Dumbledore and the truth about Sirius?

Why didn’t Dumbledore try to find out the truth about Sirius? This question has been haunting me for a while now. After I read book 6… I have been wondering, why Dumbledore didn’t try to find out the truth about Sirius Black, when he was charged of murder and sent to Azkaban. Why did Dumbledore believe that Black had betrayed the Potters, and turned a spy for Voldemort?

In book 6, we have 2 instances where Dumbledore tries to find out the truth about two alleged murderers, Morfin and the house elf Hokey! Despite Morfin’s history of breaking the law, and his natural instinct towards cruelty, Dumbledore refused to believe that Morfin had killed Tom Riddle Sr. and his family. Dumbledore also refused to believe that Hokey the house elf had poisoned Hepzibah by mistake.

Other than this, Dumbledore’s natural instinct is to give people a fair chance. He gave werewolf Lupin that chance. He supposedly gave Snape a second chance (supposedly because I don’t believe Snape was ever really a death eater to begin with). Why then did he not give that chance to Sirius Black? Why didn’t he try to find out the reason as to why such a trusted friend of Potters suddenly turned a spy for the enemy and as good as killed them!

I have since read and re-read all the books in search of this answer. The only reason I can think of, and I agree it’s a weak reason, is that Dumbledore genuinely believed that Black was capable of the act. Surprised? So was I, when I first came to this hypothesis. Maybe this will help you a little to understand my point of view.

At the age of 16, Black did something that almost killed a fellow student he didn’t like. I am of course talking about Severus Snape. It was Black who devised a plan to play a… for lack of better word, prank on Snape for being nosy. We all know about the incident where Snape was lured into the Shrieking Shack when Lupin was hiding in the Shack as the werewolf. If it wasn’t for James’s heroic act, Snape would have been bitten, worse still, even killed. In order to save the neck of his best friends, James risked his own life. If Snape would have come to any harm, Sirius, James, Peter and Remus would be in big trouble. But, would they be the only ones to get into trouble? Of course not. The one person who would be in deep waters too, had this incident taken an ugly turn was Albus Dumbledore himself! Dumbledore had allowed Lupin into the school against the better judgment of a lot of professors. Lupin was an experiment. If Dumbledore could help a werewolf to get through school successfully, it would benefit the other werewolves who wanted to lead a normal life. So, thanks to Sirius, that experiment almost failed, and had it caused any serious problem, Dumbledore would have been taken to task for doing what he did.

These were the repercussion of what was possible, if anything had happened to Snape. Conversely, we have Sirius and Remus telling us that Snape entered school knowing a lot more hexes then even the fifth year olds of the time. Which means, had he seen a werewolf trying to attack him, he could have attacked the werewolf himself. I am not too sure whether the ministry would have considered it an offence if someone had attacked and possibly killed a werewolf trying to attack a human! Remus could have lost his life had the whole incident turned ugly.
But the initiator of this little prank, Mr. Sirius Black, did not think of any of these consequences. The impression he gave was that he just didn’t care if he hurt the enemy. In fact, in book 3 we get the impression that even after so many years, he doesn’t understand the gravity of his actions or regret his little prank.
POA: “It served him right,” he (Black) sneered. “Sneaking around trying to find out what we were up to… hoping he could get us expelled.”

Black may not have meant it to turn ugly. From the way he describes it, it looked like he just wanted to scare Snape a little. But, he did come across as a rash, slightly unthinking sort of a person who didn’t care about the complicated consequences of his actions. In short, he didn’t care if he was cruel to his enemies! Sirius’s behaviour, I am sure, would not have gained him any accolades from Dumbledore, to put it mildly.

So the only conclusion I can draw is that Dumbledore believed that Sirius was capable of committing the heinous act he was believed to have committed. Therefore, he didn’t go to verify whether Sirius was being fairly accused and punished. I also have a feeling that after the unfortunate Snape incident, Dumbledore had any strong liking for Sirius. This, I realized when Dumbledore spoke to Harry about Sirius’s death at the end of OoTP.

I know it’s a weak explanation, for it suggests that a man like Dumbledore too can get a tad bit petty. But other than this, I do not have any other explanation as to why Dumbledore so readily believed that Sirius Black, a member of the Order, James and Lily’s best friend, Harry Potter’s godfather, would actually betray his friends and turn to the other side! Especially, when Sirius used the word “Voldemort” instead of “He-who-must-not-be-named” or “You-know-who”. No Death Eater would say his name!!! So you have any thoughts?