Letter: Al-Arian should be innocent until proven guilty
(03/06/03 5:00am)
We'd like to point out something to the Duke community that, apparently, Bill English and Mike Simms have forgotten. Sami Al-Arian has been accused, not convicted. We're not going to argue about his innocence nor his guilt here, but we find it truly despicable, not to mention wholly un-American, that Sami Al-Arian has already been tried and sentenced in the minds of so many, and yet to our knowledge, nobody here has seen any of the evidence against Sami Al-Arian. This "guilty until proven innocent" mentality is truly frightening and seems to have become the prevailing theme in today's society. The right to a fair trial has become all but an ideal.