The sheer volume of misogyny directed at Samhita over that post is nauseating. I would read more of the comments, but I don’t want to get a headache from the asshat stupidity. Frankly, the volume of misogyny found in the progressive blogosphere and community at large is dismaying to me, a feminist and progressive male.

Kaethe above noted the rather large misconception people have about “innocent until proven guilty”, and that they just plain don’t know what this legal standard actually means. She’s absolutely right.

From my law courses in college, I learned that it means simply this: the burden of proof that a defendant is guilty of a crime is on the prosecution, and absent sufficient evidence of guilt, the defendant must be found not guilty (which, I might add, is NOT the same as being innocent). This can be contrasted with “guilty until proven innocent”, which requires a defendant to prove innocence, something that can be very difficult or impossible to do (proving a negative, and all).

It does not mean “the defendant’s word must be assumed true”, it does not mean “any evidence presented by the prosecution, especially the victim, is assumed false”, and it certainly doesn’t mean “if there is insufficient evidence to prove the defendant is guilty, the victim was obviously lying.”

Yet that’s how the public (and, scarily, many lawyers and judges as well) treat the standard when it comes to rape cases. If a woman accuses a man of rape, the assumption is that he is innocent, not until proven guilty, just innocent period. Sometimes this even means innocent even after proven guilty!

I still run into people who will talk about what a gold-digging liar Desiree Washington was, even today, years after Mike Tyson was convicted, sentenced, and sent to prison for raping her.

One thing I find interesting (and I’ve been following posts on the case pretty closely) is how many commentators cannot distinguish between the assumption of innocence for an individual accused of a crime and the assumption that a crime occurred. While you might expect he said/she said handwaving around a date rape case, it seems so unlikely when applied to the violent gang rape of a woman at work. Why do the defenders of the accused so often go from “they’re innocent of this crime” to “no crime occurred?” I’m sure there’s a patriarchy-blaming explanation that I just haven’t seen yet.

Who said this first? I’m curious.

Germaine said it, I believe it, and that settles it!

Dipping into it again, I found this post. By now they’ve started quibbling back and forth over statistics; the composer of said post has claimed that the rape of black women by white men is statistically low. Obviously, then, the woman he’s been debating with has a hankering for (and I quote) “slavemaster-style rape”.

As if this isn’t nauseating enough, another guy goes on to suggest that it’s true. I thought that men were supposed to pretend to know better by now.