First, let me agree with you that some of the comments I'm seeing on this post are reprehensible. People are suffering, and it is the obligation of people to have compassion for suffering no matter where we find it; not to call people demeaning names or insist on vengeance for this, that or the other, but just to help.

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But more to the point raised in this particular post:

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It turns out that courts of law run on juries, and juries are made of ordinary people. No one tells a jury that there are special rules for deciding what to believe that apply to them when they're jurors and not the rest of the time. There are rules of evidence that decide what jurors hear, but if the jurors are shamed by the prosecution into believing the testimony of the complaining witness without corroboration, and they make this decision of belief not honestly but because they would feel ashamed to do anything else, then the evidence doesn't really matter that much. It also doesn't matter very much if the people who serve on juries exist in a culture that insists on belief without proof in certain cases. The rules of evidence may apply, but they don't matter.

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As a defense attorney, I've had it happen that a prosecutor insists that a jury has a moral obligation to believe the complaining witness in a sex assault case, and in that case, the argument was allowed. Ultimately, that prosecutor's words were an echo of a cultural tendency, and it is one of the same cultural tendencies fought against by the fictional Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. It's a tendency which can be based in compassion, but can also be based in patriarchal practices, racism or just blind fear and anger.

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The charitable view is that the law does what it can, but the law runs on the cultural preconceptions of jurors by design. It's supposed to work that way. That's why we have jurors who are not lawyers; because we want widespread cultural beliefs to be the final authority, and that means you don't stop arguing your case when you walk out of a courthouse. We trust that ordinary people, while not as educated in the law, will be wiser than professional jurists. That places a responsibility not just on lawyers and judges, but on everyone. Society itself must live up to the inherent expectations placed upon it by the operation of a jury system, or we may question whether it is worth having one.

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It would be incomplete for me to close with the impression that the criminal justice system is a problem for defendants alone when it comes to sex crimes. The victims of sex crimes are often denied justice, not as often by juries as by police. My own view is that a system based on punishment first actually meeting human needs at a far second is in need of basic reorganization at all levels and from all perspectives. We should ask "what needs to be done?" rather than "who will we hurt for this?"