The Wisdom Of A Hero!

Nonetheless it was the Roman law, not the English
common law, which first laid down the principle that
normally the man accused of a tort or a crime should
be presumed innocent. Implied as it is in Magna Carta
(c. 39), the presumption of innocence was first literally
stated, it seems, by Jean Lemoine, a canonist and car-
dinal in the time of Pope Bonifice VIII. Making use
of Stoic-Roman-Christian ideas of natural, human, and
public law, and of the ideas of legists and canonists,
he declared that every man accused of a crime had
the full right to public trial and to full legal defense
by lawyers and documents and witnesses. For every
man, he declared, "is presumed innocent until proved
guilty" (quilibet praesumitur innocens, nisi probetur
nocens, Glossae to Extrav. Communes, 161-65).