Quote:
Originally Posted by Wormius
What happened to 4x4? Did you accidentally take an Elizabeth Fry Society pill? Maybe we should delve into her past to try to figure out why she would do something like this, and that
will absolve her of any sins.
If anything, she should be sentenced to his original sentence as a deterent to anybody else considering such actions, and then the judicial system should be examined to figure out how such a miscarriage could have happened.
I am interested in knowing what exactly happens when a judge wrongly convicts somebody based on flimsy testimony. Is anything done, or does it take 50 cases before anybody looks into it, like for example how medical examiners can be incompetent but their testimony is used send people to prison erroneously. There seems to be no accountability.
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If there was an error in law, the convicted can launch an appeal. It's not perfect by any means, but it is meant to provide some degree of judicial oversight.
Part of the problem with sexual assault crimes, including attempts, is that there often isn't any physical evidence and it becomes an issue of "he said-she said" with conflicting testimony at trial. A certain balance has to be struck here, which is very tricky: skew it too far in the favour of the accused, and you'll get rapists walking away from charges, and skew it too far in the favour of the complainant and you'll get wrongful convictions.
If I recall correctly from my 1L Criminal Law class, sexual assault has one of the highest acquittal rates (usually because the defence will smear the character of the complainant) as well as one of the lowest rates of reporting. A lot of guys (including some in this thread) think that it is fairly common for women to file a complaint with the police solely to ruin a man's life, but they'd be fairly surprised to learn that it actually is quite rare.
As someone alluded to earlier in this thread, I strongly believe that Canada's justice system generally does a good job of balancing issues like this. It's easy and often politically convenient to condemn Canada's system as "soft", but our justice system has really taken a long look at wrongful convictions after Milgaard and Morin. I would bet that on a per capita we have far fewer than in the U.S.