ABSTRACT
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished.” That was John Adams's argument to the jury in defense of the British officers accused in the Boston Massacre trial. Adams must have been very certain the jurors he was addressing shared that belief. After all, Adams was not likely to risk auditioning a novel personal insight with his clients' lives on the line. Instead, he sought to mobilize a common understanding—a primal source of the legitimacy of the criminal justice system:
[G]uilt and crimes are so plentiful in this world they cannot all be punished. But when innocence itself is brought to the Bar and condemned, especially to die, then the subject will say “Whether I do well or ill is of no account, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that takes hold in the mind of the subject, that will be the end of all security whatsoever.
(Wroth & Zobel, 1965, p. 242)