Quote:
Originally Posted by VO #23
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.
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Well, I was thinking that there is no accountability from a sense that the worst that would happen is they lose their jobs. There is some kind of immunity that lawyers and judges, maybe everybody in the justice system that no other professions are able to escape from. Engineers, doctors, military can all be sued or go to jail for being incompetent or negligent. What are the consequences for those in the legal system?