4 ms·

You're talking as if a trial 'collapsing' (I assume this means the accused is found not guilty) is some huge catastrophe, when in fact the possibility of such '

• DanBC 8y ago
  If there's no hope of a conviction because there's evidence that strongly suggests the events didn't happen it would be better to avoid the trial.
  • deogeo 8y ago
    It would, but I wouldn't want to entirely give up victim privacy for it.
    • hdfbdtbcdg 8y ago
      If the accused is innocent then they are the victim and the accuser is the perpetrator.
      • tus87 8y ago
        Leftists struggle badly with this concept. Which is funny as decades ago it was leftists who would have been fighting against police state mentality while right wingers would be dismissive of accused people. Bleeding hearts and all that. Except when the accused is black, leftists can still get out To Kill a Mockingbird when it suits them. Then 3rd wave feminazism happened and our standards of impartial police investigations, independent courts and a fair trial resemble medieval Europe. Or North Korea or China.
      • DanBC 8y ago
        That's not necessarily true though is it? Two people can have different interpretations of events without one of them making maliciously false allegations. The complainant can have an honest, sincere, belief that they did not give consent. And, for phone evidence, there are good reasons why a complainant may say one thing to police but something else to friends of the accused.
        • deogeo 8y ago
          > That's not necessarily true though is it? [..] Two people can have different interpretations of events without one of them making maliciously false allegations. You don't even have to go that far - the allegation could be true, but newly uncovered evidence could cast sufficient doubt that the accused is not found guilty. E.g. an eyewitness correctly identifies an assailant, but it is later revealed she wasn't wearing her prescription glasses.
        • hdfbdtbcdg 8y ago
          Indeed there are three states. Guilty, innocent and not sure. A lot rides on it. A heinous crime must be punished (and most likely future ones prevented) but we absolutely can't send innocent people to prison - and they shouldn't spend years under a cloud of suspicion. The police, CPS and the courts have a really difficult job.
• sjy 8y ago
  The point of a trial is to allow an independent tribunal of fact to make difficult factual decisions, like whether to believe a complainant’s oral testimony. In one of the cases cited in support of this change in practice [1] the police had access to a “computer disk containing 40,000 messages [which] revealed the alleged victim had pestered [the accused] for ‘casual sex’”, but this was not noticed until part-way through a trial which everyone had spent months preparing for. In this case, justice required that the private message history between the complainant and the accused be shared with the police and, if the case was to go to trial, the court. But the fact that the messages were discovered during the trial, rather than in the early days of the investigation, was a catastrophe for which the police apologised. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-42873618 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-42873618