Surely you can't be serious. If anything, this demonstrates EXACTLY what you're arguing against. A woman cries rape (with ZERO evidence mind you) and you have an entire legal system that caters to her, and throws a completely innocent man in jail for 4 years of his life. Those are the facts.....nowhere in there did anyone DOUBT her. People were all too ready to discount HIS story, simply because nobody WANTED to believe it.
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This is horrible for the guy but the sadder part is that it probably makes women even less likely to report being raped.
Id match rather a guilty person get of free than an innocent person go to jail. I think if this happen the guy should be able to sue jurors, judges, etc. If people are held accountable it is unlikely stuff like this happens.
Although this story is horrible it doesn't change the fact that many women are very reluctant to report being raped for multiple reasons including being looked at as liars. I don't want to make up numbers but I can almost assure you the number of rapes that go unreported are far higher than the number of innocent men convicted of rape.
The fact that he was tried shows that this doesn't fly in the face of "innocent until proven guilty." I agree this guy got the shaft but I don't think we can presume that he was completely railroaded just on evidence of this woman. What it sounds like to me was that there was corroborating evidence and not just the word of the woman. Granted that that evidence ended up being wrong without actually sitting in the court I don't think we can say that this was a railroad from the beginning.
Exactly... especially date rape. Which happens a lot more than anyone realizes. You people who think I over react have no idea how widespread the problem really is and how stories like this really make it more difficult to prosecute criminals who feel like it's not wrong to force someone into something they don't want. And it's not just females that are hesitant to report it... guys are even LESS likely to report it because no one ever believes a guy doesn't want it to happen. Maybe I am too close to the situation to think rationally, but I really think people are uneducated about this particular crime and it makes me angry that a female even tries to lie about experiencing that sort of violation.
The act of having a trial doesn't completely satisfy "innocent until proven guilty". One must then also be proven guilty, if they are guilty. Neither of us have all the facts, but as best can be implied from the article, there was no evidence. It was a woman who said she was raped. So the guy wasn't proven guilty, he was assumed guilty. Few systems are full-proof, but our legal and judicial system should certainly strive to be. Acknowledging the fact that many woman are afraid to report rape for various reasons, it's really difficult to understand the contention that the bigger harm here is that to raped women, as opposed to the man who lost 4 years of his life and the legal system that put him behind bars??
You're making a ton of assumptions here of how the case played out. And it is only one example of a rape case wrongly convicted. This travesty does not solely occur in rape cases either.
I understand everything you're saying, and I'm fairly certain that being raped is probably one of the most horrifying things a person can go through. But, that doesn't change the fact that, in today's society, it is probably FAR easier for a woman to claim rape and get an innocent man thrown in jail than it is for an innocent person to defend themselves successfully AGAINST the charges, given the same amount of evidence. I just think people are more readily predisposed to discount everything a man says when it comes to this sensitive topic, and I don't think that's right. As harrowing an ordeal it might be for a woman who just got raped, facts should ALWAYS be checked, and I'm afraid that DAs are more interested in getting results than they are in finding the truth.
My assumptions are based solely on what the article has stated. If things were left out, there's nothing I can do about that. The article however, painted a picture of a woman who was looking for sympathy and attention, and decided the best course of action was to accuse a man of doing something so horrible, that it got him convicted to 20 years in prison. I understand that there are FAR more cases of rape that go unreported than there are of innocent people going to jail.....but the unreported cases are just that. Unreported. There's nothing that prosecutors and juries can do about those cases, unfortunately. However, there is ABSOLUTELY something they can do about the cases that are in front of them. Due diligence and fact-finding are the least they can do before they decide to believe one person over another, and I'm afraid that the legal system has abandoned that. I'm not saying that people should automatically discount what a potential victim is saying....I'm just saying instead of making snap-judgments based on conjecture, and eyewitness accounts, do a little more digging. That's all.
She should get 20 years. This is a pretty sad story, she took advantage of our justice system and of negative stereotypes of men to land that poor dude in jail.
