German prosecutors charge ex-Audi boss Stadler over emissions cheating

It’s not just about proving the perpetrator, it’s about proving the circumstance because there will be different sentencing - and sometimes even different laws - depending on the circumstance.

This is still wrong. A crime is an act of a person, which fulfills rather strict criteria. Both the legal theory and typical legislation [1] requires, among other, mens rea - guilty mind. Without a specific person convicted, you can't say with certainty there was a guilty mind. Thus indeed, before conviction we can't tell with certainty that there was a crime committed.

In your example of "murder", all we can say with certainty is that a person is dead. Evidence may establish a 3rd party was involved, which would indicate killing (as opposed to accident, natural causes, or self harm). There still remain three distinct possibilities: criminal murder, or the lower culpability of homicide (for example, a negligent homicide), or justified killing (for example, act of self defense). Those possibilities span the whole gamut from culpability to innocence, and warrant much different end results for the alleged perpetrator.

In case of the DieselGate here, investigating & prosecuting is the correct & practical option. We all suspect there was a crime, but there's a reason justice is dispensed via a deliberative process, rather than via mob rule.

Moreover, white collar crimes like the DieselGate usually don't have evidence as clear cut as an official memo saying, "I, hereby undersigned, order my underlings to break the law by doing X, Y, and Z.". A more realistic scenario is a series of emails & phone calls saying, "make the new engine meet the target parameters by this quarter's end", coupled with tacitly ignoring a footnote in an engineer's memo saying, "However we recommend against leaving the high performance mode enabled for production vehicles", along with a nod to a mid level manager who asks, "should we match the high performance mode to that of our competitors' car models X, Y, and Z?". In which case establishing responsibility & culpability will take some thorough work.

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[1] aside of the small set of strict liability crimes where the event/fact alone constitutes a crime

You may be found to have defamed someone if you go around stating your opinions as facts and the court disagrees that they are facts.

It also serves to avoid ignorant, heated lynch mobs. As with free speech, societal buy-in is a precondition to precluding the government from taking actions.

I know this is, in day-to-day parlance, irrelevant. We see the amount of evidence, we form an opinion in our mind. It's not that I think Stadler never knew anything. But this being HN, the discussion could be a bit more elevated than in a pub :) Plus, "presumption of innocence" is a legal term, I think it is worth discussing it with a "lawful" mindset.

Does it really help the German car sector's reputation, if people will hear in the news for weeks how they investigate the case, who's responsible, how they figured these details out? I don't think so, because every time it'll be on the news that they caught someone, the news will also repeat the original sleazy act of (alleged?) cheating, and that sticks, that's what people will remember.

However, if they just try to be not too loud about it, most people will forget in a year or two.

That only holds for cheaper economy cars, of which japan currently has the consumer perception edge with. The German car industry's edge is with conspicuous consumption type cars, such as luxury and GT cruisers; and the customer base for those types of cars doesn't car about efficiency as much as prestige and sportiness. I'd go as far to say the customer base for the M3 or equivalent sport cars is the type to actively subvert the emissions equipment with an ECU flash or test pipe swap for the performance boost.