Is Anyone Really Guilty Anymore?

While the system of justice should be structured to avoid sending innocent people to prison, but the modern fixation on one side of the judicial and law enforcement equation has devastating consequences. 

Richard Kirk | August 29, 2026

“Justice delayed is justice denied.” “The wheels of justice grind slowly but ever so fine.” “Better that one-hundred guilty persons go free than one innocent person should suffer.” These are incompatible aphorisms that at various times have been asserted about the American justice system.

The first was clearly employed when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901. The President died on September 14, and his killer was executed a month and a half later. As a Facebook contributor noted, “If the justice system worked the way it did for McKinley, [Tyler] Robinson would have been dead by December, 2025.” More accurately, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer would have exited this life by Halloween last year.

The assertion that “justice delayed is justice denied,” despite its frequent repetition, is a concept honored more in the breach than in the observance. Tyler Robinson’s preliminary hearing, for example, won’t be concluded until September, almost a year after Kirk’s murder. Karmelo Anthony’s trial took over fourteen months after the knife-totting youngster stabbed and killed Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet. Recently Anthony’s hearing for a retrial was denied. Appeals will doubtless follow.

That the wheels of modern American justice “grind slowly” is obvious, but the “ever so........

© American Thinker