Jason, thank you for your post puncturing the alleged “growing consensus” that fewer than 10 percent of rape allegations are false, and you’re of course right to say that “it’s hard to imagine” how we could ever know the true percentage. Considering how much liberal wonks pride themselves on their analytical rigor, you’d think they’d realize not only is their number bogus, but they can’t ever know the true number of false (or true, for that matter) rape allegations. Simply put, our legal system doesn’t adjudicate “truth” but rather attempts to establish facts within varying degrees of certainty. In fact, the goal of a defense lawyer in a rape case is rarely to establish actual innocence (falsity of the claim) but to simply raise the right amount of doubt.
In criminal cases, the standard is obviously proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which allows a jury to convict even when there is still some doubt about guilt. In civil cases, the preponderance of the evidence standard requires a jury to find liability even if they think there’s a 49 percent chance the defendant didn’t violate the law. Thus, there are convicted (or “liable”) rapists who are actually innocent, just as their are acquitted suspects who are actually guilty. We can never, ever know the actual percentages of the truly guilty even amongst the ranks of the convicted, much less among the ranks of the never-charged (where the instances of actual innocence are much greater). The liberal standard is, increasingly, to treat every single suspect as a rapist unless their is an unmistakable indication of actual innocence — something that isn’t even the object of either the criminal or civil justice systems. For obvious reasons, they don’t apply this standard to any other area of criminal or civil law. Would they say that every murder suspect is a killer unless there’s been a finding of actual innocence? Agenda wonkery is shoddy wonkery.