Following the conviction of Mark Curtis, the Socialist Workers Party leadership decided to step up its campaign in defense of Curtis, promoting the proven rapist as a martyr of the labor movement and a victim of police brutality. Given the overwhelming evidence against Curtis, the continuation of the SWP defense campaign required a degree of falsification of the facts of the case which can only be explained as deliberate lying.

Many of the top SWP leaders had attended the trial in Des Moines, including National Secretary Jack Barnes, National Organizational Secretary Craig Gannon, Militant Co-editor Margaret Jayko, John Gaige, Norton Sandler and Hector Marroquin. They had heard the testimony of two black working class children, Demetria and Jason Morris.

They had heard Curtis’s own attorney, Mark Pennington, declare in his closing argument to the jury that there was no claim of frame-up by Curtis or his defenders. Their decision to push ahead with the defense campaign under these circumstances revealed that the SWP leadership knew that Curtis was guilty and did not care. He was to be defended anyway.

The theory of this new stage in the defense campaign was elaborated by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes on the eve of the trial. Clearly anticipating Curtis’s conviction, Barnes told a rally in Des Moines on September 4 that Curtis must be defended no matter what. Barnes elaborated the unique theory that Curtis must be assumed innocent regardless of the evidence against him.

Mark’s innocence is not a question, he said. The presumption of innocence has taken hundreds of years for working people to win. It is not a legal fiction. It is not something you have a right to pick or choose depending on whether or not you like or identify with the individual.

It is one of the most important milestones on the march to human solidarity, and to the ability of the great majority of the world to act as fully human beings.

No one in the world is obligated to prove Mark’s innocence, and neither will Mark be obligated to do so at the trial.

It’s not that you’re innocent until proven guilty. You are innocent. (Barnes’s emphasis.)

The SWP leader concluded, “We have an obligation to defend an innocent and free human being. Mark Curtis will not get a fair trial. The courtroom will not be where innocence or guilt will be decided. And it is not where justice will be found” (Militant, September 16, 1988).

Barnes’s “theory” of jurisprudence was a combination of gross ignorance and cynical anti-Marxism. He elevated the presumption of innocence to a classless universal principle and at the same time, totally distorted its content, transforming it into a blanket amnesty for all members of the SWP, who can never be accused of any crime, no matter what the evidence.

To be historically correct, the presumption of innocence was not won by “working people.” It was a principle of bourgeois law established through the struggle of the revolutionary bourgeoisie in England against the feudal order and incorporated into English Common Law, from whence it passed into the bourgeois legal system of the United States.

As a bourgeois democratic principle, the presumption of innocence has a progressive content which must be defended by the workers’ movement, alongside other such democratic gains as the right of habeas corpus, the requirement of due process, the right to confront one’s accuser and the right not to be forced to testify against oneself.

What the presumption of innocence meant in the case of Mark Curtis is that Curtis was not obliged to prove his innocence during the three-day trial which began September 7. The prosecution was obliged to prove his guilt, and to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Under bourgeois law, this presumption of innocence protected Curtis until the point where the jury began its deliberations. The prosecution had the burden of proving the case against Curtis, and the jury then had to weigh whether or not it had succeeded.

But under the legal theory of Jack Barnes and the SWP, the presumption of innocence for Curtis extends, not until the end of the trial and the beginning of jury deliberations, but forever and ever! He is not innocent until proven guilty, but innocent even though guilty. According to Barnes, acquittal of Curtis was obligatory even in the absence of a reasonable doubt, even in the face of certainty of Curtis’s guilt.

Curtis’s defense attorney Mark Pennington did not take this position in his closing argument to the jury. In a statement which explicitly rejected the theory that Curtis’s membership in the SWP automatically entitled him to acquittal, he said, “I am not going to try and stand here and tell you that because he belongs to the socialist party, he is less likely to have committed a serious crime than anybody else.”

Barnes’s interpretation of the presumption of innocence logically precludes even holding a trial, since no matter what evidence was presented against Curtis, no matter how clear his guilt, the presumption of innocence would prevail. By this standard, Curtis should have been released immediately after his arrest, once the police discovered that he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

While from the standpoint of legal forms, the burden of proof in the Mark Curtis case lay with the prosecution, from a political standpoint, the case presents itself somewhat differently. The working class cannot evaluate such a case from the standpoint of prostration to bourgeois law, or take the position that the jury’s verdict constitutes irrefutable proof of Curtis’s guilt. There is a long history in the workers’ movement of trade union and political leaders being framed up in legal proceedings in which the norms of bourgeois democratic law were observed, while the outcome was the conviction of innocent men and women.

In making the public claim that Curtis was the victim of a government frame-up, however, the Socialist Workers Party was under a political and moral obligation to the workers’ movement to present positive evidence of the frame-up. This the SWP refused to do. There was no attempt in the course of the trial to expose the mechanism of the supposed frame-up of Curtis, and defense attorney Mark Pennington actually declared in his closing argument that there was no claim of frame-up by the defense and denounced the prosecution for suggesting otherwise.

The theory of “innocent no matter what” advanced by Jack Barnes itself demonstrates that the Curtis defense campaign is a fraud and a provocation. Those engaged in a real struggle against a government frame-up would never elaborate a theory that “it doesn’t matter if he’s guilty.”

In the frame-up cases with which the workers’ movement in the United States has had long experience, the exposure of the frame-up always plays a major role in the campaign to mobilize the working class to defend the frame-up victims. Moreover, one hallmark of government frame-ups is a crude and heavy-handed falsification of evidence and concoction of charges which provides ample material for their exposure.

We have only to examine several of the most recent capitalist state frame-ups, the case of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, the murder conviction of Gary Tyler, jailed since he was 15 years old for a crime he did not commit, and the conviction of four Kentucky coal miners on charges arising from the shooting death of a scab coal truck driver for A.T. Massey in 1985.

“Hurricane” Carter, a well-known middleweight boxer, was arrested and framed up in 1966 along with his friend John Artis, for the murder of three white patrons in a Paterson, New Jersey bar. The only evidence was the testimony of a convicted burglar and admitted perjurer, Alfred Bello. The state’s political motivation in framing up Carter was obvious: he was an outspoken civil rights militant and opponent of police brutality against blacks. Even after the conviction of Carter and Artis was overturned when Bello recanted his testimony, the state prosecuted a second time and kept the two in prison another decade when Bello recanted his recantation and declared that his original lies were really the truth.

Gary Tyler was convicted by an all-white jury at a trial presided over by a racist judge. The only eyewitness testimony came from a 15-year-old black girl, Natalie Blanks, who later recanted her testimony in a lengthy affidavit, saying she had been threatened by the prosecutor. The only physical evidence, the supposed murder weapon, was a gun which the police said had been stolen from their firing range. When the defense later sought a ballistics test, the police claimed the gun had disappeared.

In the trial of the Kentucky miners, the prosecution case consisted of the testimony of three people, an admitted perjurer who was seeking a plea bargain and two paid witnesses who were seeking a bounty offered by Massey Coal. Even this “evidence” was so flimsy that the four miners were prosecuted, not for state murder charges, but on federal charges of conspiracy and interference with interstate commerce, which required less proof.

The Socialist Workers Party and the Curtis defense campaign were unable either to refute the prosecution case or provide a shred of evidence of frame-up. The real content of Barnes’s appeal to the “presumption of innocence” is to declare that any such efforts are irrelevant and unnecessary because Curtis was to be defended regardless and in spite of his guilt.

Those who have been asked to support the Mark Curtis defense campaign should consider the implications of the position,

You are not innocent until proven guilty. You are innocent.

The theoretical foundation of the Curtis defense campaign is that the question of his guilt is immaterial.

If it is illegitimate to suspect Curtis of rape under conditions when he was arrested in the victim’s living room with his underpants down around his ankles, then there are no limits to the depravity which the SWP leadership will defend. Any SWP member can commit any crime whatsoever against the working class, with complete impunity.

Barnes’s paeans to the “march to human solidarity” were not merely sentimental anti-Marxist claptrap: they are the ideological justification for the most vicious hostility to the working class. The logical corollary of the principle that Curtis is innocent no matter what is that Demetria Morris must be presumed to be a liar and her testimony ignored and discounted entirely. Barnes thus extends his “human solidarity” to the rapist Mark Curtis, but denies it to the rape victim Demetria Morris. Behind the sentimental rubbish about the “ability of the great majority of the world to act as fully human beings” is the filthy, heinous defense of a proven rapist, the sanctioning of a vicious crime against a 15-year-old black working class girl.

The very advancing of such a conception has a political and social significance. What social forces will be attracted to a party which offers them impunity in their conduct towards the working class? This is the outlook of the lumpenproletariat, and especially of those declassed petty-bourgeois elements which were radicalized in the 1960s, rejected conventional bourgeois morality, but had nothing to replace it, and turned to out and out amoralism.

The most hedonistic layers of the middle class, steeped in the gratification of immediate impulses in the name of “alternative lifestyles,” they are capable of every form of depravity. Under conditions of the 1980s, with the deepening crisis and decay of American capitalism, these elements are moving drastically to the right.

In defending Curtis, the Socialist Workers Party is declaring itself the true home for these declassed layers. In the fullest sense of the word, the Socialist Workers Party has become a sociopathic organization, a watering hole for all sorts of degenerate elements, social criminals, filled with hatred of the working class. Curtis himself — a drug user and rapist — is a perfect representative.

Those middle class radical groups which have rallied to the support of Mark Curtis and embraced the rapist as their comrade are part of the same social process. The members of these organizations are completely indifferent to Curtis’s guilt. In the months which followed Curtis’s conviction, members of groups such as Socialist Action and the Revolutionary Workers League have openly declared that they support Curtis even if he is guilty. They have even claimed that to support the family of the rape victim is to side with the capitalist state against the Socialist Workers Party. Presumably then, they would condemn 11-year-old Jason Morris for calling the police when Curtis forced his way into the house and began raping his sister!

These groups pervert the well-established principle of unconditional defense of political prisoners against capitalist state repression. The Trotskyist movement defends legitimate victims of state frame-up unconditionally, that is, regardless of their political views and affiliations, not regardless of whether or not their claim to be a victim of political repression is genuine! Such claims must be judged on their merits.

This twisted view of unconditional defense, i.e., the defense of Curtis whether or not he is guilty, was stated most explicitly by the organization that has worked openly as an attorney for the SWP, the Socialist Action group. A lengthy article in the January 1989 issue of Socialist Action called for all-out support for Curtis. It excused the glaring contradictions in the defense case, saying,

It is impossible to explain every part of a puzzle in a frame-up.... We may never know the answers to every question....

The article admonishes,

It isn’t simply blind faith in Curtis, the SWP, or other targets of the cops and courts. None of us has a license to kill, rape or steal simply because we are political activists or racially or sexually abused by capitalism.

That such a disclaimer of the “right to rape” should appear in a newspaper claiming to be socialist is astonishing. It is an indication of how widespread is the degeneracy within organizations such as Socialist Action, whose members do not see anything wrong with Curtis’s actions.

But after making this pro forma statement, Socialist Action goes on to declare that it does indeed have “blind faith” in Curtis and the SWP. The article continues:

We must unconditionally and automatically accept the word of working-class fighters and victims of racial or sexual abuse against the word of cops or other agents of the capitalist state. This is true even when the state’s case rests on the testimony of alleged victims who, themselves, are Black, Latino, women or unionists.

Such a position is a monstrous provocation against the socialist movement; Socialist Action declares that in any case where a member of an organization claiming to be socialist is accused of a crime, their denial must be accepted “unconditionally and automatically” against the testimony of their victims, regardless of whether their victims are themselves working class. What is this except a license to commit crimes against the working class and then scream frame-up and demand unconditional defense when caught in the act? Nothing could be more calculated to discredit socialism in the eyes of the working class. This assertion that socialist organizations are not responsible and answerable to the working class reveals the deeply antiproletarian character of middle class tendencies such as Socialist Action.

To ensure this automatic reflex, we have absolute trust among ourselves. Our confidence in one another is based on our common acceptance of a class struggle program…. We extend this same trust and confidence to rebel fighters everywhere….

This principle would open the doors of the socialist movement to any police agent or provocateur. All such an agent has to do is to declare his acceptance of a class struggle program, and the political pollyannas of Socialist Action will extend their absolute trust, taking responsibility for any action which such an agent might commit.