I completely agree with everything that you’ve said about how vulnerable groups are treated AND at the same time, the term “innocent until proven guilty” has been misused a lot recently. When there is probable cause to suspect someone, we do not owe them the assumption of innocence — not in general practice nor in law.

In other words, this presumption is not literal, but is simply indicative of who has the burden of persuasion and proof in a trial setting. If we were routinely sending people to trial whom we presumed to be there for no good reason because we believed them to be innocent, our court system would be more clogged than it already is.

It does not literally mean that we think people who are standing trial are considered innocent, and it’s misleading to continue to bandy that phrase around as if it did. We also are not out of line to accuse or suspect someone when given probable cause to do so. When a crime is reported, we believe the accuser until such time as further investigation reveals that we should not believe them. And then we proceed accordingly.