When Innocence Doesn’t Count: The Case for an Evidentiary Override

By John-Michael Kuczynski

In a strictly procedural legal system, innocence is not enough.

Let that sink in.

You can be factually, obviously, publicly innocent. Everyone in the courtroom can know it—the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, even the defense attorney. And yet, if the right piece of evidence isn’t introduced in the right way, under the right legal theory, by the right party, in the right time window, then the system simply shrugs.

Truth is not procedurally admissible unless it enters through the proper gate.

This isn’t a bug. It’s not an unfortunate edge case. It is a core feature of proceduralism as it exists in Anglo-American law.

And it is morally indefensible.

The Problem: Innocence Isn’t a Legal Category

In the proceduralist view, justice is defined by whether the system was followed. If the rules were observed, then the outcome is deemed just—even if the outcome is factually wrong.

In this framework, innocence is not legally actionable unless it gets plugged into the process correctly. There is no “Truth Override" button. No emergency brake. If the defense attorney forgets to introduce the videotape, or introduces it with the wrong label, or under an inadmissible theory, that’s it. The case is over.

The truth never got its procedural passport.

What We Need: An Evidentiary Override

Most discussions of override mechanisms focus on moral override: what to do when a procedurally correct outcome is ethically monstrous.

But we also need an evidentiary override: a way to let truth enter the courtroom directly, even when it didn’t follow the perfect route.

The evidentiary override is a formal recognition that:

• Truth sometimes appears out of order

• Procedure is not omniscient

• Innocence, when clear and compelling, must not be overruled by a filing error

This is not about undermining structure. It’s about preserving the legitimacy of the system itself, which erodes every time a factually innocent person is punished for a procedural misstep.

This Doesn’t Even Help Commerce

The standard defense of proceduralism is that it makes law scalable and reliable—especially for commerce.

Fine. But what, exactly, is gained by imprisoning innocent people because their defense was filed 37 minutes too late? Does that stabilize markets? Build trust in institutions? Improve transactional clarity?

Of course not.

This isn’t rule of law. It’s bureaucratic nihilism masquerading as rigor.

Final Thought

A legal system that cannot recognize innocence unless it is procedurally perfect is not a system of justice. It is a machine.

And a machine that continues running even when it knows it is destroying the wrong person is not just flawed.

It is wicked.

We don’t just need moral discretion in the law. We need evidentiary sanity.

The override must be allowed to say:

“The truth is here. The form was broken.But we will not let that be the final word.”