At Guantánamo, a “preponderance of the evidence,” the standard applied in deciding civil disputes over money, is enough to detain a person indefinitely without trial. Tens of thousands of people have found themselves arbitrarily consigned to the American No Fly List without due process or a meaningful right to appeal. Yet today, in a whole range of cases related to the so-called “War on Terror,” guilt is pronounced on the most meager of circumstantial grounds. As such, it is a jurisprudential ideal: the highest standard of justice to which a society can strive. In American courts, juries are asked to convict or acquit on the basis of “reasonable doubt,” since proving a defendant’s guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt is all but impossible. The phrase refers to an unattainable burden of proof.
Today, on Veterans Day, on the 11th day of the 11th month, an aircraft began circling the Statue of Liberty trailing a banner that read “THE SHADOW OF A DOUBT.”
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