I strongly believe that 98% of the time, when a woman says she was raped, she was raped. This is consistent with the rate of false report for other crimes. However, in the 20% of rape cases that are stranger rapes, the woman could be certain of her identification of the perp and still be wrong a *huge* percentage of the time. And in the 80% of the rape cases that are acquaintance rape, until society recognizes that women have vastly less motivation to lie about having been raped than rapists have to lie about having raped someone, you are *always* going to have the asshats on the jury who think that because she had sex with him once he has a permanent lease on her pussy, or because she had sex with *anybody* once she was required to put out for him, or because she got drunk she deserved it, or she’s just a dirty liar because she’s a woman. So until misogyny is a thing of the past, men will always be acquitted of acquaintance rape because they’re just seen as more credible than women. And if men are acquitted of rapes they committed at higher rates than any other crime, criminalizing the women who attempt to get justice because they weren’t able to get justice would be a terrible blow to justice and a license for men to rape with impunity.

(BTW — this is ridiculous. Men commit EVERY CRIME THERE IS at higher rates than women, except child abuse, which they commit at higher rates in proportion to the amount of time they spend with kids but they spend so much less time that the actual rate for women is higher. (Well, and prostitution, but only because we don’t criminalize being a john, which is absurd. If johns were criminals too, then men would have much, much higher rates of prostitution-related criminality than women, although any given woman with prostitution offenses would have many more offenses on her record). If a man is a rapist, he is a criminal, and criminals lie; a rapist has much higher motivation to lie about not raping than a woman has to lie about being raped. Why don’t we as a society ever notice that 90% of the murderers are men, and most of the thieves, burglars and con artists are men, and take from that a lesson about the relatively credibility of a man and a woman when she says “he raped me” and he says “she totally wanted it?”)

Yes, there are some women who file false reports of rape, but this is such a trivial problem next to the huge, huge problem of men who rape and then lie and smear the women they raped in order to escape justice, it’s like you’re trying to swat a fly while the house is on fire. Unless we had a justice system where the women is presumptively believed unless a preponderance of the evidence suggests otherwise — and that would violate the tenet of “innocent until proven guilty” — then you can never assume that acquittal actually means innocence. So you could never prove that a woman filed a false report.

My position is no statute of limitations on rape. Period.

Your logic would mean that the statute of limitations for murders committed by non-strangers must be lowered.

If you were being consistant then any perjury or false report or statement related to any crime would have the same statute of limitations as the crime itself. To be consistant this would need to include men who commit perjury when they claim sex was consensual. The consequences of that would mean that a man wrongfully acquitted of rape could be convicted of perjury and sentenced as if he were found guilty of the rape charge without it being double jeopardy.

Yet you only focus on women who report being raped. You seem unaware that men have given false police reports, either implicating an innocent man for a crime he committed or reporting a crime which never happened.

If it is a misidentification then, no, the victim is not at all complicit. Once you open this door then all jurors who wrongly assume that a rapist is or might be innocent because of testimony which paints the defendant as a model citizen have chosen to be complicit to letting a rapist go free.

That would mean if a rapist who was wrongfully acquitted goes on to commit murder that all the jurors on the rape case are at least partially complicit in that murder.

And there should also be no statute of limitations on false reporting of rape if a lie sends an innocent man away for 20 years — only because the lie had its intended effect — the woman should not be exempt from proseuction if her lie is only outed long after she made it. Otherwise we are rewarding women who are good liars.

Has to work both ways.

Yes, people do make mistakes. A false ID isn’t the same as a maliciously false accusation which targets someone.

But the degree to which one acts, or says one is certain, is controlled. The degree to which

Marcelle, you said
This connection between genuine cases where the rapist got away with it and genuine cases where the wrong person was convicted is a false one. Therefore, this conclusion about what the witness said is faulty at a basic level and contributes to unfounded accusations being directed at rape victims who cooperated with law enforcement to the best of their ability.
But I don’t see the “because…” part. If you think it’s a false connection: why?

Are you saying that you think that people who misidentify their attacker are not AT ALL complicit? That they do not choose AT ALL when balancing their desire to see someone?

Cold cases have had physical evidence processed prior to the statute of limitations but that DNA result wasn’t properly filed before the statute of limitations expired. Other cases have only unprocessed DNA evidence and these cases can’t be kept alive via John Doe warrants.

I believe that in the US that once the statute of limitations expires on a case, there can never be a conviction in that case no matter what changes are made to a jurisdiction’s statute of limitations. To have this change would I believe be a constitutional issue.

The problem here is that there is no way to know all of the valid permutations in advance. With new advances in DNA detection a case which was originally viewed as having no forensic evidence may be reviewed using new technologies.

There is no statute of limitations on murder yet all of the same issues people use to justify having short statutes of limitations for rape cases apply to murder cases.

The burden of proof is on the prosecutor so the issues I’ve seen listed would make it harder to get a conviction, not easier.

Anyone know if retroactively changing a statute of limitations runs afoul of the prohibition on ex post facto laws or other due process limitations.

At risk of hijacking the intent of this thread — I’m getting heated up about all this — I don’t get the whole dance the patriarchy does around victim-blaming in what was supposed to be a progressively civilized civilization. Why is rape of a fellow soldier in a war zone during time of war not prosecuted as treason, since the perpetrator is knowingly weakening the combat effectiveness of the unit in the face of the enemy? (…other considerations, such as why there is an enemy, set aside for the moment.) Those who hold our common welfare in their meaty little hands — judges, court officers, lawyers, police officers, Federal agents, legislators, even pastors and priests — hopefully, usually, not perps themselves — almost universally horribly underestimate the impact of rape — except when it is in there own families — and even then, their estimation of the impact is usually self-referenced. It is one of our primary shames as a species that this is going on, and on, and on, with winks and nods — when we could all be working together to find a way to live beneath our vines and fig trees, “in peace and unafraid.”