Ask any Western man which he’d rather be charged with, murder or rape, and watch how many would rather be accused of killing another human being. After all, not only will an acquitted accused murderer live down the stigma more easily, he’s more likely to get a fair trial.
In the name of ‘fairness’ (which sounds an awful lot like ‘pandering to feminist dogmas’), the legal barriers to conviction in rape cases have been progressively (in every sense of the word) lowered. Some would clearly wish to go further: if the ‘believe women’ of activists and politicians is taken seriously, every accusation will ipso facto become a conviction. Why bother with trials at all?
The process itself is punishment enough for the accused, anyway. No matter how obviously unlikely the accusation.
A tradie found not guilty of raping his girlfriend while she was in the middle of a yoga routine faces a $100,000 legal bill after the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions appealed a costs decision by a judge who blasted the prosecution as “doomed to fail”.
After a jury took just 25 minutes to acquit the man, District Court judge Craig Everson SC found the DPP brought the case despite there being no reasonable prospect of conviction, and took the unusual step of awarding him costs.
In other words, the accusation was so obviously false that – for once – the false accuser was going to be held to account.
Enter the feminist activists.
However, last week the office of the DPP challenged the costs ruling by Judge Everson – himself a former ODPP Crown prosecutor – in a move the acquitted man’s lawyers described as unjust and unprecedented.
The DPP in question has long been the focus of claims of over-zealousness in pursuing obviously false rape accusations.
The dispute follows a string of cases in which judges have accused the office of DPP Sally Dowling of running baseless sexual assault prosecutions that have no hope of securing a conviction.
The long-running feud is understood to reflect concern among some judges the ODPP prefers to take a “believe the victim” stance and push a matter before a jury, rather than rejecting impossible cases.
Well, they want us to ‘believe women’. This is what that means in practice.
The judge awarded the man a costs certificate, which can be done only in cases where, if the prosecution had been in possession of evidence of “all the relevant facts” at the start, it would not have been reasonable to institute the proceedings […]
The acquitted man’s lawyer, Maggie Sten, of George Sten & Co Criminal Lawyers, told the Australian it was shocking – and, in her experience, unprecedented – for the DPP to challenge a costs order in a case where a judge had so clearly found the prosecution wanting.
The young man was “absolutely devastated because he can’t afford to fight it, but this needs to be fought because otherwise it could become a precedent”, Ms Sten said.
“What the DPP is doing in this case is pathetic. It’s just so stupid, because the basis for a cost order is discretionary, and this judge clearly explained why he exercised his discretion. I think they’re blatantly wrong, from beginning to end.”
And expensive for taxpayers. As Sten points out, a single day in court ‘for one of these fiascos’ is going to cost the taxpayer at least a quarter of a million dollars.
Not all women lie about rape, but some do. It’s a simple fact of human nature: people lie, men and women. Every failed rape charge is, logically, a lie. Likely, many fail because of the simple difficulty of proving the charges. But who said securing convictions is meant to be easy? Isn’t the whole point that convictions for serious crimes face a high hurdle of proof?
Perhaps if a few of the more obvious liars were prosecuted for perjury if their accusations fail, then we wouldn’t see so many baseless prosecutions.
