You arrived at this page by selecting:Guilty until proven innocent (T & A and YEP 24/06/08)
Everyone is probably familiar with the term 'innocent until proven guilty' but I am finding more and more these days that it is actually the other way around. Guilty until proven innocent.
A reader contacted me recently to highlight such a thing regarding somebody who was arrested on suspicion of fraud due to an accusation made from a previous employer. This person was dismissed by the current employer as soon as they heard of the matter.
Now that's the unfortunate thing if you are indeed innocent. It is perfectly legal for your employer to dismiss you if it believes that you have been dishonest in some way and they believe it is a threat to the business. Pretty rotten luck if you are innocent and your prospects of being re-employed could be very slim with this kind of baggage.
I also see that formal cautions given by police seem to becoming more and more common. If the police charge you with something which they consider to be relatively minor they may offer you two options, a formal caution or risk going to court. Many people opt for the formal caution route to end the matter but in effect think that they are being forced into admitting their guilt.
The tax man also requires us to prove we are innocent everyday by asking us to keep adequate records of our expenditure, to make sure we are not fiddling the system. If we don't keep records and therefore have plenty of evidence to prove our innocence you can come unstuck in one way or another.
We are constantly having to either prove our innocence or be treated as guilty during everyday life. I have recently noticed a local petrol station has introduced a spiking system to deter or catch people from taking petrol without paying for it. It works on a traffic light system and is manually operated. If the spikes are activated the traffic light turns to red and the spikes come up out of the ground and pierce your back tyres.
This is all well and good but lets say they do catch someone. What happens to the rest of us using the petrol station. Are we all to be encaged like animals until someone decides to descend the spikes and remove the damaged car? And what happens if the guy with the spiking power gets the wrong car or the system goes haywire. What then? Well at least the garage cover themselves by signage at the pumps that state if I take petrol from the pump I am agreeing to the spiking system. I say poppycock. I am agreeing to no such thing and I'd like to see them try and make that one stick in a court of law.
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