There is “no justification for limiting presumption of innocence to criminal cases,” Ken Pennington, a law professor who has published scholarship on the presumption of innocence, told me by email. “Presumption of innocence is not a procedural matter as American jurisprudence would have it, it is a right that is due to every human being.”

Nevertheless, it is frequently under attack. As crime or terrorism increases, popular support grows for stopping and frisking people on the street without probable cause or imprisoning them without charges or trial.

Even falling crime rates don’t eliminate this authoritarian impulse. “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon,” President Donald Trump told an audience of cops last year, “you just see them thrown in, rough, please don’t be too nice. When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody. I said you can take the hand away, okay?”

The comparative legal scholar François Quintard-Morénas has written that “the principle that the accuser bears the burden of proving the guilt of the accused has its roots in antiquity. One of the oldest written codes of law, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, already embraced it.” It can be found in ancient Greece and Rome, in papal pronouncements from bygone centuries, in King Louis XVI’s court, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in British common law.

Summed up today as “innocent until proven guilty,” the principle “has a dual dimension,” Quintard-Morénas wrote: “A rule of proof casting on the prosecution the burden of proving guilt, it is also a shield that prevents the infliction of punishment prior to conviction.”

He argues that France is committed to both dimensions, unlike the United States. “While France recently reinforced the presumption of innocence by elevating it to a personality right, Anglo-American jurisdictions tend to view the doctrine as a mere rule of proof without effect before trial,” Quintard-Morénas observed. “Denying that the presumption of innocence has any application before trial ultimately legitimizes the unnecessary indignities inflicted upon a growing number of persons accused of a crime. A revitalization of this cardinal principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence is needed at a time when the words ‘accused’ and ‘convict’ are increasingly synonymous.”

France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man states:

Every man being presumed innocent until he has been found guilty, if it shall be deemed absolutely necessary to arrest him, every kind of rigor used, not necessary to secure his person, ought to be severely repressed by the law.

The United States certainly falls short of that standard. The public defender Jeffrey D. Stein explains how America’s failure to treat people as innocent until proven guilty causes some defendants to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit. The failure to treat people as innocent until proven guilty also leads to defendants spending years in miserable jails before being tried for their alleged crimes.