We need to stop awarding money to rape victims

You have me confused with someone else. What I assume, since there are such cases, is that the defendant is objectively guilty, in which case the court should find accordingly.

Sure they can, but they cannot do so justly, as there is no room in the law for a finding that the state almost met its burden of proof.

 

Okay, maybe what I'm saying is that when a defendant has been found "guilty", that does not mean they have found him objectively guilty.

Currently there's no distinction in the court system between someone being found guilty based on the accusation from another witness, and someone found guilty because of a huge mountain of convincing evidence.

But that is simply not true. Men are sentenced to prison all the time, based only on a woman's claim that she was raped.

That is how the system works.

Whether you think that's just or not is really besides the point here.

 

We're all aware that a court can get things wrong, so I see no need to belabor the point.

Hell if I know why there should be, seeing a single witness can provide a mountain of convincing evidence.

Of course it is.

Be that as it may, it doesn't contradict anything I said.

 

You need to get this idea out of your head that just because the court decided to punish the man, the man should also have to give compensation to the woman.

If you persist in citing the fact that the man was found guilty by a court, we are just going to go around and around in circles and not get anywhere.

There are different standards that can be used to find guilt, so you need to get this simpleton idea out of your head that the man was found to be guilty.

It depends on what that determination is going to be used for, that will very much affect the standards of the determination.

Stop making this black & white.

You people who worship big government imagine the court must somehow have a way to find out if the man is really guilty or not. That is not the case.
The finding of 'guilt' or 'incense' is just a procedural formality, not really an actual certain determination.

Your comment that "well sometimes the court gets it wrong" is a complete deflect, with no relevance to the point I'm trying to make here.

No, this isn't a rarity for courts to get it wrong. I am discussing something that is deeply intrinsically a part of the system.
Courts decide that is a man is 'guilty' based on an accusation of woman.
We shouldn't then use that 'guilty' verdict for a monetary compensation.

 

No, you need to abandon the idea that a rapist has no obligation to compensate the victim.

 

What you repeatedly refuse to realize is that's not my primary point.

The core of my argument is not that a rapist should have no obligation to compensate the victim, but that it doesn't automatically follow that a man should compensate a victim because he has been convicted of rape in a court.

If the man was convicted mainly based on just the testimony of the victim, then there shouldn't be compensation. That's my primary point.

 

And you evidently imagine that is ameliorative WRT the credibility of your position. Which is sad.

Neither does it automatically follow that any defendant should be penalized on conviction of anything in court, so you're just rehashing the same truism to no apparent purpose.

If that's not sufficient to justify compensation, why is it sufficient to justify conviction?

 

Because the witness clearly stands to gain something material if she gives a certain type of testimony.

What could be a worse incentive to give false testimony than giving a woman lots of money if she says something happened, and they can't find a reason to disbelieve her?

If she knows she can't get money out of it, there will be a much smaller chance that women will lie.

If we start awarding money, there will be more innocent men accused of rape who would not otherwise have been.

 

You're dodging the question. I didn't ask why such testimony is insufficient to justify compensation, I asked why, if that's the case, it is sufficient to justify conviction.

 

Well, I pointed out that's kind of besides the point, because that's the way the current system is.
Men do get convicted based on nothing other than the alleged victim's testimony. (I assume we're not arguing about whether that's the case here)

Now, we can have a discussion about whether or not that should be how it works. But in this thread, I'm just specifically talking about monetary compensation.

Now, maybe you were asking is there some argument that applies to compensation that does not apply to punishment. And the answer to that is yes.
Awarding monetary compensation to a woman is going to be a lot more likely to induce a woman to give false testimony than putting the man in prison will.

(I think there are some additional reasons too, but let's just focus on that for now)

 

Quite the contrary, it is the point.

Actually the current system is irrelevant, because there are women who get raped, and whose testimony constitutes the entirety of the evidence available, in which case the defendant should be convicted, irrespective of the process employed. This being the case, the obvious question you continue to evade is why exactly that convicted rapist should bear no obligation to compensate the victim.

 

I have no issues awarding money to rape victims, but rapists should not be allowed to make them sign nda's

 

That's another problem with the current civil court system. The alleged perpetrator can give the victim a settlement, basically a bribe not to go forward with the lawsuit and initiate the civil court proceedings.

In what other system would we allow a woman to extort money out of a man, threatening to bring him to court if he does not give her money?
But in the civil court system we do.

 

Don't you just love contracts?

These days, a lot of wealthy African American men in the sports arena are making the women they sleep with sign contracts stating that they are agreeing to consensual sexual intercourse. There have been too many instances of these women extorting a huge settlement out of the man, millions of dollars, threatening to accuse him of rape.

 

yep, rapists come on all colors, so do rape victims....

and yes, if you're just doing one night stands and your rich, probably not a bad idea to get it consent writing and even on video as they could be forced to sign such consent for fear of their lives or livelihood

 

But especially some colors.

It's absolutely terrible what African American basketball players have to put up with these days. Probably a full 10% of the audience who goes to see their games are gold-diggers, hoping to get their chance to ruin the man.

(I posted a thread about their shenanigans here: women who steal sperm to get pregnant without the man's permission )

 

we would not allow a suspect to bribe a witness in any other criminal case - in fact we would imprison them for attempting to do so

 

no, I disagree with you there, I say rapists can be any color

now the rich are more likely to suffer from gold-diggers, agree with you there, but they are also more likely to pay off their victims if they are rapists too - works both ways

if a woman steals a man's sperm, she should lose all rights to custody - course one would have to prove it, so men should secure their sperm, be responsible for it, clean up after themselves - many men poke needle holes in condoms to get a women pregnant too, lot of bad people out there

 

The burden of proof is different between criminal and civil cases.

 

K. But why can someone be financially punished for a crime they can't be criminally found guilty of?

 

He just told you.

Maybe you are making the erroneous assumption, like a lot of people, that a jury "determines" whether you committed the crime or not. That is not quite really true.
If they ever word things like that, it's really just a legal formality.

Maybe there are a lot of lay people in the public who do not realize that after you have been found 'not guilty', let's say for killing someone, by a jury at trial, after that you can still be sued by the dead person's family for damages, with another jury, and ordered to pay money. That's what the law is.

In the first instance, they are deciding whether you should go to prison based on the alleged crime. In the second instance, they are deciding whether you should be made to pay damages to a private party (not the government) based on the alleged act. Even when that alleged act is the exact same thing as the alleged crime.

It's generally regarded that the standard of proof is lower for deciding whether you can be sued than whether you can be found criminally guilty. That's almost held up as a truism in legal circles.

You have to understand that before you can understand what's so novel about the approach in the opening first post.

 

I think I can explain this to you now, in better words.

Your fallacy is that you believe a man should be made to pay money to a woman because she says she was raped, even though there may be no other evidence.


Now, is that not what you believe? Do I understand your position wrong?

Because that is what your position is basically tantamount to.

You seem to claim that because a woman claims she was raped, a man can be found guilty by a court; and because the court has determined that the man is guilty, he should give her money.

 

But isn't that essentially double jeopardy? Just because the first one can ruin your life in prison and the second one can only make you destitute and ruin your life financially, its still basically being tried for the same crime twice...

 

A crime is an act "against the state" which has the burden of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt".
A civil matter is an act "against person(s)" which has the burden of proving personal harm.

For instance, a famous case is OJ Simpson. He was found "not guilty" in the criminal case, but was found liable in the civil suit brought by the families of his ex-wife and her then current boyfriend.

 

Yes, it is in a way.

A lot of the public would be shocked if they actually found out about some of the laws that exist and how the system can work sometimes.

You might be shocked to learn that there are multiple other ways you could potentially be faced with multiple jeopardy. You could be tried in two different state courts, and federal court. Three different times, and that would not count as double jeopardy. Or you could be tried for doing essentially the same thing, but under two different laws.
Or a judge could take into account something you were already acquitted of in the past, and then impose a long prison sentence for some other technicality of the law that is relatively minor, since the law can allow them huge amounts of discretion to do so. If you want a sort of actual example of this, look at the sentence OJ Simpson finally got. Years later, when he used a gun to forcibly take back what he believed to be stolen property, the judge took into account his history that he had infamously been acquitted of murder, and took the opportunity to sentence him to much longer than a normal person would otherwise have likely got in those circumstances.

Basically there are all sorts of ways to circumvent Constitutional protections.

I'm not going to talk to you about this here because there are other threads in the Law & Justice section where I've brought up these issues.