"Why rape cases should not be subject to reasonable doubt"

Article here. Excerpt:

'Disturbingly low conviction rates have many explanations, but one contributing factor is the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard of evidence employed in criminal cases. This standard requires that the jury not have any reasonable doubts about the defendant’s guilt in order to convict. Doubts they have that are frivolous or hypothetical should be put aside.
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As it stands, the legal system is weighted unfairly in favour of perpetrators of sexual assault. In addition to sending out a powerful expression of intolerance for gender violence, a lower standard of proof can decrease these harms by reducing the likelihood of false acquittal. Reasonable doubt is inappropriate, but what standard would do better?

Of the standards commonly employed in law, only the ‘preponderance of the evidence’ standard has been used on a consistent basis to decide cases of sexual violence, albeit in civil trials. Indeed, given the high probability of false acquittal, civil trials have increasingly become a first port of call for female victims of sexual violence in the US. Rather than calling for the absence of doubt, this standard judges a case on what the evidence leads one to believe most strongly. If a woman’s testimony provides a stronger reason to believe that she did not give consent, this should be enough.

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... until one day, one of them gets falsely-accused.

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If we're going to suspend "reasonable doubt" for rape cases, why not all criminal cases?

For example, if a man or the police accuse the accuser of filing a false report of rape, shouldn't we use the lower "preponderance of evidence" standard to judge her guilt?

We all know why this lowering of the standard is being proposed: because allegedly women are being harmed by the higher standard. And if a woman is being hurt, why, something must be done about it. Better to have 100 innocent men go to jail than to have even one guilty go free. In the end, this is about special rules for women because women are such special people the rules shouldn't apply to women, including the rule that requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

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Hell, why even bother with trials for male defendants at all?
Any man accused of anything should just be sentenced and sent to prison. Justice be damned.[/s]

The sad thing is that this is actually just an example of Poe's law. Eventually feminists will be pushing for men accused of crimes to be denied even a chance to profess their innocence.

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In the 18th C TPTB undertook as serious study the question of "Why do men rebel?" European monarchs felt that if they could identify the causes of insurrection they could head them off. That study was partly responsible for the various bloodless revolutions that occured that century wherein absolute or near-absolute monarchs voluntarily ceded absolute power and transferred much of their authority to some kind of elected gov'ts.

They concluded in their investigations that men did not predictably rebel even when their vital interests were threatened. For example, compelled military service threatens men's vital interests yet most men comply with it. No, they discovered that it was outrages to their sense of justice that most reliably compelled men to revolt. Thus even economically secure men could join rebellions, even men of status were known to join popular rebel causes. In US history, the Prussian (Austrian) Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben risked loss of his status and title by helping train Washington's men at Valley Forge and penning the US's first book of military regulations. Arguably the US would not have won the Revolutionary War without his leadership. Von Steuben simply believed the colonists were right to rebel.

Once things get bad enough for men, they will rebel. Alas, since ppl of both sexes dismiss men's complaints when proferred verbally, inevitably men must become violent to win back their rights. History repeats itself. Sadly it will probably do so in this case too. Happily, we are far from that time at this point. But check back in 30 or 50 years.

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