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Comment by thegp | Hacker News Reader

Might not want to cite ghomeshi as an example of an unfair justice system:

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/christie-blatchford...

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/a-good-day-for-jus...

The judge himself acknowledged that the evidence in this case raising a reasonable doubt is not the same as saying these events did not take place. This is where the law fails. Under intense scrutiny and a barrage of questions of details that happened many years ago, anyone can "lie" or have "inconsistencies". A victim can try to befriend the assailant in an attempt to reclaim or recontextualise what happened to her. The law is ill-equipped to handle this situation.

So what should you do? Not apply scrutiny? Remember, in dubio pro reo

Remember that the verdict of "not guilty" is not the same as "innocent". We can't take away Ghomeshi's freedom, but we can send him to counselling, warn women, or other things that do not require judges and cops.

Yes it is kinda."innocent until proven guilty". At least if you believe in rule of law.

In theory, the English legal system is biased towards convicting as few people as possible. The idea with "innocent until guilty" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" is to only convict under the presence of enough undeniable evidence. Because it requires so much to convict, in theory most people will not be convicted. This is because we consider the error of wrongly convicting an innocent person to be far graver than to let guilty people free (the cost of this error is even more dramatic in the case of death penalty).

If you are familiar with hypothesis testing in statistics, it is the exact same idea. Your null hypothesis (innocent) is accepted by default unless you have overwhelming evidence (a very small p-value) that your hypothesis is not true. In that case, you reject the null hypothesis (and convict). But with a lukewarm evidence (not tiny p-value), you just "fail to reject". You never actively accept the null hypothesis.

This is why "not guilty" is not the same thing as "innocent". A court does not attempt to establish someone's innocence or not. A court is biased towards convicting only in the face of undeniable evidence. And that's why things such as whether the victims contacted Ghomeshi after the assault or not are "reasonable doubt" and thus he's acquited. Not because the court proved that the assault didn't happen, but because the court failed to obtain undeniable evidence that it did.

> The judge himself acknowledged that the evidence in this case raising a reasonable doubt is not the same as saying these events did not take place.

There is a fairly dramatic, well-known example of this (outside of the area of sexual assault) in the OJ Simpson case where the high (beyond a reasonable doubt) standard of criminal law failed to be met, resulting in a criminal acquittal for murder, but the lower (preponderance of the evidence -- or, in layman's terms, whatever the jury finds is most likely to be true) standard of civil liability resulted in a finding of civil liability for wrongful death.

A criminal acquittal means innocence only from the perspective of the criminal justice system, it doesn't mean the act charged was not committed by the person charged.

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