The three boys accused of taking it in turns to rape a girl have been found not guilty

[Lougle]

The three boys accused of taking it in turns to rape a girl have been found not guilty on all counts despite some of the incident being filmed. How could that be? That poor girl. I believe in justice, I wasn't in court. I just can't understand it though.

Thank you. I want to be a (prosecution) criminal barrister but my heart is failing the more I hear...

10 seconds... yes, that's probably not very good evidence. But I'm still struggling to understand what the jury was thinking...

Agree 100
We had a very high profile rape case on Northern Ireland in 2017 ( the gillen report since has tried to bring in changes) as people were pitching up at the court to gawp at the victim
After this bbc ni, on their current affairs documentary show Spotlight, did a mock rape trail with members of the public as jurors
My goodness .. so many rape myths, one woman on this fake jury asked her husband how she would vote.
I know it was a mock up but it showed how ridiculously uneducated juries can be

Isn't there any kind of test to see how able to understand the details jury members are? And don't they receive education in rape myths before?

I agree with your post mainly though...

They’re a jury of the accused peers. They come as they come (sadly)

she thought it would be a consensual snog and a secretive fumble, not to be gang raped.
Yes, this is possible and some girls seek approval and attention from boys in this way. There is social conditioning and peer pressure and SM influence telling them they are unworthy or unattractive if they don't get some male attention. The girl has a romantic naive idea of this perhaps and didn't realise the risk. I imagine she was lured/persuaded then it turned nasty quickly.
The boys are being conditioned in another way and there may be various factors at play here. What do we know about the background and upbringing of any of these young people, what they've been exposed to, what morals or self control has been inculcated (or not)? Some vile boys, especially when they are in a pack or gang, see an opportunity to commit vandalism, assault, rape and many get away with it. They may even be celebrated by some of their peers FFS.

Interestingly, my DS has been called to jury next month and hasn't tried to get out of it, I think he's both interested to expeience it first hand and also wants to do a good service.

Nope

They are your and my peers

Just as Im your peer and you're mine

Blame Magna Carta or whatever even came before that.

"Without reasonable doubt" is the key in criminal court cases. Balance of probability!

If there was even the slightest "reasonable doubt" in the jury's mind, no doubt heavily pushed by the defence counsel, the jury are almost forced to give a not guilty verdict.

I would love to do it and be good at it (she says), but I wouldnt be able to take time from work and Ive turned it down twice and therefore am off the list.

Good luck to you, I don't know what stage you're at with your legal training but the more you can expose yourself to the problems (and positives) with our justice system the better you will able to do your job. Don't give up!

@Carla786

And don't they receive education in rape myths before?

That's the job of the barristers/counsel in court. Part of the case is to "teach" the jurors about the relevant laws etc. The prosecution should have been telling the jury about the law, and warning them about the myths.

I was called twice to do it in my 20's but the first time I was in the middle of my professional exams and then they called me again about 6 months later but I was in a small practice with only one other person who was in France at the time so I couldn't do that either. That was at the Old Bailey which could have been a very interesting case! I'm in my 50's now and they've not called me since.

Yes very similar I suspect you wont be called then, Im sure I was told that if I turned it down twice that was that

Im wondering about volunteering as a magistrate, this has reminded me that I wouldnt mind that.

That's not quite accurate. It's near impossible to get out of doing jury duty. My dp has been called up a few times now despite working over 40hrs a week for a small business. He is the only one there that does his job, the business lose money when he's not there. He's never been excused. It's not something you can just opt out of. His employer has given him letters, but it's still not accepted.

You make it sound like it's very easy to opt out

Well as I said I did opt out, twice and will never be called again.

Yes, same here @TheGrimSqueakersFlea

There was a cross section on the jury I was on.

It’s hard to know what the arguments were, and what the judge instructed at the end.

Something seems to have failed in this case but I’m not sure what.

Thank you! I want to do something to improve things. I try to find out what I can (not started degree yet as doing conversion course)

I've been called and excused three times! Once when I was an employee and twice when I was self employed. I think it's a matter of ticking the right boxes on the exclusion form and putting together a convincing and coherent detailed statement as to the reasons why you need to be excused, keeping emotional out of it, staying purely factual and clearly explaining the genuine/provable detrimental effects of attending.

I am a lawyer (an old one & not a criminal lawyer) and I have always believed in jury trials. However, the on-line reactions to the recent killings of two civilians by ICE officers in the USA have given me cause to reflect on this.

I don’t know how many of you are aware of these killings, but the two victims were a woman in a car and, in a separate incident, a young man. Both were shot by ICE officers at fairly close range.

I watched the reactions to both incidents play out on Twitter. There were numerous videos of both incidents from various angles and these videos covered the period from the initial interactions until after the shootings. There may have been altered images shown but I believe the videos I saw were legitimate.

In any event, what I found deeply shocking was how posters viewed what they could see with their own two eyes through their political leanings. So, the Trump supporters “saw” the woman in the car use that car as a weapon and were certain that she drove it at the ICE officers, thus justifying being shot several times at close range. She most definitely did not, and I am sure that any independent witness seeing those videos would agree with me.

When a similar thing happened with the second victim, it dawned on me that we have entered a new period in our history, or perhaps we have regressed into what happened in the distant past. A significant proportion of our populations are either “for” a certain stance or “against” it, and that is affecting their sense of right and wrong and their understanding of who is guilty and who is not guilty. If the ICE officers involved are tried in relation to these incidents, doubtless the results will depend upon the political leanings of the jury members.

We are also at a stage where women’s rights are under attack - and if you don’t believe this, you are not paying sufficient attention. I am no longer satisfied that victims of rape have a realistic chance of obtaining justice in our courts.

I had an early view on that which was similar. The level of interrogation on SM according to political allegiance would make a fair trial difficult. People felt they knew the answer already, and you’d be hard pressed to find jurors ready to assess the evidence in court without political loyalty.

Maybe, it’s hard to know as court may be a bit different.

Although I generally think jury trials are a good idea, most crimes do not have that exposure online.

@LegallyBlondish

We are also at a stage where women’s rights are under attack - and if you don’t believe this, you are not paying sufficient attention. I am no longer satisfied that victims of rape have a realistic chance of obtaining justice in our courts.

I agree. I don't necessarily think it's just political persuasions either, nor racial opinions. I think another potential issue is age, and there seems to be a growing number of "older" people who seem to hate today's youngsters and have a kind of irrational attitude that whatever a younger person suffers, they've somehow "deserved" it, even though they know nothing about the young person in question. It's the "we had it worse in my day" attitude that we see a hell of a lot of here on MN and I'm starting to wonder if that attitude is also prevalent in other arenas too, such as a jury. I'd love to see the breakdown of the jury in this case, i.e. male to female ratio, and ages etc. It wouldn't surprise me if such "attitude" contributed towards the awful Rotherham (and other) rape/abuse cases where it seems that police, social services, etc., all seemed to think those poor young girls somehow "deserved" to be raped/gang raped so took no action to stop it nor prosecute the known perpetrators.

I suspect class prejudice was a big factor. The girls in Rotherham were seen as immoral 'chavs'.

It's also not really a wood. It's a few trees next to a supermarket car park and right near a tram stop. Kids go in there to vape/do balloons and snog etc. It's a few metres from the tram stop