controversy surrounding the Congressional Race in Indiana’s 7th District has been rather interesting to say the least. There have been posts on a number of blogs and mainstream media outlets about the case, so there’s no need to rehash any of that. What I will say though is that this entire incident made me think about domestic violence.
Knowing what I do about the subject and the fact that some people very close to me have been the victims of it at one point in time, I find it reprehensible that a man (and in some cases, women) would beat their spouse or significant other. For every domestic battery that goes reported, there are many that don’t. In same-sex relationships the numbers are even more staggering.
We have changed laws to make it easier to prosecute domestic violence cases because of the nature of the crime and the unwillingness in many instances of the victim to come forward. However, there is one thing that has not changed in the way we treat domestic violence cases, the defendant is always innocent until proven guilty. But somehow in the debate this week, that seems to have been lost.
As an attorney, I took an oath a few years back to uphold the law. And a fundamental principal of the law is that we use judges and juries to declare guilt or innocence and not public opinion or the blogosphere. A number of anonymous and not-so-anonymous individuals have accused the Republican candidate in the 7th Congressional District of being a wife beater and just no damn good. Is it true, only he and wife truly know what happened that day in August 15 years ago. And despite the police report, case file and innuendo, one thing we know for sure is that Eric Dickerson was never found guilty of a crime.
Might it have been because his wife and daughter chose not to testify? Maybe. We don’t know. Might it have been because the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office back in 1991 dropped the ball? We don’t know. What we do know is that there was never a trial and never a finder of fact. There was never a verdict of guilty. I know some people may find this hard to believe, but in America, people are still innocent of crimes until proven guilty. If we are going to declare people guilty of crimes simply because of police reports, but no trial or pleas, then we have gone down a road that is far away from what I was taught in law school.
I find it very disappointing that quite a few people whom I call friends, although I may disagree with their politics, have decided to declare someone guilty without the benefit of due process. By taking this tactic they are now no better than the system they want to change and make fair for the poor and disenfranchised. On any given day they will point to the innocence of someone wrongly convicted of a crime, but in this case, where there are simple political differences in ideology, they have decided to convict someone who has never been found guilty.
I ask my friends to truly think about the precedent they set, because it lays the moral foundations on which they stand. You cannot accuse the system of being unfair to the poor, to women and to minorities when you yourselves have adopted the same techniques of their oppressors.
If there is anything good to come out of this I hope my friends (and I still call them friends despite our differences) will not sacrifice the principles which make them admirable for the expediency of politics. Let us have the debate over the serious issues of the day, be the war on terror, the economy and making our communities safer and our schools better. But a strategy of guilt by police report, rather than by a jury, is a disservice to the values that you hold. And it opens the door to path that serves no one.
Let’s debate, let’s discuss, but let’s not loose sight of what is important. And let’s not sacrifice principle for politics.
