Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Dave Lee Travis: Another Yewtree travesty of justice
Where is the evidence?
An accusation is not evidence.
An accusation requires evidence even to begin to be established.
Parallel accusations are not evidence, and they are not mutually corroboratory simply for being in parallel; especially when the context is a high-profile police trawl of a celebrity, because self-evidently this is almost guaranteed to generate multiple false allegation.
False allegation of sexual assault, notably rape, is commonplace, and research – along with examination of media-reported cases – shows the often incredible triviality of motivation.
Then there is 'false memory' of various forms, which is a major problem with 'historic cases' such as this – an alleged incident 20 years ago.
The CPS should never have brought this case, which is a re-trial of what was itself a trial that never have been brought. It should never have passed even first-base in consideration, but such is the serious anti-male prejudice of the CPS that the case was progressed in the hope that most of the jury would share similar prejudices. On this occasion, most did -- but some did not: conviction was on a majority verdict only.
On top of all this is the triviality of the alleged offence: fondling breasts is barely even a serious misdemeanour, never mind a notable criminal offence. It's straining definition to term it 'sexual assault' when the genitals of neither alleged perpetrator not putative victim are in any way involved -- the term 'groping' is improperly applied to anything other than hands on genitals. And the usual context is of frivolity (even if that may be a cover for unwanted fondling).
The whole Yewtree fiasco is near beyond belief, and will be seen in retrospect as a stark manifestation of the loony era of 'identity politics'.
# posted by Steve Moxon @ 5:13 pm 
