Another huge, important, but subtle distinction to make here is that the trial is not to decide whether you did the thing. It’s not always a mystery who perpetrated an alleged crime. Even if you pull out a gun and shoot somebody on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, and 300 million people see it, they can’t just take you off to prison for murder. They have to give you a trial to determine whether you violated the law.
There’s a thing called an affirmative defense, as in, “yes, I did the thing, but it wasn’t a crime, because…” If you can, say, convince a jury that you’re a time traveler, the ref was going to make a bad call in the 4th quarter that cost your team the Super Bowl win, and that justified shooting him, well, then it wasn’t a crime. That’s what a jury is ultimately charged with deciding.
This is not to say that Magione’s attorney plans to present an affirmative defense, just that there are a number of good reasons to plead not guilty, even if it’s 100% certain you did the thing.
Judicial system working like this (including the previous comments about pleas) is something I would’ve probably doubted if I read it in a fiction, but here we are
Another huge, important, but subtle distinction to make here is that the trial is not to decide whether you did the thing. It’s not always a mystery who perpetrated an alleged crime. Even if you pull out a gun and shoot somebody on the 50-yard-line at the Super Bowl, and 300 million people see it, they can’t just take you off to prison for murder. They have to give you a trial to determine whether you violated the law.
There’s a thing called an affirmative defense, as in, “yes, I did the thing, but it wasn’t a crime, because…” If you can, say, convince a jury that you’re a time traveler, the ref was going to make a bad call in the 4th quarter that cost your team the Super Bowl win, and that justified shooting him, well, then it wasn’t a crime. That’s what a jury is ultimately charged with deciding.
This is not to say that Magione’s attorney plans to present an affirmative defense, just that there are a number of good reasons to plead not guilty, even if it’s 100% certain you did the thing.
(Edit: Typo.)
Judicial system working like this (including the previous comments about pleas) is something I would’ve probably doubted if I read it in a fiction, but here we are
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