Then your conviction would probably be overturned on appeal. The standard is 'beyond reasonable doubt'. There will be no law that waters down that standard in cases of rape, and nor should there be.
No, it wouldn't be overturned on appeal, for various different reasons.
I'm afraid this is all going to be very long, but it is all, or at least mostly all, relevant.
Firstly, PorridgeQuackBacon, I would like to sincerely thank you for being honest with both yourself and us about that. A fair few people do not realise that they will feel that way until they are actually sitting in a courtroom, and such willingness to actually consider how that responsibility would feel is most laudable.
It is a recognised phenomenon that the more severe the penalty, the more hesitant juries are to convict; the most stark way to illustrate this is to consider the death penalty itself.
I'm not sure when it was first speculated that jury hesitancy might be a factor in convictions, but it was certainly acknowledged as a serious issue after the UK and Canada both abolished the death penalty for murder, and saw the conviction rate for murder increase. (Ironically, contrary to the expectations of the right-wing press, it may well out that having the death penalty would mean more murderers walking the streets, not less.)
The Economist's outline on a 2017 analysis of conviction rates in Victorian Britain
This US study set out to gather data on how strongly jury decisions may be affected by the absence or presence of the death penalty, by surveying jurors themselves, post-trial. These jurors (who had already voted guilty) were asked if they would have been more likely to vote not guilty, had the death penalty for the defendant been a possible outcome. 30% said yes. (3% said they would have been more likely to vote guilty.)
Obviously, projected differences in length of custodial sentence should not have such a strong link with guilty/not guilty verdicts as the possibility of a death sentence seems to do; but it seems foolish to me in the extreme to assume that there would not be.
I imagine there have been a fair few attempts to articulate why this happens, including in the extract already linked. (I rather like that one.)
I might put it as thus: evidence suggests that 'beyond reasonable doubt' may mean sweet Fanny Adams once the jury have retired. Our peers do not coolly analyse the probabilities; they are strongly motivated to go with the choice that won't leave them sitting bolt upright at 3 am for the next six years, thinking, "suppose, just suppose he was telling the truth and I got it wrong, and I sent an innocent man to prison..."
Quite simply, it is acknowledged that juries do this, and we could in fact have an entire thread about what 'beyond reasonable doubt' means to the average person on the electoral register vs what legal professionals think it means.
However, perhaps that would be unwise, because in all the discussion of how juries should vote, we would be missing the huge elephant in the room: why do we have a jury system at all?
There are other justifications of it, but one reason why we have this entitlement to be heard by a collection of our peers (if charged with an appropriate offence) is to deliberately allow the voice of the people an opportunity to subvert Parliament's will.
The jury are directed to consider the case on the evidence submitted and pronounce guilty/not guilty accordingly, but they are not legally obliged to do so. They are in fact legally entitled to pronounce not guilty (even if they believe 100% that the defendant did it), because they believe that the legal penalty for the crime is disproportionate, or because they think the crime should not count as a crime, or the case otherwise strikes them as unjust. This is called Jury Nullification, and you can read an excellent description and explanation of the practice here.
Lastly, in this hypothetical case that QuackPorridgeBacon sat on? A convicted defendant can not "just" appeal. They must have permission to appeal, and to obtain that, they need to submit grounds that something went wrong with the trial process, or perhaps fresh evidence that should be considered. Please note this is not an exhaustive list, not intended to be. However, speculation that the jury might have returned a different verdict had the charges been lesser/greater is not sufficient for an appeal.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry who works in the courts knows that this is a possibility, and as it is the jury's right to do so, the CPS take this into account when they are deciding whether to press cases and what charges to pursue.