8 ms·

I would argue that the recent wave of "guilty until proven innocent" and "guilty when accused, and more guilty if accused by more people" is even worse for publ

I would argue that the recent wave of "guilty until proven innocent" and "guilty when accused, and more guilty if accused by more people" is even worse for public policy. Due process does indeed exist for a good reason, one of which is to prevent a situation where mere accusations have the power to destroy lives. Does this mean I think any or all of the recent high-profile cases are innocent? Oh shit, wait, it doesn't matter what I think unless I'm on a jury or in a position to hire or fire the person who is accused. It's easy to feel smugly righteous about a lot of these cases, but the reality is that it does matter if innocent people are caught up in the hysteria. I'm not quite sure when the media collectively decided that it was a good idea to promote abandoning the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," but the long-term consequences of this are likely to play out in very unexpected and ugly ways that will affect most or all of us in areas that have nothing to do with sexual harassment.

greglindahl 9y ago
Society has not abandoned innocent until proven guilty in court cases. That's where that standard applies.
- jeffdavis 9y ago
  Courts do have stricter standards for admission of evidence and verdicts. But the basic innocent-by-default is a general principle that should apply pretty much everywhere. And there should be consistency and standards in media reporting of allegations, and for HR decisions.
  - geofft 9y ago
    The thing about innocent-by-default is that false accusations are also a serious crime with serious penalties (for good reason), and if you believe that the accused is affirmatively innocent, you have to believe that the accused is guilty. The reason that courts, specifically, do not have this paradox is that "innocent" simply means "we do not have the evidence to justify using the extraordinary punishment powers reserved to the government alone against this person". Yes, there's such a thing as getting a court to declare you affirmatively innocent, but usually they say "not guilty," which is an important philosophical distinction. So a court can very well decide that a person has not been proven guilty of their crime, and that their accuser has not been proven guilty of malice, either. But humans don't work like that. When we think "innocent," we don't think "I have insufficient data," we think "they didn't do it". It is arguably a flaw in human thinking, but it's a flaw we have to live with and work with. And a world in which all who accuse people of sexual harassment are effectively guilty-until-proven-innocent in the court of public opinion isn't a great world, either.
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      > But humans don't work like that. Sure they do. There are three options, just like there are in court. We punish the accused, or we punish the accuser for lying, or we don't punish either of them. Not punishing anyone is what we do when we don't have convincing evidence one way or the other. That's just consistency -- you don't punish the accused without proof just like you don't punish the accuser without proof. When there is no way to know the truth, it's completely valid to do nothing.
    - solidsnack9000 9y ago
      ...if you believe that the accused is affirmatively innocent, you have to believe that the accused is guilty. This is not strictly or even practically true, but you acknowledge that later. When the defendant prevails in a court case, we don’t turn around and lock up the plaintiff. You go on to say: ...a world in which all who accuse people of sexual harassment are effectively guilty-until-proven-innocent in the court of public opinion isn’t a great world, either. If you replace “sexual harassment” with any other accusation, do you still feel the same way? With regards to the flaw in human thinking you mention — do we have to work with it for all kinds of accusations, or is it specifically a problem for sexual harassment?
      - ggg9990 9y ago
        False accusation is a particular problem for sex crimes because the legality of the act depends on consent. You can't explain away a dead body saying "he asked me to murder him." But you can explain away evidence of sexual intercourse by saying "it was consensual."
        solidsnack9000 9y ago
        In the absence of evidence that indicates non-consent — signs of a struggle, injuries, presence of date rape drugs — evidence of sexual intercourse doesn’t need to be explained. Actually, even in the presence of clear evidence of non-consent, evidence of sexual intercourse doesn’t need to be explained — it’s the evidence that creates the impression of an assault that needs to be explained. It seems wrong to take evidence of sexual intercourse alone, and a statement by a plaintiff claiming that the sexual intercourse was non-consensual, as a basis for a conviction. That amounts to just deciding to believe one side and not the other. If that what’s happening, why look for any evidence at all?
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    So, for example, if a business in my neighborhood has a sign that says "No hippies, Jews, or N?????s", I should continue to shop there until they get convicted by a court?
    - solidsnack9000 9y ago
      If you have concrete evidence, that’s enough. What if the situation was, that someone told you they saw this sign one time? Would that be enough not to shop there?
      - jeffdavis 9y ago
        It's probably worth asking the owner whether it's true, and if so, let them know that's why you don't want to shop there any more. Just trusting an allegation alone and walking away silently seems both less fair and less effective. Also, sometimes you find out more to the story. Maybe the owner is very old, and it happened a long time ago, and he's since changed his attitude dramatically. Maybe you forgive him or maybe not, but then you at least put it in perspective. In any case, certainly don't repeat the unsubstantiated allegation to others.
    - jeffdavis 9y ago
      Of course not. You can make your own judgement based on the evidence you have. I am standing up for the presumption of innocence when the evidence is lacking or in conflict.
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  Innocent until proven guilty (“the one who asserts must prove”) applies in courts because it is a fair standard — it’s not a standard limited to courts. When we are in the position of having to determine if someone did something wrong, and what to do about it, we are faced with the problem of determining what is just and administering justice. The same basic rules apply to us, because we have the same basic problem: not allowing the tribunal or committee or even the court of public opinion to become another source of injustice.
forapurpose 9y ago
I think these comments are exaggerated and misrepresent the situation, and no basis in fact is provided: > the recent wave of "guilty until proven innocent" ... > the media collectively decided that it was a good idea to promote abandoning the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," The stories I've read have done a good and careful job of corroborating and verifying their stories. Those that don't are subject to massive libel lawsuits like the one that shut down Gawker. > smugly righteous > hysteria This is name-calling, which doesn't add to the discussion, and it's against nobody in particular, which makes it meaningless. Who, by name, is smugly righteous or hysterical? And do those people affect us? Are they representative or influential somehow?
- amputect 9y ago
  > The stories I've read have done a good and careful job of corroborating and verifying their stories. There are several good recent examples of this: - the project veritas employee trying to shop a false abortion story to the post - the schumer accusation that was shown to be falsified - weinstein's fake accuser that was planted by his own team to discredit investigations When people come with false information, it gets found and reported on, because journalists do their due dilligence. News organizations are really careful about this kind of thing, because screwing up here is a really good way to get your entire org badly burned.
  - grandmczeb 9y ago
    News organizations aren’t immune from getting it wrong though. The Duke lacrosse case and Brian Banks are two prominent examples.
    - eigenstuff 9y ago
      The Duke Lacrosse case wasn't uncovered by journalists, though.
      - grandmczeb 9y ago
        The reporters involved ignored massive inconsistencies in the accuser’s story and twisted facts to advance a narrative - the opposite of due diligence. Wether they uncovered the story or not isn’t relevant.
skookumchuck 9y ago
The Duke Lacrosse case was a fine example of wrecking the lives of the accused, despite eventually being found completely innocent.
- rayiner 9y ago
  And how many countervailing stories are there of womens’ careers being destroyed because the wouldn’t go along with sexual advances from superiors?
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    I'm interested. Produce one that was on the scale of what happened to the Lacrosse players.
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      That's the problem with not only this issue but many others like environmental pollution -- crimes are very hard to detect when the victims are numerous, and the damage is non-public. Needless to say there are many women who have been murdered for rejecting sexual advances.
    - evgen 9y ago
      Harvey Weinstein. More people suffered and to a greater extent, more money involved. If you didn't have the ability to Google up the Duke case you could not name a single person involved, but would have no problem naming some of Harvey's victims.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - iamnothere 9y ago
      I think it's disingenuous to claim that actual victims of harassment haven't suffered as much as the Duke lacrosse players. As another commenter has pointed out, I'm sure there are cases where the situation has escalated to actual murder to silence the victim. Just as lynching has probably resulted from unfounded accusations in the past. People are awful! Why do people have to take political sides rather than supporting actual truth and justice, regardless of who "wins" a particular case? It's infuriating.
rayiner 9y ago
Talk of “innocent until proven guilty” is misplaced. In a workplace context, you’re not judging guilt and innocence. You’re resolving a civil dispute, where nobody’s freedom is at stake, only property. Even in courts the standard used for civil disputes isn’t “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” but a mere “more likely than not” conclusion. I’m a civil litigator. We never talk about “innocent until proven guilty.” Imagine you’re in a dispute with someone over where your property line is drawn. If someone presents an affidavit attesting to facts that show the property line is actually five feet into what you thought was your yard, and you have no facts to the contrary, guess what: you’re losing summary judgment. Civil standards give the defendant a very thin benefit of the doubt. Your accuser’s story just has to be a hair more believable than the other person’s alibi. Workplace harassment cases are emphatically not like criminal cases. A false negative (acquiting a guilty person) usually has no direct negative effect in most criminal cases. A murder victim doesn’t much care if the state incorrectly acquits her murderer. Workplace harassment is more like the land boundary case. Somebody gets the land; a false negative means one party has been wrongly deprived of her land while the other party had received an undeserved windfall. In a workplace, likewise, an accuser who is telling the truth but is not believed is wrongfully forced to either continue working with her harasser, or to give up valuable career opportunities. A false negative (failing to believe a truthful accuser), is pretty much as bad as a false positive.
- MaxBarraclough 9y ago
  What's your opinion of Title IX? (Forgive my assumption that you practice in the USA.) My understanding is that it has college campuses hearing criminal cases. (I'm British, and only learned about this yesterday.)
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    That’s a misunderstanding of Title IX. Under the Obama administration’s guidelines, incidents of sexual harassment and assault on university campuses were treated as violations of the victim’s civil rights. They were required to give a hearing if a purported victim came forward with an accusation to determine, using the “preponderance of evidence” standard, whether the alleged incident occurred, and if so, to discipline the student responsible under the university’s code of conduct. This might take the form of counseling, probation, suspension, expulsion, or whatever. The Trump administration relaxed the requirement that universities adhere to the “preponderance of evidence” standard. This is all, for incidents where a crime occurred, in parallel to the usual criminal court system. No university Title IX panel is trying criminal cases.
DanBC 9y ago
> Due process does indeed exist for a good reason, one of which is to prevent a situation where mere accusations have the power to destroy lives. No, that's untrue. Innocent until proven guilty is only about the state's power to impose punishment. Innocent until proven guilty is used for even the most mild criminal offences where long term repercussions are unlikely. A person's life can be destroyed in a civil trial where balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt, is used. See all the parents who've been prevented from contact with their children because courts used balance of probabilities.

greglindahl 9y ago

Society has not abandoned innocent until proven guilty in court cases. That's where that standard applies.

jeffdavis 9y ago
Courts do have stricter standards for admission of evidence and verdicts. But the basic innocent-by-default is a general principle that should apply pretty much everywhere. And there should be consistency and standards in media reporting of allegations, and for HR decisions.
- geofft 9y ago
  The thing about innocent-by-default is that false accusations are also a serious crime with serious penalties (for good reason), and if you believe that the accused is affirmatively innocent, you have to believe that the accused is guilty. The reason that courts, specifically, do not have this paradox is that "innocent" simply means "we do not have the evidence to justify using the extraordinary punishment powers reserved to the government alone against this person". Yes, there's such a thing as getting a court to declare you affirmatively innocent, but usually they say "not guilty," which is an important philosophical distinction. So a court can very well decide that a person has not been proven guilty of their crime, and that their accuser has not been proven guilty of malice, either. But humans don't work like that. When we think "innocent," we don't think "I have insufficient data," we think "they didn't do it". It is arguably a flaw in human thinking, but it's a flaw we have to live with and work with. And a world in which all who accuse people of sexual harassment are effectively guilty-until-proven-innocent in the court of public opinion isn't a great world, either.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > But humans don't work like that. Sure they do. There are three options, just like there are in court. We punish the accused, or we punish the accuser for lying, or we don't punish either of them. Not punishing anyone is what we do when we don't have convincing evidence one way or the other. That's just consistency -- you don't punish the accused without proof just like you don't punish the accuser without proof. When there is no way to know the truth, it's completely valid to do nothing.
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    ...if you believe that the accused is affirmatively innocent, you have to believe that the accused is guilty. This is not strictly or even practically true, but you acknowledge that later. When the defendant prevails in a court case, we don’t turn around and lock up the plaintiff. You go on to say: ...a world in which all who accuse people of sexual harassment are effectively guilty-until-proven-innocent in the court of public opinion isn’t a great world, either. If you replace “sexual harassment” with any other accusation, do you still feel the same way? With regards to the flaw in human thinking you mention — do we have to work with it for all kinds of accusations, or is it specifically a problem for sexual harassment?
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      False accusation is a particular problem for sex crimes because the legality of the act depends on consent. You can't explain away a dead body saying "he asked me to murder him." But you can explain away evidence of sexual intercourse by saying "it was consensual."
      - solidsnack9000 9y ago
        In the absence of evidence that indicates non-consent — signs of a struggle, injuries, presence of date rape drugs — evidence of sexual intercourse doesn’t need to be explained. Actually, even in the presence of clear evidence of non-consent, evidence of sexual intercourse doesn’t need to be explained — it’s the evidence that creates the impression of an assault that needs to be explained. It seems wrong to take evidence of sexual intercourse alone, and a statement by a plaintiff claiming that the sexual intercourse was non-consensual, as a basis for a conviction. That amounts to just deciding to believe one side and not the other. If that what’s happening, why look for any evidence at all?
- greglindahl 9y ago
  So, for example, if a business in my neighborhood has a sign that says "No hippies, Jews, or N?????s", I should continue to shop there until they get convicted by a court?
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    If you have concrete evidence, that’s enough. What if the situation was, that someone told you they saw this sign one time? Would that be enough not to shop there?
    - jeffdavis 9y ago
      It's probably worth asking the owner whether it's true, and if so, let them know that's why you don't want to shop there any more. Just trusting an allegation alone and walking away silently seems both less fair and less effective. Also, sometimes you find out more to the story. Maybe the owner is very old, and it happened a long time ago, and he's since changed his attitude dramatically. Maybe you forgive him or maybe not, but then you at least put it in perspective. In any case, certainly don't repeat the unsubstantiated allegation to others.
  - jeffdavis 9y ago
    Of course not. You can make your own judgement based on the evidence you have. I am standing up for the presumption of innocence when the evidence is lacking or in conflict.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
Innocent until proven guilty (“the one who asserts must prove”) applies in courts because it is a fair standard — it’s not a standard limited to courts. When we are in the position of having to determine if someone did something wrong, and what to do about it, we are faced with the problem of determining what is just and administering justice. The same basic rules apply to us, because we have the same basic problem: not allowing the tribunal or committee or even the court of public opinion to become another source of injustice.

forapurpose 9y ago

I think these comments are exaggerated and misrepresent the situation, and no basis in fact is provided: > the recent wave of "guilty until proven innocent" ... > the media collectively decided that it was a good idea to promote abandoning the principle of "innocent until proven guilty," The stories I've read have done a good and careful job of corroborating and verifying their stories. Those that don't are subject to massive libel lawsuits like the one that shut down Gawker. > smugly righteous > hysteria This is name-calling, which doesn't add to the discussion, and it's against nobody in particular, which makes it meaningless. Who, by name, is smugly righteous or hysterical? And do those people affect us? Are they representative or influential somehow?

amputect 9y ago
> The stories I've read have done a good and careful job of corroborating and verifying their stories. There are several good recent examples of this: - the project veritas employee trying to shop a false abortion story to the post - the schumer accusation that was shown to be falsified - weinstein's fake accuser that was planted by his own team to discredit investigations When people come with false information, it gets found and reported on, because journalists do their due dilligence. News organizations are really careful about this kind of thing, because screwing up here is a really good way to get your entire org badly burned.
- grandmczeb 9y ago
  News organizations aren’t immune from getting it wrong though. The Duke lacrosse case and Brian Banks are two prominent examples.
  - eigenstuff 9y ago
    The Duke Lacrosse case wasn't uncovered by journalists, though.
    - grandmczeb 9y ago
      The reporters involved ignored massive inconsistencies in the accuser’s story and twisted facts to advance a narrative - the opposite of due diligence. Wether they uncovered the story or not isn’t relevant.

skookumchuck 9y ago

The Duke Lacrosse case was a fine example of wrecking the lives of the accused, despite eventually being found completely innocent.

rayiner 9y ago
And how many countervailing stories are there of womens’ careers being destroyed because the wouldn’t go along with sexual advances from superiors?
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  I'm interested. Produce one that was on the scale of what happened to the Lacrosse players.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    That's the problem with not only this issue but many others like environmental pollution -- crimes are very hard to detect when the victims are numerous, and the damage is non-public. Needless to say there are many women who have been murdered for rejecting sexual advances.
  - evgen 9y ago
    Harvey Weinstein. More people suffered and to a greater extent, more money involved. If you didn't have the ability to Google up the Duke case you could not name a single person involved, but would have no problem naming some of Harvey's victims.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - iamnothere 9y ago
    I think it's disingenuous to claim that actual victims of harassment haven't suffered as much as the Duke lacrosse players. As another commenter has pointed out, I'm sure there are cases where the situation has escalated to actual murder to silence the victim. Just as lynching has probably resulted from unfounded accusations in the past. People are awful! Why do people have to take political sides rather than supporting actual truth and justice, regardless of who "wins" a particular case? It's infuriating.

rayiner 9y ago

Talk of “innocent until proven guilty” is misplaced. In a workplace context, you’re not judging guilt and innocence. You’re resolving a civil dispute, where nobody’s freedom is at stake, only property. Even in courts the standard used for civil disputes isn’t “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” but a mere “more likely than not” conclusion. I’m a civil litigator. We never talk about “innocent until proven guilty.” Imagine you’re in a dispute with someone over where your property line is drawn. If someone presents an affidavit attesting to facts that show the property line is actually five feet into what you thought was your yard, and you have no facts to the contrary, guess what: you’re losing summary judgment. Civil standards give the defendant a very thin benefit of the doubt. Your accuser’s story just has to be a hair more believable than the other person’s alibi. Workplace harassment cases are emphatically not like criminal cases. A false negative (acquiting a guilty person) usually has no direct negative effect in most criminal cases. A murder victim doesn’t much care if the state incorrectly acquits her murderer. Workplace harassment is more like the land boundary case. Somebody gets the land; a false negative means one party has been wrongly deprived of her land while the other party had received an undeserved windfall. In a workplace, likewise, an accuser who is telling the truth but is not believed is wrongfully forced to either continue working with her harasser, or to give up valuable career opportunities. A false negative (failing to believe a truthful accuser), is pretty much as bad as a false positive.

MaxBarraclough 9y ago
What's your opinion of Title IX? (Forgive my assumption that you practice in the USA.) My understanding is that it has college campuses hearing criminal cases. (I'm British, and only learned about this yesterday.)
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  That’s a misunderstanding of Title IX. Under the Obama administration’s guidelines, incidents of sexual harassment and assault on university campuses were treated as violations of the victim’s civil rights. They were required to give a hearing if a purported victim came forward with an accusation to determine, using the “preponderance of evidence” standard, whether the alleged incident occurred, and if so, to discipline the student responsible under the university’s code of conduct. This might take the form of counseling, probation, suspension, expulsion, or whatever. The Trump administration relaxed the requirement that universities adhere to the “preponderance of evidence” standard. This is all, for incidents where a crime occurred, in parallel to the usual criminal court system. No university Title IX panel is trying criminal cases.

DanBC 9y ago

> Due process does indeed exist for a good reason, one of which is to prevent a situation where mere accusations have the power to destroy lives. No, that's untrue. Innocent until proven guilty is only about the state's power to impose punishment. Innocent until proven guilty is used for even the most mild criminal offences where long term repercussions are unlikely. A person's life can be destroyed in a civil trial where balance of probabilities, not beyond all reasonable doubt, is used. See all the parents who've been prevented from contact with their children because courts used balance of probabilities.