"Give me the man and I will give you the case against him"[1] (Polish: Dajcie mi człowieka, a paragraf się znajdzie; translated to English more literally as "give me the man; there'll be a paragraph for him",[2] Russian: Был бы человек, а статья найдется, also translated as "give me the man, and I will find the crime [for him]",[3] or "show me the man and I'll show you the crime"[4]) is a saying that was popularized in Poland in the period of the People's Republic of Poland, attributed to the Stalinist-era Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky,[2][5]: 200 [6] or the Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria.[3][4] It refers to the miscarriage of justice in the form of the abuse of power by the jurists, who can find the defendant guilty of "something" if they so desire. The saying is related specifically to the concept of the presumption of guilt.[5][6][7]: 179 [8]: 85
The saying is commonly attributed to the Stalinist-era Soviet jurist Andrey Vyshinsky[2][5]: 200 [6] or the Soviet secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria.[3][4][9][8]: 85 Jarosław Grzegorz Pacuła briefly discussed the saying's origins, pointing to older similar sayings in English, such as 18th-century Scottish jurist Lord Braxfield's "Let them bring me prisoners, and I will find them law" and the Russian proverb "If there is a neck, there is a collar" (Была бы шея, а хомут найдётся; or Была бы голова, а петля найдется) that Vyshinsky might have known and paraphrased.[10] A similar quote has also been attributed to 17th-century French statesman Cardinal Richelieu ("Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him").[8]: 85 [11][12] A related American saying is "A prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich".[13]: 38 [14][15][16]: 36 Polish writer Henryk Pająk summarized the saying in four words: "person exists, [their] crime exists" ("jest czlowiek, jest przestępstwo").[17]: 152
The paragraph, in the context of the versions of the saying using this term, refers to a particular part, demarked by the section sign of a legal text (statute or article), called a paragraph in Polish.[2]: 200 This is why the title of the famous book Catch-22 was translated to Polish as Paragraf 22.[2]: 200
In Poland the saying is associated with the criticism of the justice system under totalitarian (in particular, communist) regimes.[2][18][19]: 7 [7]: 179 [10] The saying has been described as "one of the most popular, depressing and representative sayings about the general powerlessness of people faced with injust legal systems, characteristic to all countries governed by the communists".[19]: 7
Such abuse of power, exemplified by this saying, has been explicitly discussed in the context of military justice in the Stalinist era in Poland (1948–1956), particularly with regard to the court's ability to determine the legal classifications of the defendant's actions, based on very vague and generic legal terminology. During that time, in several cases, the courts considered multiple competing classifications and often sided with the prosecution in defaulting to the one which would invoke the harshest punishments.[20]: 269–271
The expression is widely used in Putin-era modern Russia to describe fabrication of criminal cases by police and judges.[21]