Black defendants are effectively presumed guilty in practice despite legal doctrine

Evidence

Today, in courtrooms across America, advocates and lawyers representing Black people cannot effectively assist many of their clients without recognizing that, contrary to the legal doctrine, those clients are presumed guilty and burdened by assumptions of criminality that have been shaped over centuries. The job of the advocate then becomes convincing the court and the jurors of a client’s innocence, rather than just defending the client against accusations of guilt, an inversion of the presumption of innocence written into American law. The advocate who fails to understand this reality can actually imperil the life of his or her client. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 853

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s core task: the inversion of the presumption of innocence is a concrete legal-practice consequence of the reframing argument (continuity from slavery to today).
• SEED: Angle: ‘the criminal-defense lawyer as presumption-of-innocence undoer’ — how practice inverts doctrine, an essay on the gap between legal formalism and courtroom reality.