I actually just finished a stint of jury duty last week and got picked for 2 trials. A couple of observations:
1. One of the trials was an underage rape case and there was essentially no physical evidence. Mainly all we had to go on was 3 police interviews (2 from the alledged victim, one from the accused). As a jury, we relied on those videos to determine who we felt was telling the truth and the trust worthiness of what they were saying. I'm not saying this was a good thing necessarily, just an observation that this is what we did. I'd like to see the results with a parallel jury that relied only on written transcripts etc.
2. The judge actually gave us guidance at the beginning of both trials that in addition to what witnesses said, how they appeared to us (their demeanour) was also evidence that we could use in assessing the trust-worthiness of what they said. My understanding was that we should use our general life experience that we had acquired in our day to day living to assess the evidence of the witness. I guess there are good sides (eg. intuition based on non-verbal communication/body language) and bad sides (eg. biases) to using this approach.
I was once excused from a jury panel in a quite-similar situation, but the alleged victim had waited months to say anything, and it was totally he-said / she-said. During voir dire, the prosecutor asked if anyone had a problem with a one-witness case. I raised my hand and said, yeah, under those circumstances there was reasonable doubt by definition. I was excused, and never heard what happened afterwards. (IAAL.)
This might be a silly question, but how come there was no evidence?
I thought that the hard part with persecuting (adult) rape is that the physical act is the same as sex - so there’s no “obvious” proof that the crime even happened (like a dead body), only different interpretations of why sex happened.
That goes away if it’s statutory rape, where even just sex is evidence of crime.
So she claimed she had been raped while sleeping over at a friend's house by the father of the friend. He claimed it never happened. She only told her mother and step-father around 2-3 weeks afterwards about it.
She was forced (she was not able to choose) to take pregnancy rejection medication but refused/declined to have a physical examination/rape kit done (she had a choice in this). So essentially there was no physical evidence (in the trial at least) that sex had ever occurred. Also, the trial was taking place around 6 years after the alledged incident.
What we did have was a very detailed, consistent, plausible, and compelling recount of events leading up to, during, and after the rape from the 13 year old victim in a police interview about a month after it occured and also another interview around 2 years later. Watching the interviews, and based on the type emotion she showed at particular points, the language (including body language) she used to describe the events etc it was difficult to not believe her, it was in fact heart breaking to watch and listen to.
I guess my point is that all that "soft" information that we received from the video recorded interview was indeed information that we used to assess whether we thought she was telling the truth or not or whether she was coached or was making it up, for whatever reason. We were in fact instructed by the judge to use that information to make our assessment whether there was reasonable doubt or not.
I'm not sure how you separate this type of information from other information we also receive eg. the physical attractiveness of the accused and defendant and how the legal system can remove this type of bias. Based on other comments here, I'm also no longer sure about whether we, as a jury, should be using that soft information, and I'd love to see results from studies about how juries assess evidence when it is presented in different ways as suggested here.
1. One of the trials was an underage rape case and there was essentially no physical evidence. Mainly all we had to go on was 3 police interviews (2 from the alledged victim, one from the accused). As a jury, we relied on those videos to determine who we felt was telling the truth and the trust worthiness of what they were saying. I'm not saying this was a good thing necessarily, just an observation that this is what we did. I'd like to see the results with a parallel jury that relied only on written transcripts etc.
2. The judge actually gave us guidance at the beginning of both trials that in addition to what witnesses said, how they appeared to us (their demeanour) was also evidence that we could use in assessing the trust-worthiness of what they said. My understanding was that we should use our general life experience that we had acquired in our day to day living to assess the evidence of the witness. I guess there are good sides (eg. intuition based on non-verbal communication/body language) and bad sides (eg. biases) to using this approach.