YOUR correspondents Thomas Masson and Reverend Dr John Cameron (Letters, October 17) are both correct to point out respectively that rape is an extremely difficult crime to prove, and that the presumption of innocence is a precious liberty which must be retained at all costs in order to preserve civilized justice.
Rape is the criminal act of sexual intercourse in the absence of consent. Therefore in order to prove the charge of rape the Crown must prove first that the act took place; and secondly that there was no consent for this act. In the first case the fact that sexual relations occurred is generally not contested thanks to the precision of modern forensics. However in order to demonstrate the second condition the Crown is required to prove a negative, that something (consent) did not exist, and moreover to do this beyond all reasonable doubt. This is especially challenging as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Broadly speaking, unless there are injuries to the complainant’s body, or a witness who saw or heard something, the absence of consent is tremendously difficult to substantiate. As acts of sexual intercourse almost always occur in private, convictions for rape will always be close to impossible to secure. The criminal justice system therefore provides very little in the way of deterrence to lower the prevalence of this appalling crime.
The trend recently has been to address this injustice by gradually skewing the system in favour of the complainant by granting them anonymity, by preventing them from being cross-examined by the accused, by insisting the police “believe” the complainant in all cases, by limiting the ability to introduce into evidence the complainant’s previous sexual behaviour, and so on. All of these interventions are problematic in that they can serve to undermine the impartiality of the system and the rights of the accused to a genuinely fair trial.
If we accept, as we must, that in a system which is just to the accused, convictions for rape will always be few in number, then in order to deter rape the punishment meted out to those convicted of the crime must be especially severe by way of compensation. This is why convicted rapists should be hanged.
Chris McLaughlin,
99 Rockmount Avenue, Thornliebank, East Renfrewshire.
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