Personally my problem with Harry wasn’t so much that he immediately assumed there was a trick (shouldn’t get a probability of 1.0, no, but certainly a basket worth piling some eggs in) but that he assumed the truth would get her off. He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape “If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?” I don’t even know the answer to that question, but I’d certainly ask before I assumed it was “no”.
Especially considering how draconian the law is and how one of the two most important members of the judge/jury is not only the victim’s father but someone already predisposed to dislike her (for what amounts to unapologetic and on-record racial discrimination). In advance I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a show trial that blatantly ignored the evidence to get a conviction, though Dumbledore’s faction was a bit too vocal for me to expect that with my current knowledge.
He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape “If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?”
Harry doesn’t know about the GHD attack and so his working hypothesis is that her memory of attempting to kill Draco is false.
“Ah!” Harry said suddenly. “I get it now. The first False Memory Charm was cast on Hermione after Professor Snape yelled at her, and showed, say, Draco and Professor Snape plotting to kill her. Then last night that False Memory was removed by Obliviation, leaving behind the memories of her obsessing about Draco for no apparent reason, at the same time she and Draco were given false memories of the duel.”
Since that was the last theory Harry proposed before he switched from theories to lines of attack, and nobody fully shot it down (there was an objection, but the objection was just that it’d be difficult), I have to assume that was his working theory when he left the room. And I would not automatically assume that this scenario, which we know to be very close to the correct one, would count as “innocent” in front of a wizengamot led by the angry, racist father of the victim.
Personally my problem with Harry wasn’t so much that he immediately assumed there was a trick (shouldn’t get a probability of 1.0, no, but certainly a basket worth piling some eggs in) but that he assumed the truth would get her off. He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape “If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?” I don’t even know the answer to that question, but I’d certainly ask before I assumed it was “no”.
Especially considering how draconian the law is and how one of the two most important members of the judge/jury is not only the victim’s father but someone already predisposed to dislike her (for what amounts to unapologetic and on-record racial discrimination). In advance I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a show trial that blatantly ignored the evidence to get a conviction, though Dumbledore’s faction was a bit too vocal for me to expect that with my current knowledge.
Harry doesn’t know about the GHD attack and so his working hypothesis is that her memory of attempting to kill Draco is false.
“Ah!” Harry said suddenly. “I get it now. The first False Memory Charm was cast on Hermione after Professor Snape yelled at her, and showed, say, Draco and Professor Snape plotting to kill her. Then last night that False Memory was removed by Obliviation, leaving behind the memories of her obsessing about Draco for no apparent reason, at the same time she and Draco were given false memories of the duel.”
Since that was the last theory Harry proposed before he switched from theories to lines of attack, and nobody fully shot it down (there was an objection, but the objection was just that it’d be difficult), I have to assume that was his working theory when he left the room. And I would not automatically assume that this scenario, which we know to be very close to the correct one, would count as “innocent” in front of a wizengamot led by the angry, racist father of the victim.