Not all political prisoners are innocents.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.
I come from the liberal side of thinking: Better one guilty man should walk free than one innocent man found guilty.
I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.
As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won't be put to death.
There are no 'political prisoners' as such in Bahrain. People are not arrested because they express their views, we only have criminals.
More oftentimes than not, you're automatically guilty before innocent.
Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything. Whoops!
We all have the problem of what do you do with the not-guilty-yet in free and democratic societies where you have the presumption of innocence. It's a very difficult problem.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
Everyone is innocent unless proven otherwise.