So often when people bring up false convictions, they talk about maliciousness as if that is the only cause. The implication is that those who report crimes are the ones mostly to blame for false convictions. Nowhere does this belief seem to be stronger than when discussing rape.
The perceived solution to this problem is almost always a call for lax enforcement of rape laws or a removal of rape victim shield laws. If only we’d stop protecting alleged rape victims, no innocent men would be sent to prison.
But Injustice Anywhere has a post about faulty assumptions about the forensics of how to determine whether a fire was the result of arson. Those assumptions are now in question and may have led to thousands of false convictions. Maybe even the execution of the innocent.
That means that the assumptions about wrongful rape convictions must be thrown out and replaced by the data of how wrongful convictions really happen.
Blaming the victim might be easy, but easy isn’t always accurate.
(crossposted at my blog, Abyss2hope)
This post is a feminist, pro-feminist and feminist-friendly only thread.
If you aren’t sure what that means, please read this before commenting.
There have been several high profile cases in Canada in the last few years where men have been exonerated for murders by new DNA evidence, largely through the efforts of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted.
In all the cases there was either direct wrongdoing by prosecutors and police, forensics and lineups designed to arrive at the answer the authorities wanted, or incompetent defense lawyers and often all three.
Have there been any documented cases of wrongful rape convictions based solely on a women maliciously lying about the incident ?
What’s interesting about bringing up death row incidents is the victim, by definition, cannot be bringing a false accusation because she is dead. MRAs who point to these cases are hurting their case that there a lot of women out there who are lying about being raped, since there is no doubt that the victim has been raped and murdered in these cases.
I just completed a couple of blog searches to see what people are saying about what may be a massive injustice related to arson cases and found a surprising lack of discussion and lack of emotion.
Those who proclaim on feminists blogs that they are against false prosecution of the innocent because no innocent person should be punished, and not because they don’t care about the problem of rape, are not responding to this with similar passion.
I find that quite revealing.
Why are those who when talking about rape say that it’s better that 20 guilty men go free than to have one innocent man found guilty so quiet on this issue?
For what it’s worth, I believe that it’s better for 20 guilty arsonists go free than to have one innocent person found guilty of arson.
I pretty much believe this across the board, regardless of crime.
I believe that punishment of the innocent is much worse (at a 1:1 ratio, anyway) for our society than non-punishment of the guilty.
I don’t, however, believe that punishment of the guilty comes primarily from false reports or lying victims. I think it comes primarily from half-assed police work and ambitious prosecutors. Hanlon’s razor and all that.
False convictions make me so sad and sick. False capital punishment, even worse. To suffer through the death of a loved one, and then to be accused, tried, convicted and sentenced for it – I just can’t imagine the horror.
I don’t want to see any innocent people sent to prison, and I want all the innocent people in prison to be released. But none of that is about lax enforcement. I’ve been reading John Grisham’s An Innocent Man. Incompetence, childlike faith in forensics despite the scientific rigor, and the tendency of police and prosecutors to become more convinced they’ve got the right guy, even when more exculpatory evidence is produced. None of it is about malice.
Kaethe, you make a good point about lax enforcement. When it comes to arson, few people would advocate for simply assuming that all fires are accidental unless someone is caught in the act of setting a fire. That response increases the arson-related danger since it would allow most arsonists to be safe from prosecution.
An important difference which makes your analogy problematic is that a rape cases often turn on eyewitness identifcation while arson cases are much less dependent on them. As such, incorrect accusations of rape tend to be tied to either mistaken identifcation of the eyewitness or (we hope not) lying by the eyewitness. False accusations of arson aren’t nearly as eyewitness dependent, so they tend to be based on non-eyewitness mistakes or fraud. So showing that a forensic technique was mistaken doesn’t implicate (one way or another) the eyewitness cases.
Important caveat: not ALL rape cases are eyewitness cases. Some aren’t. But there are many more rape cases where the key evidence is from an eyewitness than arson cases where the key evidence is from an eyewitness.
I tend to suspect that a fruitful area of inquiry would be to explore the well known fact that eyewitness testimony recognizing strangers is often unreliable. It is very possible (likely I would even hope) that pure identification mistake is at the root of many false rape accusations.
(Minor) Your “read this” in the last sentence is not linked… you might want to edit it in.
Admin: link fixed.
Sebastian, problems with eyewitness testimony aren’t unique to rape cases. If there are problems in ensuring that the right stranger is put on trial for rape those problems also exist in other types of crimes. Yet many people only seem to care about these problems when it comes to rape.
We just had a case here in the Chicago area of a man being released from jail after 8 years incarceration because the single eyewitness had made a mistaken identification.
“Sebastian, problems with eyewitness testimony aren’t unique to rape cases. If there are problems in ensuring that the right stranger is put on trial for rape those problems also exist in other types of crimes. ”
I’m confused. You are completely right, and that is why I brought it up–I think that is the useful area of comparison as opposed to comparing a forensic science issue to an eyewitness identification. I’m confused, because you seem to be taking a tone as if you were disagreeing with me.
Sebastian, I’m not comparing arson to rape because of how false convictions happen, but because of the variation in the way people respond to possible false convictions based on the type of crime involved.
Many people who are rabid about possible false rape convictions become apathetic about false convictions — including convictions that result in executions — when the crime is not a sex crime.
Where is the passion and drive to free those wrongly convicted of non-sex crimes like arson? Where’s the effort to raise awareness about non-sex crime injustices?
Many people who are rabid about possible false rape convictions become apathetic about false convictions — including convictions that result in executions — when the crime is not a sex crime.
Hm. That’s an interesting assertion. I’d like to see you back it up.
Where is the passion and drive to free those wrongly convicted of non-sex crimes like arson? Where’s the effort to raise awareness about non-sex crime injustices?
IIRC there are organizations that are heavily involved in doing just that, generally concentrating their efforts on crimes that carry the death penalty.
RonF, are you asking for links to every blogger who rants about false rape charges/convictions but who mentions nothing about other false charges/convictions? The list would be far too long to include here.
Other than the Innocence Project what organizations are heavily involved in trying to free those wrongly convicted of non-sex crimes?