Introduction

In March 2024, NASA engineer Eric Sim was arrested at Johnson Space Center on seven counts of sexual assault. District Attorney Kim Ogg held a press conference calling him a "suspected serial sex predator" and "believed to be a serial rapist," publicly seeking additional victims internationally. Media coverage was extensive, emphasizing his NASA credentials and sensational claims about a spreadsheet allegedly listing hundreds of women. Sim was forced to resign from his nine-year NASA position and spent nearly a year under 24-hour house arrest on $700,000 bond with all electronic devices monitored.

In February 2025—just two days before trial was scheduled to begin—prosecutors dismissed all seven charges, stating there was "insufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt" after reviewing terabytes of data for eleven months. The complete dismissal should have vindicated Sim entirely. Instead, his defense attorney stated bluntly: "This whole thing devastated him. He lost his job, lived under house arrest for a year, and his life was on hold." More ominously, the attorney noted that the damage to Sim's name "may never go away," asking the essential question: "Where does he go to get his reputation back? How does he put his life back together?" (KPRC 2, 2025).

Sim's case is not anomalous. In November 2015, Saifullah Khan, an Afghan refugee attending Yale University on scholarship, was accused of sexual assault. A jury acquitted him on all charges in March 2018 after deliberating for less than four hours. Yet Yale's University-Wide Committee found him responsible and expelled him in January 2019—nine months after his criminal acquittal and one semester before graduation. Over 77,000 people signed an online petition opposing his return to campus, using what observers described as "boldfaced, erroneous, inflammatory language calling him a rapist" despite the jury's verdict (Fox News, 2018). Nearly a decade after the initial accusation, Khan's life remains consumed by legal battles, he was denied his Yale diploma despite completing all coursework, and he faces deportation to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan where he fears execution (ABC News, 2023).

These cases illuminate a profound dysfunction in how American society processes criminal accusations. While "innocent until proven guilty" remains enshrined in constitutional law and judicial procedure, it has become functionally irrelevant in the court of public opinion. Legal exoneration—whether through acquittal or dismissed charges—arrives too late, too quietly, and to too few people to repair the reputational destruction wrought by initial accusations. Between accusation and acquittal, careers end, fortunes evaporate, and reputations sustain wounds that never fully heal.

This erosion is not merely theoretical. Research examining nine prominent cases from 2015-2025 where individuals faced criminal accusations, endured intense public scrutiny, and were ultimately exonerated reveals a stark pattern: media coverage of accusations generates hundreds of articles and sustained public condemnation, while exoneration receives a fraction of that attention—often a single news cycle buried on inside pages. Empirical studies demonstrate that 60-80% of the public continues believing defendants guilty despite acquittals, social media amplifies accusations 350-3,900% more than exonerations, and digital permanence makes the "court of public opinion" increasingly divorced from actual courtroom verdicts (Hoetger et al., 2022; Steblay et al., 1999).

This dissertation argues that the erosion of "innocent until proven guilty" in public consciousness stems from five structural forces that interact to make the principle functionally unworkable in the modern information ecosystem: (1) the principle's development in a pre-media era with fundamentally different information conditions, (2) the temporal mismatch between instant public judgment and slow legal proceedings, (3) the collapse of trust in legal institutions that once monopolized legitimate judgment, (4) media business models that prioritize engagement over accuracy, and (5) fundamental human cognitive limitations in processing information and maintaining suspended judgment.

These forces are not correctable through individual moral improvement or simple policy reforms. They represent a systemic incompatibility between a centuries-old legal principle designed for small communities with limited information flow and a twenty-first-century information ecosystem characterized by instant global dissemination, algorithmic amplification, permanent digital records, and declining institutional authority. Understanding these structural forces reveals why cases like Sim's and Khan's are not aberrations but inevitable outcomes—and why the presumption of innocence, while legally intact, has been functionally defeated in the arena where reputations are actually determined: public consciousness.