Even The Wolf likely can't clean up Harvey Weinstein's pending troubles

They’re not.

 

His first case, the rape case, wasn’t prosecutorial misconduct.

 

You keep doing these little sidesteps ... "increased vigilance" is not the issue. Lowering the evidentiary hurdle for conviction/sanction is the issue.

 

You don't find letting the victim pick someone with an ironclad alibi out of a lineup to be problematic?

 

Yep. Otherwise it’s just Internet grandstanding. And patronizing. Your “default” has no real world application.

 

There are some high-profile instances of false accusations and incorrect convictions. (That is also true of other crimes, including murder, because justice is imperfect.) There are also thousands—tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?—of men who have escaped any kind of repercussion, legal or otherwise, for criminal sexual behaviour. (Can we agree on this? I feel like we can.) False convictions are obviously tragic. So are unpunished crimes. And at the moment, I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that there have been more false convictions than men who have escaped justice. So a correction—a balancing—seems fairly obviously needed, if what we're after here is a more perfect justice, and one way to make that happen is to have women feel that they will believed when they accuse someone of having done something terrible to them. It also seems like common decency.

 

Great. That’s been my point all evening.

Should we try sex crime cases or just issue convictions?

 

Let's add public opinion to the list. Criminal conviction, private sanction, public opinion turn.

Each should have their own standard in order to balance the interests in obtaining true positives against avoiding false positives. That is true for literally all crimes.

 

Dude, I would rather shit barbed wire than engage you on this subject.

 

Lowering the hurdle is a method for increasing vigilance.

I’m also for clarifying and standardizing legal definitions across the board.

 

Exactly right. If the person was exonerated, you claim it is an example of a false accusation easily uncovered even though some of the examples raised weren't easy at all.

If the person wasn't exonerated, we don't know about it. Damn convenient.

 

Women are to be believed. OK.

“Balancing” necessitates some faulty convictions. Got it.

Should we try sex crimes at all? If so, why? They are extraordinarily hard to prosecute, by nature, and society is better off, on balance, absorbing the low number of faulty convictions than it is absorbing unpunished sex crimes. Why try the cases?