this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
1153 points (96.9% liked)
Political Memes
7824 readers
2953 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think "criminal" can just mean someone who has committed a crime while not having been in a trial convicted of it
Don’t spread that idea, that’s how we got here.
The law is that a person is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. (Yes, yes I know “for now” and the rule of law has ended you pedants let me have my modicum of hope.)
For decades people have been “convicting” others in the court of public opinion which has caused the general public to think they know better than a judge and jury while only having information from hearsay, rumors, and the news. That leads them to disregard court findings and believe people to be guilty who are not and people to be innocent who are not. So people who they don’t like are going to prison in El Salvador and people they do like are president.
It's not an idea, that's just how the word works. It can have different and more specific meanings in different context but generally a criminal is someone who has committed a crime.
Sort of, a criminal is someone who has been found guilty of committing a crime.
The way we prove that guilt, from the perspective of the US, is through the courts. Until the guilt is proven through the courts they are not a criminal but the accused of an alleged crime. Really seems like far to many people like to glaze over that part and just jump straight to an accused being guilty without due process.
It doesn't say have been found guilty, it says is guilty. Someone who has committed a crime is guilty of it, whether or not it has been proven in court.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/guilty
"Innocent until proven guilty" is a legal principle. Like I tried to explain, there's different context where in a court you could say that they can't consider someone guilty (and a criminal for that particular thing) until proven so, but you can still be a criminal outside of specific legal language for being guilty, meaning having committed a crime.
Guilt also means different things, it can mean you have actually committed it (factual guilt seems to be the term for it) and legal guilt is the one proven and assigned in court.