“Jamsheed Zahoor Paul had very little hope left in him,” his lawyer recalled on a phone call with me. Arrested at the age of nineteen under the Arms Act, 1959 and subsequently under terrorism-related provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, Paul, the son of a former Jammu and Kashmir police officer, would often tell his lawyers Ahmad Ibrahim and Tamanna Pankaj, “Everyone in my family was in the service; I cannot even dream of doing such a thing.”On Thursday (March 19), a Delhi court cited “a great deal of doubt” in the case against him and acquitted Paul and his co-accused Parvaiz Rashid. At the time of their release, the duo had already spent over seven years in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.“In 2018, when these two boys (nineteen and twenty-four years old) were picked up, news outlets continuously ran stories like ‘two highly radicalised ISIS terrorists arrested near Red Fort’,” Advocate Ahmad recalled. “If you look this up, you will find out how much they were hounded back then.”And he is right. Nothing is ever truly lost on the internet, and with the help of a brief social media search, I pulled up multiple news reports from 2018 that ascribed unsubstantiated labels on Paul and Rashid.‘ISIS men’, ‘terrorists’ and more“2 ISIS men held in Delhi with arms (sic),” a September 8, 2018 India Today headline read, without adding “alleged”, “purported”, “claimed”, or even a Delhi Police attribution.Innocent until proven guilty is, perhaps, the most frequently forgotten piece of common knowledge. However, the first rule I learned as a news-desk trainee, at around the same time as Paul’s arrest (so this isn’t some niche, new journalistic convention), was to use “alleged” until someone’s guilt was established by a court of law – until the trial had concluded and a court, after wading through all the evidence, passed a legal order of conviction.In Paul and Rashid’s case, it would be several years until a court concluded this matter, but India Today, based only on their arrest, seemingly pronounced Paul and Rashid’s guilt within days of their arrest. And the India Today lede? “The Special Cell of Delhi Police managed to arrest two hardcore terrorists of Islamic State Jammu & Kashmir (IS-JK) from Red Fort area on Thursday night (emphasis added).”Screenshot of an India Today report published soon after Rashid and Paul were arrested by the Special Cell of Delhi Police.While the summary paragraph did refer to the duo as “accused”, it also stated, as fact, that: (1) Paul and Rashid “are part of IS-JK (sic)” and (2) that they were using encrypted messaging platforms for terrorism-related activities. Note that there is no attribution, or appearance of claim, in this paragraph either.Screenshot of the same India Today report, which fails to attribute the allegations of terrorism, nor explains that the charges against Rashid and Paul were mere allegations at the time.Seen together, such framing constructs both arrested youth as “ISIS men” and “hardcore terrorists”. In this context, the term “accused” becomes little more than a token, blink-and-miss caveat.Similarly, a report on a YouTube channel called News State loudly proclaimed in Hindi: “Delhi’s special cell has achieved great success! They have arrested two terrorists in Delhi”. Their description identified Paul and Rashid as “two terrorists of ISJK”.Screenshot of a News State YouTube video labelling the arrestees as “two terrorists”, without attribution or clarifying that this was an allegation at the time.On the same day, news agency ANI posted on X: “Special Cell of Delhi police arrested two terrorists near Red Fort today.” Once again, notice the woeful absence of attributional qualifiers in these early media reports.Screenshot of an ANI post on X (then Twitter) after the arrest of Rashid and Paul.Invisiblising identityHow news outlets frame key developments (or even somebody’s identity) matters, because media messages are “structured in dominance”. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall noted in 1973 that by “ensuring that certain positions must be visible, the media also tend to ensure that certain positions will remain basically invisible”. That, in effect, is the structure of dominance.In Paul and Rashid’s case, the narrative about the duo being ISIS-affiliates and “hardcore terrorists” invisiblised their real identities – young Kashmiri engineering students arrested under charges the court found to be unsubstantiated.Additional Sessions Judge Amit Bansal of the Patiala House Courts noted in his order that the prosecution had “failed to prove” the charges slapped on the accused. Among other reasons, the court noted an apparent failure by the authorities to include independent (especially public) witnesses in the case against the two. It noted that the mobile phones seized from them were kept in an unsealed condition with the Investigation Officers (IO) for about two months, instead of being promptly sent for forensic examination.“No satisfactory explanation has been offered for the said prolonged custody of the said mobile phones with the IOs,” the court said.The cost of such framingFor Ahmad, the problem posed by news reports that presumed guilt rather than innocence was how they could prejudice “the investigating officers, the lawyers, the judges and everybody else involved with the case”.“If, even before the trial, two people are perceived as terrorists working with ISIS, then people don’t really care about the merits of the case or what the evidence reveals,” he explains.Prejudicial reporting hurts an individual’s right to a fair trial. It may even be contemptuous (under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971) for news outlets to prematurely label someone as guilty, if their reportage prejudices or otherwise interferes with the legal proceedings.Ahmad explains how this worked against Paul and Rashid: Section 25 of the Arms Act defines the punishment for illegal possession of firearms or ammunition. This was the initial charge against the two. Subsequently, the police added Sections 18 and 20 of the UAPA, which determine the punishment for conspiracy and punishment for being a member of a terrorist organisation, respectively.“But how was UAPA invoked – why, for what reason? – nobody would pay attention to that,” says Ahmad, adding, “This is because the fact that these are Kashmiri boys and ISIS had been named [by the prosecution] was enough to prejudice everyone.”“Thankfully, this case went to a judge who really cared about the matter, what the evidence was and what the witnesses have said. Ordinarily, people don’t perceive such cases so intricately,” Ahmad says.The accused in these cases often become so hopeless, Ahmad noted, that they consider taking a guilty plea with the hope that they would be let off sooner. However, in this matter, the lawyers told the accused that even if they were released post a guilty plea – and there is no guarantee of that – they would have to live their lives in the shadow of a terrorism conviction.Such shadows are rendered darker by negative perceptions, fortified in the public discourse by hasty, motivated or biased media reporting.What about the (similar) others?Teun A. van Dijk, one of the founders of Critical Discourse Studies, has noted that by “controlling the access to public discourse, only specific forms of knowledge and opinions may be expressed and widely circulated, and these may persuasively lead to mental models and social representations that are in the interest of the powerful”.Opinion framed as information by popular media outlets can, quite simply, wreck lives. Terrorism is not a minor charge. Its import is infectious, and a charge like it contaminates the individual’s personal and social well-being. It affects his freedom, his family, his community, his relationships, his employability and his future. An acquittal can somewhat challenge these negative mental models. However, there is not enough data to reveal how many lives have been wrecked by similar social representations.We will never know how many nineteen year olds similarly suffer among us, shunned by society, imprisoned by our imagination, plagued by our biases, their lives permanently altered by media reports hastily branding them terrorists (long before a court can).Mekhala Saran is pursuing a PhD in Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. She was formerly a legal journalist.