To think that “innocent until proven guilty” just doesn’t always apply, particularly in cases of sex offences?

[AngeloMysterioso]

It should… I know it should. In a fair and just world.

But the fact is that, in this country at least, because it’s almost always a he-said-she-said, the level of prosecutions and convictions for rape is so shockingly low that virtually every rapist out there is technically an innocent man.

I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t like trial by media, I don’t think someone should be convicted of a serious crime purely on somebody else’s say-so, but I also know that so many men are being able to get away with it that innocent until proven guilty has become a complete crock of shit.

Especially when the perpetrator is famous. Even setting aside the one in the news right now, we also have a recent case of a footballer whose crime was literally recorded and he still got away with it.

I mean what the fuck do we do?!

Maybe we just need to reverse the concept.? We are all guilty until we have proved our innocence.

How do you 'prove your innocence'? If you and one other person are present and that person accuses you of doing something or saying something, how do you prove you didn't do it?

It was never meant to.

It also means there’s zero chance of conviction because they won’t get a fair trial.

My god

There are a few issues with how rape and sexual assault is investigated, charged and prosecuted.

A defendant just needs to prove they thought they had consent, not that they actually had consent. A while range of quite shocking suggestions have been successfully used to defend rape allegations over the year - including what someone was wearing, how drunk/ high they were, whether they were known to be promiscuous, or whether they had previously engaged in consensual sex/ sexual activity with the defendant.

As many sexual crimes happen in relationships/ are committed by people known to the victim that means there is a lot of muddy water (as far as juries are concerned) in many cases - which is why a lot are never brought to trial even when they are reported.

If a victim froze instead of fighting back, that is often brought up in court to suggest they didn't actually not consent.

Any suggestion to change this to a scenario where a defendant has to show they had consent (preferably enthusiastic consent) has been met with trite complaints that 'you will kill all romance' or 'men will have to get signed contracts before having sex' nonsense.

It also does not help that massive backlogs in the justice system mean people wait years for cases to be heard (awful for both sides - prosecution and defence). As a crime where it essentially boils down to he said, she said waiting years for a case makes witnesses less reliable. This makes it harder to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Victims therefore either pull out of criminal cases before court, or decide not to report in the first place.

These are things that need to change before we can solely rely on the outcome of a criminal trial to judge someone's likely guilt.

These are things that need to change before we can solely rely on the outcome of a criminal trial to judge someone's likely guilt.

But "these things" are a reflection of society. Now I am quite happy to agree society needs changing. However you tell me how you're going to do it, and I will tell you how it won't work.

There has never been a time or a place where male violence against women (and other men, to be fair) hasn't been baked into the fundamentals of society. Under a bewildering guises of fig leaves.

I’m not saying the things he’s being accused of didn’t happen but clearly they think there is zero chance of him being charged with any actual crimes because going public like this makes it next to impossible to successfully prosecute. This trial by media is merely the fallback option because the real legal system won’t do its job

This trial by media is merely the fallback option because the real legal system won’t do its job

It would have been kind of nice if it had been given the opportunity to try.

I know a man who was wrongly convicted of rape. I know he was wrongly convicted because the victim told people afterwards she made it up. She laughed about it in fact. I personally heard her do it. She said she made it up because she'd had a one night stand and didn't want her boyfriend to find out she'd been cheating.

We reported it to the Police and to his legal team, no one was interested. By that point the conviction was done and they'd moved on to the next case.

He got 5 years in prison and 7 years on the sex Offenders register. I was in court when he was convicted and I'll never forget the look on his face when the guilty verdict was read out. It still haunts me.

He wasn't allowed to have unsupervised access to his children again..

All because of a one night stand that someone regretted.

I am a survivor of SA and I support the rule of law, even though I never got justice.

A not guilty verdict does not mean that the defendant is innocent or has been falsely accused. It simply means that there was insufficient to convince a jury of their guilt.

I'm not sure how we could dispense with innocent until proven guilty and still call it justice.

I agree with PP that rape victims are treated very differently to victims of other crimes. There is a Tracy Ullman sketch which uses humour to demonstrate how absurd it would look if we treated all victims of crime the way we do rape victims.

The other difficulty in securing a guilty verdict lies in the three tests which must be met;

1. That sex took place.
2. Consent was not given.
3. The defendant did not reasonably believe that consent was given.

The law allows for rape to actually occur but the prosecution must prove that the defendant couldn't have reasonably believed that consent had been given.

In RB's case, the fact that there are multiple complainants accusing him of sexual violence speaks to me. As would physical evidence of violent sexual activity. But he said/she said cases?

And when a PP writes that only 'enthusiastic' consent should count, how should this be evidenced? Should every sexual encounter be recorded in real time?

People have absolutely no idea what "innocent until proven guilty" means.

It's purely a legal term which exists to guarantee people the right to a fair trial, that's it. It just means that you can't lock someone up without a trial. That's it. That's literally all it means.

It has zero bearing outside of the legal system, and very precise practical usage within it. And there are laws that very directly and explicitly permit the government and law enforcement to disregard the legal construct of "innocent until proven guilty" (mainly anti-terrorism laws, which make it legal for the government to sentence someone to imprisonment without a trial).

People have a very hazy idea of "innocent until proven guilty" as some kind of vague, general concept meaning "we should all vaguely agree to pretend that someone is innocent until they've been convicted and act like they're innocent regardless of proof, evidence, or personal experience." This is bullshit and based on total ignorance of the law, and woolly thinking and lack of logical thinking.

Obviously police and prosecutors could not do their job if they had to assume and act as though all suspects are innocent. The entire job of a prosecutor is to treat the defendant as though they are guilty.

There are numerous safeguarding laws and regulations that require people in certain jobs to assume guilt without conviction, if you're a headteacher of a primary school and a teacher has been arrested on suspicion of possessing CSA images, or accused by ten pupils of molestation, your legal safeguarding obligation is to suspend that person unless he is found innocent. So legally in terms of safeguarding the law says that it's guilty until proven innocent. Would anyone genuinely advocate that a person found with CSA should be allowed unsupervised access to young children during the months/years they're waiting for the case to come to trial? Of course not! When someone's behaviour has flagged a serious safeguarding concern, then legally it has to be a case of "guilty until proven innocent" in order to protect children.

And innocent until proven guilty has ZERO bearing on public opinion, absolutely none. If you believe that a celeb, or a person in your social network, or the bloke who runs the local pub, is guilty of something, you are 100% within your rights to hold that opinion and to make decisions based on that opinion. Innocent until proven guilty as a legal concept which is enshrined in law DOES NOT APPLY.

Obviously if you go around publicly stating that someone is guilty they could sue you, but that's an entirely separate thing.

In cases of celebrities, people really genuinely seem to think that "innocent until proven guilty" means that it's somehow illegal to hold the opinion that a celeb is guilty unless they've been convicted. Those people have the IQ of ficus.

Of course it should apply in a court of law, but in every day life it’s perfectly reasonable to distance oneself from someone who has been accused of abuse - any form of abuse, including emotional abuse which often gets overlooked/downplayed.

It’s not worth the risk to not cut them out of your life, and it’s your prerogative to decide the company you keep.

I have a massive issue with journalists/the press when it comes to these things. There are numerous people who have been named and have not been charged/found guilty of the crimes that they have been accused of. Was the treatment of Cliff Richard ok?

However the public announcement of alleged crimes of people such as Rolf Harris and Jimmy Saville meant that people felt confident enough to come forward. How is it decided when these people are named, is it when the police have enough evidence for a conviction/several convictions or is it when the press fancy it.

In Cliff Richards case it feels like the latter, in the others probably the former.

I think when it comes to sex offenses against women it's more a case of innocent in all circumstances. You've got to be dead to stand a chance of conviction. I don't blame these women for not bothering to report to the police, what's the point.

I'd be interested to know if conviction rates for sex offences against men are higher.

Thanks for patronising and insulting us @TheGhostofLoganRoy. I’m sure that will have changed a lot of people’s minds. 🙄

I really really despise the notion of “believe all women”.

So women are incapable of lying, are we? We’re reduced to the the status of children in the eyes of the #ibelieveher brigade - it’s nothing but thinly veiled misogyny.

We don’t ‘believe women’ or ‘believe men’, we believe the EVIDENCE.

(Again, talking about in a court of law, what we believe personally is another matter - I’m a firm believer of gut instinct in every day life.)

Well it DOES apply, but only in relation to criminal proceedings.

And even then it's a presumption of innocence, not a copper bottom "he is innocent".

Humans make judgments on others all the time. Even before any allegation of illegality I judged RB as a over-sexed, moral vacuum of a cunt.

Innocent until proven guilty is a foundational principal of our criminal justice system. It is right proper in that specific context as its intent is to protect citizens from tyrannical behaviour by the state. It is not some blanket rule that applies in any and all circumstances and doesn't, nor shouldn't, be used to try and prevent journalists from publishing stories, or individuals from forming opinions.

For those who find what they see as trial by media distasteful, be careful what you wish for. There are countless examples of crimes and offenses that would never have come to light if it hadn't been for investigative journalism.

Innocent till proven guilty doesn't stop me forming my own opinion, as I'm not a judge or jury member I can't convict anyone but I can say "I don't believe RB when he refutes the allegations, I think he is a predator." I hate this being used to shut women up!

Don't know what happened to the formatting there

Should be:

And even then it's a presumption of innocence, not a copper bottom "he is innocent".

What absolute arse. As if someone regretted a one night stand so much they went through all the police statement giving, had enough compelling evidence of rape and gave a good enough account in a trial that he got found guilty, sent to prison and put on the SO register.

If you heard all this, why didn't you support an appeal?

Honestly, nothing about your post makes sense.

Our legal system is founded on the premise that we would rather 100 guilty men go free than 1 innocent man be deprived of his life.

The idea of confining an innocent person to gaol on the premise that we may then have incarcerated a series of is repugnant- this is not even to consider that there are serious implications that those with political power may then use their power to imprison those who are innocent because the threshold for conviction is lower which just lends itself to corruption.

The problem with rape and sexual assault and sexual abuse is not one that should principally be dealt with by the legal system. The legal system by its nature is designed to deal with crimes that aren’t that common. What we need is cultural shift that drives an improvement in behaviour. Imagine if we were to accept that every tenth man was guilty of some serious sexual crime (I don’t know if that statistic is correct, but I imagine it’s not far out). If every single one of those men was to be incarcerated you would be talking about a prison population of 3-4 million in the UK. This would simply be unsustainable in a functioning society.

This isn’t confined to just sexual crime mind you- if you had a society where rampant violence existed and then decided to drive cultural change by making it illegal, you would ultimately destroy the prison service, not to mention that the fact that your society existed with this malaise that everyone just culturally “got on with” would mean that making it illegal would generate a systematic disregard for the law. Eventually it would be that people thought something being against the law didn’t matter. This is why cultural values matter and tampering with them needs to be done with great caution.

So does that make a miscarriage of justice OK?

It is very difficult to be fair to everyone.

C4 and the Times have been very clever. The assaulted women would not have achieved justice if they went to the police. By broadcasting they have put the shoe on the other foot.

If Russell Brand wants to prove his innocence of these crimes, he can take it to court by suing them. I believe he has threatened litigation before now he can put his money where his mouth is.