Cases

In 1633 the Roman Inquisition found Galileo Galilei "vehemently suspect of heresy" for defending the heliocentric model — that the Earth moves around the Sun — in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He was forced to recant, the book was banned, and he spent his remaining nine years under house arrest. In 1992 Pope John Paul II formally acknowledged that the Church had erred. The case that the verdict was defensible in context: in 1616 the Church had warned Galileo not to hold or defend Copernicanism as fact, and the Dialogue was widely read as breaking that instruction (and as mocking Pope Urban VIII through the character Simplicio). Scientifically, heliocentrism was not yet proven — Galileo's tidal argument was wrong, stellar parallax had not been observed, and Tycho Brahe's geo-heliocentric model fit the data available then. The case against: a religious court has no business ruling on physical reality; the evidence Galileo did have (Jupiter's moons, the phases of Venus) already undermined Ptolemy; and the trial became the defining example of authority suppressing science. The question is about the verdict judged by 1633 standards, not by what we know now.

In 399 BC a jury of about 500 Athenian citizens tried the philosopher Socrates on charges of impiety (not honouring the city's gods and introducing new ones) and corrupting the youth. He was convicted by a narrow margin, then — after proposing, half in jest, that his "penalty" be free meals for life — sentenced to death by a larger majority. He refused offers to help him escape and drank hemlock. The case for the conviction: Athens had just emerged from defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the brutal rule of the Thirty Tyrants, several of whose leaders (Critias, Charmides) and the traitor Alcibiades had been Socrates' associates. His public questioning of democratic institutions and traditional religion broke laws the jury was entitled to apply, and he was tried under proper procedure by his peers. The case against: he was prosecuted for speech and ideas, not acts; an amnesty of 403 BC barred prosecuting political grievances from the tyranny, so the charges may have been a proxy for exactly that; and executing a 70-year-old philosopher for asking questions is the archetype of a democracy persecuting dissent. Judge the verdict, the sentence, or both — the sides let you separate them.