Strange how seemingly unrelated events can remind you of things you hadn't thought of for years, isn't it.
Back in the mid-90s, there was a computer game called Frontier: First Encounters, an approximate sequel to the old Elite. It was set in 3250, with humanity spread across over hundreds of light years of space and 3 major political alliances.
Anyway, one of the side plots related to a legal dispute. An influential person had arranged the assassination of an opponent, whose family tries to have him brought to trial. He hires a bunch of lawyers who advance the following argument:
- Our client is "innocent until proven guilty"
- He hasn't been proven guilty, so therefore he is innocent
- Since he's innocent, the accusation of murder is libellous, and so we're suing you.
(The dispute is only resolved when the lawyers are bombed from orbit.)
There's a bit of text explaining why their legal strategy works - the influential person had spent years lobbying for the law in the relevant star system to be rewritten in his favour. There seem to be a lot of people who think that's how "innocent until proven guilty" already works, which just shows the difficulty of developing sufficiently implausible satire.
