The presumption of innocence is treated across The Bob Zadek Show as the cornerstone of American criminal law and as a guarantee that the show’s host and guests say is being displaced outside the criminal courthouse. In the episodes surveyed here, the concept is invoked in three settings: campus sexual-assault proceedings, civil asset forfeiture, and constitutional interpretation generally. The recurring claim is that in each setting the burden of proof is reversed, so that an individual must establish innocence rather than have the state establish guilt.
Campus tribunals and the burden of proof
In a 2014 episode, Bob Zadek introduced Cathy Young, author of the article “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” to discuss what he described as the erosion of due process for male students facing sexual-assault allegations on college campuses. Zadek framed the show around the contrast between what students learn about the Bill of Rights—the right to confront an accuser, trial by jury, due process—and what he called the most unconstitutional environments in America, life on college campuses, where students are deprived of many constitutional protections Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014).
Young described federal pressure on universities, including a report released by the White House Council on Women and Girls before the State of the Union, which recommended a new task force given roughly 60 days to produce further recommendations on handling campus sexual assault. She said the report relied on “phony statistics” tending toward a presumption of guilt. As an example, she cited the report’s claim that a study showed only 2 to 8% of accusations of rape are false, and argued that even that figure is not trivial. She then described the underlying study, which examined something like ten years of rape or sexual assault charges at a large university: about 6% of charges were definitively shown to be false, about 35% were found true and prosecuted, and over 50% could not be determined either way. In her account, the White House implicitly treated all the undetermined cases as actual charges—meaning that in every case where a charge cannot be definitively proven false, the presumption is that it is true. She called that a presumption of guilt, because it turns around the burden of proof: instead of proving a charge true, one must prove it false Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014).
Zadek responded by listing the protections he said Americans cherish in the criminal justice system—the right to confront an accuser, trial by jury, the presumption of innocence, and the high burden the state must meet to prove guilt—and asked how those rules could be torn up on campuses in cases where a young man and a young woman disagree about a night involving emotional involvement and possibly alcohol. He stressed that nothing in the discussion diminished the significance of sexual assault and that the show’s message was about process. Young added a concern that the campus approach could bleed over into the real world, asking whether students who view sexual assault this way might carry that view into a criminal jury later Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014).
Civil forfeiture and proving property innocent
A 2023 episode revisited civil asset forfeiture with Mike Greenberg of the Institute for Justice. Zadek quoted the Fourth Amendment—“The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated”—and said the right is routinely violated to let government take and retain private property. He cited the Institute for Justice report Policing for Profit Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Greenberg defined civil forfeiture as a device letting law enforcement seize and permanently confiscate cash, cars, real property, jewelry and the like by arguing the property was involved in or the proceeds of criminal activity. Crucially, he said, the government does not have to prove that anyone committed a crime, or convict anyone beyond a reasonable doubt. Zadek added that the property is not merely seized but seized and retained, with the burden falling on the citizen to get it back, and asked whether that sounds like guilty until proven innocent with the burden shifted. Greenberg agreed, saying the owner is essentially forced to prove their own innocence or the property’s own innocence, which he called nuts, because the country ordinarily requires a presumption of innocence Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
Greenberg grouped the problems into two buckets. The due process bucket includes the absence of a right to a lawyer because forfeiture is a civil case, often no right to a jury, Kafkaesque procedures for contesting a forfeiture, and the frequent situation where the seized property’s value is too low to justify hiring a lawyer—so people rationally walk away rather than prove their innocence. The second bucket is the perverse incentive created when the agencies that decide whether to seize and forfeit are the same agencies that receive the proceeds in their budgets, encouraging them to focus on seizing cash and cars rather than on threats to public health and safety Civil Asset Forfeiture Revisited (2023).
The presumption of liberty
In a 2020 episode, Zadek told guest Randy Barnett that Barnett’s phrase “presumption of liberty” had clarified his thinking. Zadek called criminal law the body of law that empowers the state to take away liberty and rights, and called the presumption of innocence its cornerstone. He said everyone learns young that the burden is on the state to prove an individual committed a crime, and that the burden rests there because liberty is more important—if we err, we would rather err on the side of preserving liberty. He then drew what he called the exact parallel: since every law deprives us of a liberty in some way, the presumption should be on liberty, consistent with the criminal-law philosophy Amy Coney Barrett on Trial (2020).
The same episode turned to deference, with Zadek asking Barnett about Amy Coney Barrett’s review of Barnett’s book Our Republican Constitution, in which she took issue with deference. Barnett said he strongly supported Barrett’s confirmation notwithstanding a real disagreement. He described her as an originalist who would enforce clear constitutional rules, though he noted it would depend on her view of stare decisis. On deference, Barnett said Barrett would be more deferential to Congress when Congress exercises a power in a way that is unnecessary or improper, and that she frames the matter as Congress making policy judgments that courts are not competent to make—a framing Barnett said he agrees with as stated. But he argued it is not a policy judgment for a court to ask Congress to explain why it is doing what it is doing and why it is necessary and proper, and then to exercise independent judgment. He described the result of the deference he and Barrett disagree about as a system of double deference: the court defers to Congress on whether a law is within Congress’s power, and Congress defers to the Supreme Court, predicting it will uphold the law—so each side points at the other and what drops out is the Constitution, particularly constitutional limits on legislative power at the federal and state levels Amy Coney Barrett on Trial (2020).
Across episodes: no development
The excerpts show the topic in three episodes—2014, 2020 and 2023—but they do not show the same question argued across them in a way that changed: the 2014 episode treats the presumption of innocence as inverted on campus, the 2020 episode treats it as the criminal-law cornerstone from which Zadek derives a presumption of liberty, and the 2023 episode treats it as displaced in civil forfeiture, with no guest responding to another episode’s treatment.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the holding of any case, the name of any bill, or which amendment any forfeiture or campus proceeding turned on, beyond Zadek’s quotation of the Fourth Amendment. They do not give the title or field of any participant beyond what the labels and introductions state, and they do not resolve the questions the speakers raise about whether campus practices spill over into criminal juries or whether deference doctrine will change. Where an excerpt ends mid-sentence, the sources stop there.