The Golden Thread

A reflection and prayer to start the day with Canon Simon Doogan.

Good morning.
Some reactions to a number of recent high-profile arrests
almost left me doubting the very existence of ‘innocent till proven guilty’.
I’ve since been reassured that it’s no mere invention of crime fiction.
Known, apparently, as the ‘golden thread’ running through English criminal law, the presumption of innocence can be traced back through Canon Law, Roman Law
and all the way to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.

When Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden in Genesis chapter 3,
God comes to them and asks, where are you?
Only after giving them their opportunity to speak, does God judge and expel them.
All seeing, all knowing and fully abreast of what they’ve done,
God nonetheless asks Adam and Eve for their version of what happened.
In so doing, so far as mediaeval commentators were concerned,
a precedent of due legal process was set.

Defendants should be called
to present their own evidence and enter their own pleas, and until a case is made to the contrary, their innocence stands unimpeached.
Attempts down the centuries to undo or undermine that bulwark
foundered on the insistence that God Himself had established it.
Neither kings nor popes could override such an inalienable, universal and ultimately divine right.
I wonder what arguments will be made should it be threatened with erosion in our own day and age –
on the basis that we continue to cherish and value what it guarantees.

Lord we pray for those who prosecute and those who defend,
that justice may be done and seen to be done, that the guilty may be punished compassionately
and the innocent exonerated completely, for the sake of Jesus Christ who knows all the secrets of our hearts. Amen