What We Talk About When We Talk About Cosby

[Nixou]

How do you balance the alleged criminal's right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty with the victim's right to the pursuit of justice?

More importantly: how do you balance the accused's right to be presumed innocent with the accuser's own right to be presumed truthful

***

And then put yourself in their shoes. You have just been raped, you can make accusations, they will hit the newspapers, and you will have to deal with a million people just like you, reacting in exactly the same way you did.

Which is the reason I'm actually surprised that "Famous Person X murdered by alleged rape victim" happens so rarely.

***

Yeah, how dare we not judge people immediately without any evidence

That's the problem actually:
You lie
You did immediately judge him: you judged him innocent in spite of dozens of people bearing witness against him: ever heard the term "testimonial evidence"? 'Cause there's a fuckton of evidences of this type weighting Cosby's case which You, are deliberately pretending to be irrelevant.

 

[ms_sunlight]

Cosby is the accused, and under the US Justice system he is innocent until proven guilty. That means that the burden of proof lies with his accusers, and all doubt unless they can prove otherwise. If they could prove otherwise they would have a court case, and ALL doubt lies with the accusers of any crime.

This is completely incorrect. The burden of proof would be upon the prosecution, should it be brought. Victims are not the prosecution, they are witnesses. Their accusations are evidence, to be considered with all other evidence, and they don't have to prove anything.

I can't say this often enough. The people in this thread stating that there is no evidence are wrong. There is evidence. Victim testimony is evidence. Victim testimony is often the only evidence in many kinds of criminal cases, from rape to mugging to fraud.

There is a lot to be said about prosecutors not taking up cases against wealthy or powerful people, and how this has led to terrible injustices. Several people have mentioned the Saville case here in the UK, and others that came after. It's worth remembering that Saville's victims spoke out. Just because nothing was done for decades doesn't mean those victims and other witnesses were lying.

 

[Bruce]

Funny, because I have been asking this exact same question for a while, and you still haven't answered it. Why are you willing to condemn these women, say that their claims are false and that they are the result of mass hysteria, but not condemn Cosby, despite both arguments having equal supporting evidence?

Then perhaps you should learn to read the start of a conversion you insert yourself into so that you have the proper context for the conversation.

They also do not have equal supporting evidence. Innocent until proven guilty gives more credibility to the accused because punishment is solely theirs. This is why the accusers require proof, and without that difference you have the Inquisitional Witch Hunt you're advocating for.

Two dozen people saying he did the same thing to them, that are in fact consistent with each other is not argumentum ad populum.

We're not dealing with 12 witnesses to 1 crime. We are dealing with 12 accusers to 12 different crimes with no witnesses. The augment is ad populum "look at all those it couldn't possible be wrong".

No, it is "All these separate cases each independently refer to a similar set of actions, describing a similar pattern of behaviour."

Argumentum ad populum applies to a question where the answer is an unknown. We can for example say, quite validly that most climate scientists believe that climate change is happening and man-made without it being an argumentum ad populum, as in their case they are intimately involved in examining the evidence for climate change.

What we mean by that is that they have each reached the same conclusion examining the evidence before them.

With this case each of the women coming forward knows for a fact whether or not she was raped. From our point of view this is an unknown, from their point of view it is not.

From our point of view the question is whether they are telling the truth. The fact that their testimony is consistent weights against the hypothesis that they are lying.

Of course given the time frames we cannot establish Cosby's guilt, however it is reasonable given the evidence presented to have strong doubts. It is not reasonable however to assume that his accusers are lying.

 

[Revnak_v1legacy]

Funny, because I have been asking this exact same question for a while, and you still haven't answered it. Why are you willing to condemn these women, say that their claims are false and that they are the result of mass hysteria, but not condemn Cosby, despite both arguments having equal supporting evidence?

Then perhaps you should learn to read the start of a conversion you insert yourself into so that you have the proper context for the conversation.

They also do not have equal supporting evidence. Innocent until proven guilty gives more credibility to the accused because punishment is solely theirs. This is why the accusers require proof, and without that difference you have the Inquisitional Witch Hunt you're advocating for.

And these women are innocent of being hysterical liars until you can prove that. And I am not advocating for attacking Cosby. I think that I have seen too little information to make a judgement myself. The only thing that I am advocating is that you should not jump to the conclusion that the accusers are hysterical and that their claims are false will absolutely no evidence, because making a false accusation is also a crime, one that, by your logic, they are innocent of until proven guilty.

 

[Karadalis]

And these women are innocent of being hysterical liars until you can prove that. And I am not advocating for attacking Cosby. I think that I have seen too little information to make a judgement myself. The only thing that I am advocating is that you should not jump to the conclusion that the accusers are hysterical and that their claims are false will absolutely no evidence, because making a false accusation is also a crime, one that, by your logic, they are innocent of until proven guilty.

I think the "hysteria" part of his post was not pointed at the women making the accusations, but everyone else.

At this point it all really only boils down to "he said, she said" but the media has allready branded cosby as guilty when in truth nothing has been proven.

Furthermore it is also not an unknown that there are certain people out there, certain women, who use accusations of rape as a weapon, to get money, or to get famous. Also these rape allegations where pretty well known since each time there was a huge deal about it so its rather easy for anyone to say that cosby did the exact same thing to them as he did to his other accusers.

See thats another problem, people who are neutral and say "lets see some evidence" are somehow branded as victim blamers when in truth they just follow the letter of the law and not some biased moral standard that is lead completly by emotion.

What if these women are just out for money? After all it was said that some of them dropped their accusations after cosby paid them money. Now if you really where a victim why would you take the money? You just let your own rapist scot free and let him go to rape other women. Instead you opt to be paid off like a prostitute? Sorry but i cant sympathise with such behavior.

Listen and question is allways better then listen and believe.

 

[Batou667]

I'm not saying abandon fairness and throw Bill Cosby in jail. I'm not even saying to convict Cosby, since a conviction requires going by the law, for which evidence must always be required. I'm more referring to people's knee jerk reaction being to say 'well, until they have evidence he raped them (which for a variety of reasons they can not actually get), I'm gonna just say that they're lying'. You can't get a legal conviction of a crime without evidence, but you can at least treat the victims of that crime with enough respect to not accuse them of bullshitting just to ruin the man's reputation, since the odds of them all lying are drastically lower than the odds that what they're saying is the ugly truth.

Sorry if I wasn't clear about that before.

It's especially noteworthy when the women aren't suing so they're not out for cash, and Cosby hardly has a super active career at the moment without which he'd be crippled financially. He's already had a long, successful career, such that even if he was tarnished, he's not actually going to lose much, vs. the women who otherwise have literally nothing to gain except for an extremely feeble hope of having some minor degree of justice served.

Sure, I think we should always treat alleged victims with basic decency - certainly any kind of sentiment along the lines of "you're a liar until you can prove otherwise" isn't helpful - but we can't skew the judicial process in favour of one party in the name of compassion because the claims being made are pretty darn serious and even the act of accusing can have measurable effects. Same as any crime where you're indicating somebody else's guilt - the accuser has the right to have their claim considered, they don't have the right to be believed uncritically.

I think a good first step would be to keep the legal process in the courtroom and not allow a trial by media, which is what happens in many of these high-profile cases. It's a tricky one, because here in the UK we recently had the high-profile Operation Yewtree looking into abuse committed by TV personality Jimmy Savile and associated celebrities, and the very publicised, televised nature of the operation led to more victims coming forward and adding to a body of evidence against Savile. Other victims found the courage or perhaps the long-lacking sense of legitimacy to come up and make claims against other "untouchable" celebrities, like Rolf Harris who was recently found guilty and sentenced. This is of course all very positive and an example of justice being served. However, there is always the potential for this to become a witch-hunt or cash-grab, and there have undoubtedly been false or malicious claims made - actor William Roache, for example, was accused, forced to take time out of acting to deal with the legal proceedings, and eventually found innocent. I suppose the question is whether encouraging more victims to come forward justifies the potential for malicious accusations, and further, should that form part of an ongoing trial or investigation? Seems to me this kind of thing could bias a jury or put pressure on a judge to arrive at a "guilty" verdict.

As for the Cosby case, I don't know too many specifics, but I know he did settle out-of-court in past instances, so some of the women involved seemingly are willing to accept cash in lieu of pursuing the charges. Also, I heard that Cosby was about to make some kind of comeback or "New Cosby Show", so the timing of this could be seen to have an element of politics to it. That's mostly just speculation though of course.

 

[Batou667]

I'd be willing to believe Cosby is innocent if he'd just speak up about the whole damn thing. The fact he is not only not talking about it, but asking people to not talk about it and trying to keep it off the record is, in so many ways, really damning of his situation. His lack of openness on a topic he wants to look innocent on makes him look all the more guilty and is what's killing his public image more than anything else.

I dunno, I'd be very wary about assuming guilt from silence. He may have been told not to talk by lawyers, and certainly it's true that you smother a fire by starving it of oxygen, not fanning the flames. And guaranteed, if he did defend himself, you'd have people concluding that he "doth protest too much", or was trying to "character-assassinate" the accusers, or whatever. In a lose-lose situation like that, keeping your mouth shut is often the smartest choice.