Who Gets the Benefit of the Doubt?

On October 21, Samuel Sey, a 39-year-old Christian commentator from Ghana who writes under the name Slow to Write, was arrested by immigration agents at Columbus airport in Ohio. Sey has been a consistent defender of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda. Earlier this year, he argued that the ICE officer who shot Renee Good in Minneapolis had acted in self-defense. According to the Department of Homeland Security, Sey entered the United States legally in 2022 but remained more than four years beyond his authorized stay. The department says he has no pending applications and has accepted voluntary departure. His wife, meanwhile, says the family is confused about what went wrong in the visa process.

I can’t determine from here who is right about the paperwork, and for the purposes of this article, that isn’t the point. What matters is the reaction. Friends and allies on the right, many of whom ordinarily cheer strict immigration enforcement, rushed to Sey’s defense. The publisher of the Christian news site Protestia called it highly unlikely that Sey had knowingly broken the law, suggesting that the situation was probably a misunderstanding. A fundraising page introduced him as a husband, a father of three, and a schoolteacher. Suddenly, there was room for context, nuance, and the possibility of an honest mistake.

Nobody should begrudge him that. A man with a family and no criminal record deserves the presumption that he didn’t set out to cheat anyone. The uncomfortable question is how rarely that presumption extends to others. The same circles have spent years insisting that overstaying a visa is a violation of the law and that explanations are merely excuses. You may agree with them, and this isn’t an article about immigration policy. But it’s fair to ask whether an anonymous overstayer, without a blog, a following, or a friend with a platform, would receive the same generous interpretation. And this is hardly a peculiarity of the right. Every political camp discovers nuance when its own side comes under scrutiny, only to lose sight of it when the accused isn’t “one of ours.”

Psychologists have been studying this tendency for decades. In 1979, Thomas Pettigrew gave it a name: the ultimate attribution error. When someone in our own group does something wrong, we look to circumstances to explain it: a bad day, a bureaucratic snag, an unlucky break. When someone outside our group does the same thing, we are more likely to blame their character. The pattern works in reverse for good behavior. Our group’s virtues reflect who we are; the other side’s good deeds are dismissed as flukes or attributed to ulterior motives. We know the pressures and complications behind our own mistakes, but other people’s circumstances are less visible to us. We end up reading their mistakes as evidence of who they are. Loyalty, in other words, stretches the boundaries of the self to encompass the group.

Judging Favorably

Jewish tradition anticipated this problem. In Pirkei Avot (1:6), Yehoshua ben Perachya teaches us to judge every person favorably. The phrase is kol ha’adam: every person, not every friend, every congregant, or every member of our own camp. The Talmud (Shevuot 30a) finds a source for this principle in Leviticus 19:15: “with righteousness shall you judge your fellow.” The verse is understood as more than a rule for the courtroom. It points toward a daily habit of interpreting other people’s actions with a presumption of innocence. Hillel adds the humility that makes such a habit possible: “Do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place” (Avot 2:4). Which of us has stood in Sey’s shoes, or those of any immigrant trying to navigate a bureaucracy in which a mistake can have serious consequences? His supporters, in effect, followed Hillel’s advice. They just kept the guest list rather small.

The Talmud offers a famous illustration of this principle in Shabbat 127b. A man works for a landowner for three years, then asks for his wages so he can return home to his family. The landowner says he has no money. The worker asks for produce instead, then for land, livestock, and bedding. Each time, the landowner refuses. The worker eventually leaves empty-handed and heartbroken, yet he finds a charitable explanation for every refusal. Perhaps the money is tied up in goods. Perhaps the fields have been rented out. Perhaps the produce has not yet been tithed. Perhaps the property has been dedicated to the Temple.

After the festival, the landowner arrives with the worker’s wages, along with food and drink. He asks the worker what he had been thinking when he heard each refusal. The worker recounts his explanations, and the landowner confirms that every one was correct. He had vowed away his property because of his son, and the vow had been released only later. Then the landowner tells him: Just as you judged me favorably, may God judge you favorably.

What I love about this story is that the worker is the injured party. He is owed three years of wages and has every reason to be suspicious. The Talmud chooses a case in which judging favorably comes at a cost, not one in which generosity requires nothing of us.

This is not a call for naivety. Later authorities, including the Chafetz Chaim, explore the limits of the principle: how to approach someone whose record suggests malice, for example, and when prudence requires caution or action to protect others. Judging favorably is not the same as declaring someone innocent, nor does it rule out investigation, truthful testimony, or measures to protect the public. It is a starting point for how we interpret people before all the facts are known.

The principle cuts both ways in Sey’s case. The government’s account deserves neither automatic acceptance nor automatic suspicion. The point is not to decide in advance which side is telling the truth, but to leave room for the possibility that the situation is more complicated than it first appears.

Nobody needs a commandment to think well of a friend. As psychology suggests, that comes naturally. The commandment is there for everyone else: the stranger, the opponent, the person whose arrest we might otherwise have shrugged off. Here is a modest test. When someone is accused or arrested, substitute the name of someone from the other side and see whether the same charitable explanation occurs to you. Sey’s supporters were quick to extend him the benefit of the doubt, and that was a good instinct. Jewish tradition asks us to extend the same generosity to people who aren’t ours. As the Rabbis understood, that is where the principle begins to matter.