Last week, Labour said the government should be held to specific targets to measure progress on male violence, domestic abuse and sexual violence, and said they would introduce a seven-year minimum sentence for rape.
Sigh. Juries are reluctant to convict for rape because what the woke definition is ain’t the same as what the population definition is. Raising the penalty will reduce the conviction rate therefore…..
I suspect the genuine goal here is to make jury refusals to convict “woke” rape cases a justification for moving to trials in front of a judge alone (so they can get the result they actually want). Fortunately, I can’t see Labour getting in power to enact any of this garbage.
@John Galt: would you put it past the modern Tories under Boris, though?
Not sure its a good idea to have incentivised political targets for this type of crime. But if they did they should balance the incentives with a target for charges of wrongful accusation and perjury.
“While there were 52,210 rapes recorded by police in England and Wales in 2020, only 843 resulted in a charge or a summons – a rate of 1.6%.”
Do they mean rapes, or do they mean accusations of rape?
“While there were 52,210 rapes recorded by police in England and Wales in 2020”
How many of those were by Pakistani rape gangs?
Surely it’s all “accusations of rape” until at least the charging stage?
Most of the problem here is that a lot of those accusations of rape turn out to be firmly in the “not rape at all” category. Most are somewhere between sexual assault and rudeness/discourtesy resulting in hurt fee fees. It’s that middle ground between the initial tear jerker with the police station and the court room steps that most of these accusations fall and remain, to be whispered around the accused for ever and ever.
For the remainder of the “charges of rape”, they then have to go through the gatekeepers of the CPS. These are meant to be the bastions of probity and neutrality, but since the days when Keir Starmer ruled the roost (and probably before), they’ve been subject to political bias from the left and the whole “CPS isn’t prosecuting rape cases” accusation has been a political football their for decades.
They’ve tried the approach of only taking cases that juries will convict on, but the harridans of the left weren’t happy with that because too many accusations of “rape” that weren’t rape were being dismissed along with a lot of the “potentially rape” cases where their was zero evidence and it just devolved into arguments over “he said/she said” that no jury was going to convict either.
They changed the approach under new CPS Chief Alison Saunders (head lefty lesbian) to cast a wide net and throw anything they could at the courts in the hope that some (at least) of the weaker cases would stick, but again, juries aren’t going to convict men of rape just because two people on a date get drunk and the barristers on both sides are playing tag with arguments over the vagaries of consent.
Same applies with accusations of “rape” which are best described as “post-coital regret”, put simply the criminal justice system is not the place to try and get actual justice for such matters.
The net result of these changes meant lots of gory newspaper headlines of marginal cases being lost by the CPS. If they thought not winning cases was bad losing them (and the consequential headlines accusing CPS incompetence) was worse, so we’re now back to roughly where we were having seemingly learned nothing in the meantime.
Caelainn Barr and Alexandra Topping
Sounds like a post pudding.
posh
“so we’re now back to roughly where we were having seemingly learned nothing in the meantime.”
The story of the Left for the last 100 years basically.
This problem will be solved once juries have been *trained*:
https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and-opinion/judging-the-jury-why-rape-trials-can-still-be-in-safe-hands/5068627.article
@BIND: – From the article you posted:
Yeah. That ain’t a jury, it’s a kangaroo court.
It’s the woke libtard “experts” that are the problem.
By all means let’s make women so toxic that no man will work with them.
Must admit RLJ, that I feel a reasonable attempt at a solution would be a public register available at a click giving the names and full details of all women making such accusations. Facial recognition too, perhaps?
After all they’re pushing for similar registers for men.
Can we include taxation in that definition?
John Galt–you correctly point out the Marxist feminist shitshow Stumour presided over at the CPS.
You should mention that Saunders left under a cloud having strong evidence against her to the effect that she tried –like Kowmara Haggish in the US–to keep evidence of (rape) suspects innocence away from the defence and the Court in general.
Anyone else would have got a raft of “conspiracy to pervert the course of Justice charges” laid on her. Esp with a Tory govt.
But it was Treason May’s Govt and Treason is another BlueMarxist like Bogus Johnson. His specialist subject is vile ecofreakey while hers is Marxist feminism–tho’ I doubt she has the faintest idea that the evil cult of Marxism is the origin of is the femmi-bullshit her head is full of. She is that thick.
Saunders was allowed to slope quietly off to pensioned retirement and her immediate boss Stumour was allowed to continue his career to become Labour’s greatest never Leader.
It is therefore no surprise to see that bag of shite once again wanting to push Marxist terror tactics like mandatory sentences and the removal of a Jury.
That is certainly how the trial of political scum like Stumour and Johnson should be conducted.
Juries are reluctant to convict for rape because what the woke definition is ain’t the same as what the population definition is. Raising the penalty will reduce the conviction rate therefore…..
That’s not a problem, as Labour plan to abolish juries, too, replacing them with political commissars.