Tuesday, January 8, 2008

RE: [BDSM-LegalIssues] Re: Arrested, ALL charges dismissed, career ruined WAS: You did, didn't you,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cadenas_sd
> Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 11:54 AM

[ Snip ]

> > You are conflating two uses of the word "evidence". One is the
> > criminal justice sense, where it is part of the process of
> > establishing legal
> guilt
> > or innocense.
> >
> > The other is the plain English language one, in which it means
> "suggestive"
> > or "indicative".
> >
> > Like it or not, the fact that the principal got arrested is
> > EVIDENCE. It is not, of course, PROOF.
>
> Um, no. You are making up a second definition where none exists.
> Evidence in the judicial sense is the same as evidence in every other
> sense: indicative or suggestive, as you put it.

Don't be fatuous, Cadenas.

Go to a dictionary. Open it. Read.

Here's a clue, from Merriam-Webster (giving three, not two, definitions):

Evidence
1 a: an outward sign : indication b: something that furnishes proof :
testimony; specifically : something legally submitted to a tribunal to
ascertain the truth of a matter
2: one who bears witness; especially : one who voluntarily confesses a crime
and testifies for the prosecution against his accomplices

Another clue, this time from Dictionary.com:

Evidence -noun
1. that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief;
proof.
2. something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign: His flushed
look was visible evidence of his fever.
3. Law. data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and
which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or
objects.

So if, Cadenas, you want to claim that I'm "making up a second definition",
perhaps you'd care to explain how I've managed to insert my fiction into
multiple dictionaries? It seems extraordinarily prescient of me to have
done so, but I'm sure you'll come up with an explanation!

(In case you missed it, the M-W definitions I was referring to are labelled
1(a) and 1(b), while the Dictionary.com ones are a combination of 1 and 2
compared with 3).

> You are glossing over the far more critical aspect: what it
> is evidence of. Nobody will deny that the fact that the
> principal has been arrested is valid evidence that at some
> point something happened that led to that arrest.

No, I'm not glossing over it.

> But it is NOT evidence of *wrongdoing*. You just plain don't
> know what the "something" was that happened.

Ah, you seem still to be laboring under the goofy belief that the only
justification for making personnel decisions is whether or not a court can
convict. That's dumber than a box of bricks!

Here's a simple example: when Richard Armitage told reporters that Valerie
Plame was a covert CIA agent, that was wrongdoing. Pure and simple. Has he
been arrested, charged, or convicted? Nope, because it would be impossible
to secure a conviction... But it was still wrongdoing.

And that's where your whole discourse collapses: you are implicitly trying
to create a formulaic system to protect employees, while not bothering to
consider the consequences for employers.

Malc.

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posted by Annja Sue at 4:25 PM

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