Some people are confused by the word indictment. They think that an accused is already guilty when there is an indictment.
Indictment does not mean that a person is already guilty beyond reasonable doubt.
Indictment is a decision made by the public prosecutor or a fiscal formally charging an accused of a crime. This means that the fiscal has found a probable cause or reasonable grounds that a person has committed a crime after one or two hearings where parties were given a chance to speak on their behalf sans presentation of evidence to the contrary on the part of the defendant.
To charge a person with a crime is entirely different from proving that a crime has been committed. The former refers to probable cause or reasonable grounds which might not be true or misleading while the later requires determination of guilt beyond reasonable grounds which requires presentation of evidence and witnesses in court to prove that a person has committed a crime.
In line with the Constitutional right of every person to due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, we should not easily condemn a person charged with a criminal offence.
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