Who deserves the “benefit of the doubt” in the showdown between Professor Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh? We understand that not everyone has doubts. We ask, though, because Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Rachel Maddow, has suggested that the Republicans should “give the benefit of the doubt to the court and the country.”

Since when did courts and country become the beneficiary of doubts in America? Mrs. Clinton, still smarting over her failure to win the mandate to nominate members of the Supreme Court, attributes her benefit of the doubt scheme to Senator Robert Byrd. Now gone, he was the one-time segregationist from West Virginia, who sided with Anita Hill in her charges against Justice Clarence Thomas.

“I remember back in the Thomas hearing when Senator Byrd was asked what he was going to do,” Mrs. Clinton told Ms. Maddow, “and he said in a situation like this we should give the benefit of the doubt to the court and the country.” It just struck us as a mincing formulation, completely at odds with American jurisprudence, where the benefit of the doubt always rests with the accused.

So we went through the complete hearings with our trusty electrically-operated “benefit of the doubt” transcript disaggregater. Sure enough, there was the future chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Grassley, disputing that the benefit of the doubt should go to some abstract institution or judicial body, and it was Mr. Grassley who pointed to the words of none other than Senator Joseph Biden.

Mr. Biden was then chairman of Judiciary. He addressed “benefit of the doubt” in his opening comments, when he spoke to the question of fairness. He called fairness the committee’s “primary responsibility.” He said that meant not victimizing any witness. It meant understanding what a victim of sexual harassment goes through and why they “often do not report such crimes.”

At one point, Mr. Biden also remarked that the committee may “resolve little.” But he spoke of the importance of being fair. And then the famous words: “Fairness also means that Judge Thomas must be given a full and fair opportunity to confront these charges against him, to respond full, to tell us his side of the story and to be given the benefit of the doubt.”

It is such an elemental feature of American justice that it’s hard to understand why Mrs. Clinton failed to mark the point to Rachel Maddow. Not that the Democrats in the Thomas-Hill hearings lived up to the high standards Mr. Biden bid them to. The fact is, though, that in America the benefit of the doubt goes to the accused. The Clarence Thomas hearings give Senator Grassley a chance to remind the country that the Democrats once believed in that principle.