🧩 BND Motif Index · M1443
Every man deserves a trial
Even the most hated defendants, the enemy's own soldiers, are owed a defense and the presumption of innocence. The lawyer who takes their unpopular case is told as upholding the law that the cause itself rests on.
⚖️ Values🗂️ Crime and punishment🗂️ The Republic
- 1claim filed under it
- 2right shows it came up on
⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.
A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.
🎙️ Who it came up with
the shows we follow where its claims came up (0 left-leaning, 0 center, 2 right-leaning so far), colored by the show's lean; the bar is how many of its claims each one heard
- right-leaning
"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.
🗣️ In so many words
the words that carry it
💬 the tellers' own words: “defended the British soldiers because he thought if we did not have law and order and justice, we'd be fighting for nothing” “says every man deserves a trial and a presumption of innocence ... So I wanted to prove law and order mattered”
🧶 Its claims
what's been told in this shape, in our words, by who told it: newest first in each; a claim's dots are the shows it came up on, in their lean's color (point at them for their names)
Told on the left 0
claims heard on left-leaning shows, and no right-leaning one
🦗 No claim heard only on the left so far.
Told on the right 1
claims heard on right-leaning shows, and no left-leaning one
- 2026-11-02 “John Adams defended British soldiers to prove that law and order and the presumption of innocence matter.” 2
M1443 · first seen 2026-11-02 · what this is · how the index works