But fundamentally me saying "I think the sky is blue" and "the sky is blue" are the same thing: the latter just has the "I think" implicit but clear to anyone who stops to think for a moment about what it means that _I_ am saying it. Maybe most people don't think, of course.
> But courts decide who is a criminal or not.
Sort of. The courts decided OJ Simpson is not a criminal by the legal definition. The descriptive statement "OJ Simpson committed a crime" has fairly contested truth value.
> hopefully in an unbiased way.
I guess the key is that the US approach starts out by admitting that the "unbiased way" is an unattainable fantasy and then works on routing around that problem. The real discussion here is whether the cure is worse than the disease in this case.