[QUOTE=njkayaker;20622441]
Originally Posted by
Maelochs
It is interesting how the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" plays out though ... {/QUOTE]
This only applies in court. If it applied out of court, there would never be any trials.
Actually sir, you are wrong there.
The legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty” obviously only applies within the legal system.
The Concept of “presumed innocent until proven guilty”—that is, the idea that a person should not be condemned for action ro motivation without some evidence being offered—applies Anywhere a person chooses to apply it.
It is in fact the opposite of prejudice. So if you want to take the “pro-prejudice” side of the debate, I think I will do okay with the “prejudice is not such a good thing” argument.
As a real-world application … people here were claiming the driver obviously hit the cyclist on purpose as a symptom of road rage—but when pressed at least a couple were willing to reexamine their own positions and admit that since the windows were so darkly tinted, no one had any idea where the driver was looking or how the driver was acting, and thus had not one shred of evidence to support the idea that the driver was angry at the cyclist.
Those people presumed guilt—they decided the driver was guilty of a deliberate vehicular assault based mostly on the fact that we ride bicycles. When the Concept of “presumed innocent until proven guilty” was applied, they admitted they had jumped to unfounded conclusions.
As for why the driver pulled into the exercise center and then left—maybe he was scared that the crazed cyclist was going to lie and get him arrested.
If I had just had a crazed cyclist ride in front of me while I was crossing an intersection, and then that cyclist chased after me screaming and saying he had called the cops …. Yeah, I would cancel my workout and leave the scene, perhaps.
As far as that being any kind of “proof” of the intent of the driver, that is just ridiculous.
I am NOT saying the driver didn’t deliberately hit the cyclist. I am saying that having watched the video Several times, having done the Google Maps thing to examine the whole section of street and the various businesses involved, and the whole stretch of bike path …. I see no “evidence” that the driver tracked the cyclist, then waited at the health club driveway to hit him.
What I saw was a driver impatient to get to his workout, waiting on a pair of cyclists and a dog-walker to pass, who didn’t expect and didn’t see an idiot on a bike ignoring traffic laws and darting out of a bike path trying to race a moving car across an intersection.
The fact that after the crazed cyclist told the driver he was on his way to jail, the driver opted to depart, makes perfect sense to me. I see no “suggestion” that he hit the driver on purpose, because he decided to leave once the cyclist started threatening him.