Get cracking on that constitutional amendment, then.

Instead, I have said that a certain class of evidence should be awarded a particular class of credibility, such that a jury should require a specific reason to doubt it in order to disregard the evidence in reaching a verdict.

This is precisely requireing that the defendant prove his/her innocence. By making the victim’s testimony presumptively true, you shift the burden to the defendant.

I don’t know that there’s an answer for “how do we fix this” when it comes to celebrity cases.

But one feminist rape researcher, Mary Koss, has been working on applying an alternative to the justice system for rape cases, centered less on convicting the guilty than on trying to give the victim a sense of acknowledgment and closure. It’s called “restorative justice”; I wrote about it on my blog here. It’s not the right thing for all rape cases, but then again, neither is our current system.

Its best to have sympathy for the accuser and withhold condemnation for the accused until a trial or at least more than an accusation is known in circumstances like these.

Well said, Azalea.

The solution to rape culture leading some jurors to hold stupid / misogynistic attitudes towards rape is to work on eliminating those attitudes, not to destroy due process. The solution to social biases is not reworking the justice system so that certain classes of defendants must prove their own innocence.

Two points here. Firstly, it’s just fine to say “we must work on eliminating those attitudes”, as long as you’re not one of the many hundreds of thousands of women who will be raped n the mean time and fail to see justice done in the meantime, who will be forced to relive their experience in court and yet not find any closure because of it.

Secondly, you have (deliberately?) misrepresented what I am suggesting here. I have at no point suggested that “a certain class of defendants must prove their own innocence”. Instead, I have said that a certain class of evidence should be awarded a particular class of credibility, such that a jury should require a specific reason to doubt it in order to disregard the evidence in reaching a verdict.

That is to say, a jury should be required to be able to say clearly “this point is what causes us to have reasonable doubts about the evidence given by the alleged victim.” Or, as I originally worded it, a reason that compels one to doubt.

For most witnesses in a criminal case, that appears to be the basic standard because the evidence is given under oath – otherwise we might as well go down the road to complete Cartesian doubt, uncertain of anything except our own existence!

Remember, for a rape case even to reach criminal trial, a number of highly-trained professionals will already have assessed the accuser as a credible witness. It is because of these trained professionals that many reported rapes never reach trial (bear in mind also, that some of those professionals will, despite their training, still harbour the rape culture prejudices mentioned before). If the alleged victim is not seen as a credible witness, then in most cases there is no case to present to the court in the first place.

Typically if a woman bears physical visible scars fromt he rape, there is no question of if or who, we take her word. But when time has gone by, evidence is lost, scars are healed and we are only to believe in the word of a stranger, many get skeptical. That skepticism and the unnecessary lies of past that cause it is what hurt so many rape victims and scars us all over again.

Its best to have sympathy for the accuser and withhold condemnation for the accused until a trial or at least more than an accusation is known in circumstances like these.

Which is _my whole point_. Cheers for demonstrating it so neatly.

How is that in any way inconsistent with what I said, which was that he raped an unconscious woman in a park? She is a woman. They were in a park. She was unconscious. He raped her. Which bit do you disagree with?