I agree with you. I am a solicitor - not criminal but like all qualified barristers and solicitors studied both criminal law and the practice of criminal law. I will defend the presumption of innocence principle, the right of the most heinous criminals to proper representation and so on til the cows come home.
But dear God having served on a jury where the defendant was SO clearly and blatantly guilty (a fact that was later confirmed by the judge in her summing up at sentencing) I was horrified by the perverse thinking of some of my fellow jurors. I literally had to fight tooth and nail to get some of them to put aside a deep dislike of the victim in the case to even engage in basic common sense. It made me very sad really.
The issue with “beyond all reasonable doubt” is that it’s very hard to convey to jurors what kind of doubt might be reasonable. The burden of proof is not 100% absolute certainty but juries get very caught up in the idea of “well I can’t be 100% sure of what happened”.
It’s a generalisation - but who gets hurt behind closed doors? Women and children that’s who. So I feel they bear the brunt of that lack of ability of some jurors potentially to understand that sexual assault, rape, child abuse can be hard to prove.
More so than violence against men that may be more likely to happen on the street, outside the pub where CCTV can “show” them.
It makes me so sad. I don’t know what the answer is mind you.