Judicial Doubt and Certainty

The principle that innocence restricts criminal conviction to absolute certainty represents the first aspect of the impact of innocence on a judge’s personal conviction, with doubt serving as the second aspect of this impact. In criminal jurisprudence, this is known as the rule “Interpretation of doubt in favor of the accused.” Thus, the purpose of a criminal trial is to transform suspicion, which serves as the basis for pursuing a criminal case to the judiciary, into judicial certainty, which permits the issuance of a conviction. If the prosecution fails to provide evidence of the crime in all its elements and its attribution to the defendant, the judge must rule for acquittal, as the doubt that the prosecution cannot dispel stands as positive evidence of the defendant’s non-responsibility, thereby necessitating his or her acquittal.

This is explained by the fact that the inability of evidence of conviction to create certainty or conviction results in the maintenance of the “presumed innocence” state, which is sufficiently affirmed by any doubt regarding the validity of that conviction. This is based on the presumption that innocence is a general principle readily acknowledged at the outset for the accused. Since innocence is the general principle in humans, a conviction requires conclusive evidence of the crime’s commission and its attribution to the defendant, such that the judge is absolutely convinced of the occurrence of the crime and its perpetration by the accused. If the judge harbors doubt regarding the validity of the evidence, he must lean towards the principle of innocence, meaning that doubt must be interpreted in favor of the defendant.

It is fundamentally understood that a criminal judge cannot accurately determine the truth in issuing a criminal verdict, whether of conviction or acquittal, without absolute certainty. Judicial certainty in conviction is the firm impression formed in the criminal judge’s mind, creating a strong submission and acknowledgment of the state’s right to punish the accused, based on evidence that leads logically to the consequences attached to it. Absolute certainty and conviction in criminal judgments do not imply absolute certainty in an absolute sense; rather, judicial truth in criminal matters is a relative truth. Truth is the foundation of all criminal judgments and the goal of all trial procedures, but truth loses its value if it is achieved at the expense of liberty. While truth, in itself, is absolute, its discovery is relative due to the incompleteness of human methods of knowledge.