Comment on How does employing a rapist not constitute an unsafe work environment for female employees?
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months agoImportant note: in the US people are not found “innocent,” they are found “not guilty.” It may seem pedantic but it’s important to remember that a lack of a conviction is not evidence that they didn’t commit a crime, only that a jury believed there was enough doubt in the evidence to decline to find them guilty.
This is especially important to remember in rape cases, where evidence is difficult for outsiders to determine and a trial result of “not guilty” doesn’t necessarily mean a rape didn’t happen or that the defendant didn’t commit it.
snooggums@kbin.social 9 months ago
If they didn't do it they get the same 'not guilty' verdict, so what is the recourse for someone who was falsely charged. I am specifically thinking of the US where there are a lot of black men falsely convicted of violent crimes they did not commit because of racist eye witness testimony and prosecutors who want higher conviction rates.
Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
A false accusation or conviction isn’t even necessarily because of ill intent from anyone involved (although let’s be real, cops almost always have ill intent); people can just be wrong about who raped them. Eye witness testimony is bad in a neutral setting and horrible in an emotionally charged setting, and if for some reason DNA evidence is unavailable then unfortunately victims are left with nothing but their (human, fallible) eyewitness testimony of what happened.
Intentional false accusation is a whole other ball game, and is already a crime.