Until proven guilty

Because Malik Little '11, until recently a freshman at this university, has been charged with numerous felonies, it is proper for - one might say incumbent upon - the administration to ban him from this campus. The crimes he is alleged to have committed are grave, and if he is found by an impartial jury of 12 citizens to be guilty of them and no substantial mitigating factors are introduced, utilitarian and retributivist theories of justice would both demand that he be incarcerated for some years to come.

I do not know Little and had never heard of him before this Monday's Daily Princetonian article, which reported on his arrest in Pennsylvania and the charges brought against him by the Borough Police. But precisely because I do not know him and because the only information I have about these alleged crimes comes to me through the news media, I feel bound to assume that he is innocent.

It is the sacred right of each human being to remain inviolate in his or her own person, with certain obvious exceptions, for example when one is committing a felony; and for one person to unjustly, physically restrain another is a profound crime, indicative of gross callousness and inhuman feeling. This is why we criminalize kidnapping. A similar rationale applies to our laws governing assault; and in America we prize freedom of mind as much as freedom of body, which demands that each person be free from "terroristic threats."

But it is also the very sacred right of each human being to receive a fair trial and due process - to be assumed innocent until proven guilty - and this demands that until we have heard otherwise from the jury who will try Little, he receive the benefit of our doubt.  It is wrong, I think, to speak conversationally about the charges against him as though they are proven facts: to say, "He kicked her" or "He had her tied up in Edwards."  These are, for the time being, contested issues.

It will be urged that the jury alone must give Mr. Little this benefit and that the common public may, on the testimony of the witnesses, come to its own conclusions, even before a jury has been convened. Which is to forget that a jury is composed of the common public; that we are those peers, a jury of whom he may demand. And if we presume on the evidence of a newspaper article that Little is guilty, then our judgment may have no legal force, and we may not directly do him harm by this prejudice; but if we are wrong to so pre-judge, then we have done that wrong to ourselves; for as Socrates so stubbornly maintained, "Doing injustice is really the greatest of all evils."

Which is precisely why Little should be put on trial and evidence brought forth by adversarial attorneys, who will represent both sides to the best of their abilities before an impartial jury. If Little has committed the crimes with which he is charged, then his victim has a right to demand justice. And she may know that Mr. Little has committed these crimes, but we do not.

I realize that I have argued for the great value of the Western Canon, and anyone who has followed my earlier columns might reasonably suspect that I regard the crowning achievement of Western Civilization as the "Summa Theologica," or "Macbeth," or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. I would name the English Common Law and its associate mechanisms. These, to me, are the greatest glory of the West and the supreme product of the labors of 3,000 years. If anything human can be called sacred, it is the Rule of Law.

And so I praise the ‘Prince' for its well-observed reticence in reporting; to the best of my knowledge it has only reported established facts, such as calls to Public Safety, the arrest and the charges; and it has prefaced its reports of the alleged crimes with that most necessary adjective: "alleged."

Obviously some people know more than I do about the events that led to Little's arrest, and they will have their own, better-informed view of the matter. But I think that most of my fellow Princetonians have received all of their information about these developments through the media and scuttlebutt. If juicycampus.com taught us anything, it was the worth we should accord to scuttlebutt. And though I doff my cap to the investigative efforts of The Times of Trenton and the ‘Prince', I will continue to refrain from condemnation of any person unless a lawful jury should render its verdict and declare Little to be proven guilty.

Brendan Carroll is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.