Now obviously, the easiest and cheapest thing for the taxpayer would be to simply lock up the partner when a woman with a partner is murdered.
That would be unjust, even if it is nearly always right and easiest and cheapest. Ok, but MRA folks would go ballistic, so let’s make it easier:
If a woman with a male partner is murdered, we simply require the male partner to give up their cell phone’s contents. No silly paperwork for a warrant, no laws about self-incrimination or any of that, we just cite the “Taxpayer’s Efficiency Act of 2019” and they have to hand it over, or sit in jail for contempt until they do.
Is that still unjust?
It is, isn’t it?
I put it to you that if false accusations of rape, which happen rarely, justify examining phones belonging to the victims, then murder of a woman by her male partner, who is usually the perpetrator, justifies the exact same thing.
What stops us in both cases is the notion of justice. It is unjust whether the person is likely or unlikely to b a law-breaker. And we as a society have decided that justice is a greater good than saving a few bucks or making things easier for police.
Where the 4th amendment applies here is if any evidence of a different crime were found while looking for information on the first. If the phone records were acquired by a warrant, that evidence would not be admissible in court.
A warrant involves judicial oversight. Warrantless searches do not.
Step outside and talk to them if they want to interview you, and password protect your phone and demand they get a warrant if they want to look at it.
That’s why there is the Miranda warning, for example.
You should know and protect your rights. Yes. AND the police should not as a matter of course attempt to coerce you into giving them up.
One is being the accuser, to whom evidence is asked about the validity of the accusation (this law proposal). The other is to automatically accuse someone (in your proposal) and demand evidence to deem them innocent.
But as I noted in another comment, a warrant involves judicial oversight.
The police will already have access to the suspect's phone.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/vulnerable-women-routi...
It's up there with allegations of murder, except that people who are cleared of murder generally face less prejudice and discrimination than people cleared of rape.
Intentionally making false allegations should carry a sentence proportionate to the alleged crime, not to mention compensation for harm done to the reputation of the accused.
Most of these people got off easy.
The article also glosses over the fact that most of them were found guilty by a jury, whereas if the alleged rapists would've been found guilty, nobody would've spared them a second thought or cried foul.
And, in the context of rape, false allegations are vanishinly rare. In the UK commonly accepted figures say there are 90,000 rapes each year (and the real number is likely to be higher). That's a huge number of people who aren't seeing justice.
There was not only no evidence of any crime committed by the accused, there was evidence of the accusers lying.
A jury, after being presented evidence by both sides, first found the accused not guilty.
Later, a different jury, after being presented evidence by two sides, found the accusers guilty of lying.
What makes you so confident that, after reading an article that is objectively one-sided, you have a better grasp of the situation than the jurors in question?
This absolutely boggles my mind.
Maybe they all have been found not guilty by another jury by now and I just glossed over that fact?
Guilty people are found not guilty, by design, every day.
Maybe it's now deserving of a response.
But if there was some evidence along these lines, my first question would be whether rape reports are growing. One thing that used to happen was that there was an enormous amount of disincentive to report rape.
Society assumed by default that the woman was “asking for it.” The defence was allowed to grill her in open court about her sex life, and paint her as a harlot, implying or even openly arguing that she asked for it and/or deserved it.
The notion of consent was weak, to say the least.
Police where sexist AF and often laughed off reports, or went to investigate and told the suspect exactly who had reported them, opening them to retaliation.
Women reported rape much less often, because there was almost no incentive for them to do so, and that’s exactly how society liked it.
Naturally, this meant fewer accusations that couldn’t be proved, as well as outright fabrications. But also naturally, this meant many fewer guilty perpetrators were charged, much less convicted.
If changes in the way rape is viewed, investigated, and prosecuted produces many more accusations, it is not necessarily a “problem” that there are more false accusations.
If there are twice as many false accusations and simultaneously twice as many convictions, there is no problem at all, there is simply more reporting with exactly the same proportion of falsehood.
If there are twice as many false reports and four times as many convictions, perhaps society is much better off.
The fact is, false reports are sensational and get lots of attention. As they should, a false report is not only a crime, but a great injustice. We should work to discourage and disincent them.
But not at the expense of discouraging all reports. And the side-effect of invading the privacy of those eho report rape is a return to the days when there were fewer false eports because women didn’t want to report rape at all.
Regardless, it's not unreasonable to expect that in a legal matter all correspondence between two parties will be examined in order to determine what is just. We have to also be careful not to return to a time when an accusation alone is enough to determine guilt.
As a random example, see https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/06/believe-all-women-n...
If your "easiest and cheapest" solution involves the violation of liberties, let alone people in vulnerable positions such as rape victims, you might wish to rethink it.
> It's evidence that would probably be required for the case in court anyway, right?
If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear, right?
I genuinely don't understand how this is still a valid argument in the minds of some people. Yes, it might probably be required, but the law was written like this for a reason. You're further disincentivizing rape victims from reporting the crime, which already is a huge issue due to stigmatization and the psychological trauma.
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And as others have mentioned, I would like to see a source on "'Fake' rape reports being a growing problem", that would warrant this kind of response.
If the investigation surfaces any evidence at all that the defendant might be innocent (or hints at the existence of said evidence), it's a gross miscarriage of justice not to bring this evidence forward.
> The prosecution is under a duty to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry in an investigation, and to disclose to the defence any material it uncovers which may be reasonably capable of undermining the prosecution case or assisting the defence.
Nobody said the prosecution had to do anything. Where do you think you saw that? But the police are required to investigate. It has been the police who have been at fault, and censored rightly so, for not finding this evidence in these cases.
That’s part of “discovery”, and cases have been thrown out because prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense.