Background:
I read that about 4% of rape accusations result in convictions. A small number result in any jail, and most are ruled indeterminable after a short conversation with the police. The proof beyond a reasonable doubt standard lets many rapists hunt freely (although it also protects the innocent).
This thread is more about whether this would deter most rapists, not so much whether it is fair. Proposed Solution
If someone is accused, and we know they were in the same apartment alone, and it is credible but can’t be proven either way, they get 7-90 days in jail, with work release, and no publicly searchable record. Only the police have an internal record shared with other police departments. No one else knows about it, unless that person decides to tell people. The person’s life is not ruined. There is no trial besides the police investigation and formula and some discretion.
The more men his accuser accused, the shorter his sentence. The more women accused him before, the longer. The more believable her story, the longer. The longer she waits to report it, the shorter the sentence. The whole network of info is available at any trial.
Reasoning
We don’t want to ruin someone’s life on one accusation. Even missing work could do that. The way you treat cancer is you cut out obvious big cancer, and then you use chemo or radiation therapy that hits the cancer much more than the body cells. This jail time would hit every rapist, but only a tiny number of innocent people. The innocent could survive it and would know they would not get hit again, whereas the rapists would get hit every time.
Not just any woman can put a guy in jail. It has to be one who he trusted enough to deliberately take or go home with, and her story must seem credible even though not provable after police give both a chance to explain themselves. It has to be a location and situation where she can credibly say she felt fear. They will still add other non-fear accusations to the record to see if a trail emerges, but those don’t automatically result in jail.
The question then is whether the jail time would discourage many rapists. What is your guess?
Would it make feel victims feel at all vindicated? The goal is determent, not justice.
Didn’t realize that "pragmatic " was a synonym for depriving a person of freedom without due process. Oh, my!
So a girl is angry because her boyfriend dumped her. She accuses him of rape. They were, of course, alone together in a room many, many times. Jail time for him!
You need to take a constitutional law class once you get to university.
Currently they expel men just on the word of women. I thought a jail stay with 10-hour work release and no record would be less harmful to the accused than being expelled and having his full name and picture in several online articles about his alleged rape.
Story cliffs:
A woman was in a 3 month relationship with a football player. She says it was mostly consensual sex, but there were several separate non-consensual sexual events too during that time period. He denied the non-consensual events. Some she says happened with the 3 of them there. The school said her story sounds credible, and that is enough to expel them.
Since their contact info is not given, no lawyers can contact them. I know lawyers who are looking for such students. Since the former players are likely poor, I doubt they bothered to call any lawyers. So, they, like most accused, are isolated and don’t know how to fight back. The rest of us get to be in fear, seeing their names online and hoping it does not happen to us.
What solution do you propose?
If 5% of women willing to falsely accuse, and 5% of men are willing to rape, then it is conceivable that 50% of rape accusations are false, even though 95% of women would never falsely accuse. Also, the 1 in 4 statistic is from a 500 person sample in New York, on the other side of the country from Boise State, yet it is used as an excuse here to be harsh on the accused.
Also I’m past the editing period so I’ll comment again–
Your lack of concern for what your “pragmatic” plans do to innocent people (glad you’ve moved from fines to jail time of up to THREE MONTHS…because that makes sense) is incongruous with your stated anxiety over being falsely accused. You cracked a tooth and left school because you were afraid of that happening. How would you deal with jail time? Wouldn’t that be ten times worse? Or is everything okay until it happens to you? No worries, the innocent people will shrug off being stigmatized and missing three months of work or school. Right.
If 5% of the men are willing to rape and 5% of women are willing to file false accusations, we should do a lottery, like the Shirley Jackson story, and randomly select 5% of each gender’s population of the relevant age range and toss 'em in jail. Why bother about facts, trials, due process?
Do you not know that many rapists are physically violent men? So, exactly how many women are you trying to get killed? The easiest way around your theory that the real rapists get caught every time is to make sure there is no accuser. It would take every such rapist about 1 second to figure this out.
@ClassicRockerDad
It was certainly worth your while to read this thread. It must be the first time in months @romanigypsyeyes and I have been on the same side of something.
This thread is one of the few times people have actually have stood up for something stated within the Constitution. I also agree with romanigypsyeyes, which is also a rare occurrence! 8-}
@Traveller2013, in many states every single picture of every single person who even sits in a holding cell WAITING for charges to be filed has their picture plastered all over the web in offshore websites. You think there is any FREE card for false accusation…there is NOT. You seriously need to understand rights that every single person who is a citizen of this country have…and learn to cherish that. It’s bad enough that offshore crooks and idiots are allowed to impact personal lives let alone disturbed US citizens using their personal issues to cause harm to others. If you are suffering from something that may have occurred in your past, I highly suggest you see at a minimum the free resources that are available and talk through your trauma with someone. I have no desire to search through your posts to determine if you are a kid or a parent.
