Chauvin Murder Trial

[Rev. Rye]

I can almost understand where IA is coming from. I know what it looks like to brand people guilty without looking closely into it, and here's an admittedly stylised, but, if anything, toned down depiction:



For the record, this was inspired by an actual case in 1933, where Brooke Hart, the son of one of San Jose, California's biggest families, was kidnapped. Two men named Harold Thurman and John Holmes were arrested for his kidnapping and murder. They confessed, although there's allegations that those confessions were coerced. Were they guilty? Were they innocent? Frankly, I don't fucking know for sure. We never got much of a chance to find out, because the second Hart's body was found, a mob of 3,000 people at minimum (possibly as high as 10,000) stormed the jail, spirited the two away, and hung them from a cork elm tree in a local park. And the state's governor Jim Rolph went as far as saying he'd pardon anyone prosecuted for the lynching.

That said, IA is, to say the least, going a bit far. If there's a significant room for doubt, feel free to defend them. But, since it's difficult to prove a case beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially with a crime like rape, there's a LOT of room for people to fall through the cracks who had convincing evidence against them, but who didn't actually get a trial yet, to be given a pass. For what it's worth, the rate of false accusation in rape cases (according to the largest study I've found yet) is about 5.5%. While too common to write off the possibility, it's nowhere near common enough to treat as a default assumption. Sometimes, there may be cases where there's a reasonable room for doubt, but sometimes, the evidence all points in one direction. Since I haven't given a tinker's damn about basketball since Michael Jordan left the Bulls, I legitimately don't know if Kobe's is one of the cases with room for doubt. IA certainly seems to be painting the case with that brush, but, then again, he's spent this whole thread going out of his way to defend Derek Chauvin, even after he was found guilty.

Everyone may deserve a defense, but that doesn't mean that their defenses are all equally valid. And if you're saying shit like

even if he was guilty, he still should have gotten off because of how shit she was as a human being

I think most reasonable people would agree you've gone totally off the grid. Putting them both in jail if they were both guilty beyond a reasonable doubt (and the accuser's behaviour went into the criminal) is reasonable. Saying that, even if he's guilty, he should have been set free (except maybe in cases of prosecutorial misconduct), well that's the area where any sane person says: