Innocent Until Charged

The Kobe Bryant arrest has me thinking about that ever popular refrain, "innocent until proven guilty." To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure I really believe in it.

Let me be clear. As a legal matter, it is certainly the correct standard. No one should be punished by our legal system until found guilty in an appropriate legal forum.

As a moral matter, I think this is probably also true. The force of our moral condemnation should be reserved until an appropriate level of evidence is presented to demonstrate guilt. Each person will likely set a different threshold, but it will at least require some evidence.

But as a factual matter, I must confess that I tend to believe that if you are charged with a crime, you are quite likely guilty of that crime. I will reserve my legal and moral judgment until I've seen more evidence, but I think that once someone is charged with a crime they are transferred to a holding pattern of sorts. They are no longer innocent like you or I are innocent. They are "awaiting judgment", and particularly when it seems that a prosecutor has devoted considerable thought to whether to bring charges, the existence of those charges inclines me to no longer assume that the person is innocent in the same way they were before charges were brought.

I know this isn't very structured or clear, but it's an intuition I'm having about my own reaction to the Kobe Bryant case. I wouldn't fire him or jail him without evidence, but I also wouldn't let my daughter (if I had one) go near him (assuming I would have before this incident). So that suggests something has changed about my feelings toward him, and I certainly no longer assume he's innocent in the way I did before I'd heard about this charge.

Isn't that true for anyone else? If your neighbor was charged with a sex crime, you'd no longer let my children play at his house. Yet you probably wouldn't advocate jailing him or firing him without a proper legal trial. Is that right?

So it seems there must be some gray area/holding pattern that we put people in once they are charged (or even just accused?) of crimes, a pretty big modification of "innocent until proven guilty."

UPDATE: I'm not really concerned with whether people agree with me on the Kobe Bryant case in particular, it's just what got me thinking about the issue. What I'm more interested in is the phenomenon generally. So the "neighbor charged with a sex crime" is probably a better test case. If you had children who normally played at a neighbor's home, would you continue to let them do so after he or she'd been charged with a sex crime (but not tried or convicted)? If not, why not?