“Here’s a question for you, Mary. If forced to the choice, would you rather be raped once or imprisoned for years and raped dozens, if not hundreds of times?
Still want to say that a false accusation of rape is not as serious a crime as an actual rape?”
Considering the very low level of conviction for rapists – around 5% in the UK – the number of men falsely accused AND imprisioned is negligable. To argue that innocent men being convicted is the main problem, when this is dwarfed by the problem of guilty men going free – is perverse, and can only stem from misogyny. Yes the Duke case was wrong. Yes she should be punished. No argument there. But this is a high-profile, low incident case with negligible relation to the main problem.
False accusations of rape or any other serious crime should be punished. But no, not to the same extent as the crimes themselves.
If they determine you used “excessive force” (the parameters of which are completely arbitrary according to the whim of the criminal justice system), you’ll be charged with assault or worse.
Our criminal justice system, like yours, is not perfect, but you have no basis other than your own prejudice and ignorance for dismissing it as “whimsical”. Ultimately the self-defence case will go before a jury, which is made up of ordinary people. As in the Tony Martin case, which Americans gleefully quote as often as misogynists quote the Duke case. The jury decided, rightly, that shooting someone in the back when he was escaping through a windown was more than just self-defence. A burglar should be punished for burglary, not shot.
In America you probably could shoot someone in the back who is escaping and get away with it. Perhaps you don’t have as much respect for life as we do – unless it’s a foetus.
