Trial with No Evidence

Guilty because accused.

Accusation alone causes punishment.

Trial without evidence.

It appears the media is causing people to suffer punishment based only on accusations and this has to be morally wrong.

People are suffering humiliation, stress, and even job losses without any evidence of wrongdoing being properly examined. If wrongdoing that is actually harmful or illegal has occurred then it should be punished but punishment should always follow examination of the evidence and a reasoned judgement by impartial people.

Any one can do great harm now simply by publicly accusing another person of “inappropriate” behaviour. There is no clear definition of what this is, let alone any evidence that legal or moral codes were broken. We have gone from a need to prove actual harm to accepting anyone's word that they were caused distress by any utterance or action of another, even if they have never met. This is the effect of the wording of the rules, in the U.K., regarding hate crimes. I am severely distressed and made anxious by every economic pronouncement from Mr. Corbyn and the present British labour party and I am not alone in this distress, so why is it legal for them to make such pronouncements?

The current fashion for accusations that a public figure behaved inappropriately 20 or 30 years ago is destroying any concept of evidential trail and considered judgement.

How many people can prove what they were doing at a specific time 30 years ago? Just claiming someone did something that caused distress years ago is not evidence or proof it occurred. Nor is a claim of distress proof that any crime has been committed. A thief gets distressed by being apprehended; that does not make the apprehension unlawful. Claiming that a person who has been lied about can go to court to clear their name is not viable. We all know that most accusers do not have the money to pay compensation and we all know the cost of bringing a slander or libel case is going to leave the wronged person out of pocket. This is so even when they can prove that lies have been told. I repeat earlier question how many can prove what they were doing at a specific time in the distant past? How do you prove a lie is a lie? You need evidence to prove lies are being told but it seems that the liar does not need evidence to ruin someone.

The media in general, all aspects of it from newspapers and television, to social media, have to take responsibility for the damage they do by publishing claims that cannot be proven. The police in the UK are also at fault for giving publicity to claims against celebrities without having found any evidence the claims are factual. The excuse used by the police bosses is they they want other claimants to come forward. This is an invitation for any and all, compensation-seeking or attention-seeking liars, to claim themselves to be victims. They know they do not need to provide evidence, they know they will not be punished for telling lies, they know this is a crime with no punishment. They can hardly be guilty of wasting police time when senior police officers ask them to make the claims. The media as a whole joins in the frenzy of speculation, each section trying to be more sensational than the other. Newspapers get away with it by claiming they are reporting the accusations and so not making false or unprovable accusations themselves. Social media claims they are not responsible for the posts made by users of the service.

All of them are spreading gossip and rumour, often malicious fake news. They do great harm to individuals, cause pain in families, and even deny a nation a competent political leadership by hounding an individual. Claiming they did not start the rumour and so have no responsibility is like saying it is okay to throw petrol into a burning house as long as they did not light the match that started the fire.

It is time we, as individuals and as society, went back to the notion of it being a sin to bear false witness.

Unscrupulous and anonymous political activists can falsely accuse a political opponent of horrible activities, knowing that some voters will turn against the accused, simply because they have been accused, no evidence being necessary.

There is also a tendency to try and apply recently established codes of conduct, retrospectively. Judging the activities of people who lived five hundred years ago, as if they had the same codes of conduct that we have now, is futile and pointless. It is the same as criticising them for the use of sailing ships instead of airplanes.

Crimes and harmful activities need to be prevented and the perpetrators of such crimes need to be tried, judged and punished. The proliferation of accusations without evidence, is actually going to hinder the process of dealing with real crimes. The damming of a person just because they are accused is a dangerous down hill run with no way of stopping.

Unless this is curtailed, every politician and every celebrity is going to spend all their energy fending off false accusations while the real criminals are left to profit from their crimes.

A legal limit to the time between an alleged act and the accusation will help as will application of the law that punishes wrongful accusation. The banning of publishing an accused person's name until charges have been made will prevent some of the harm but this will not stop the anonymous social media lies and false innuendo. People who post claims bear a direct personal responsibility to be able to actually provide clear evidence and prove those claims accurate.

As a footnote, I have seen there is now a new mobile phone App called the Self Defence app; that if you are scared by someone following close behind you, you turn it on and turn and point the camera at the person. It then photos that person and calls the cops with your location. How many innocent people are going to be investigated by police simply by walking behind a person of the opposite sex? Men can fear a women behind them is going to get close and then start screaming rape so this applies to everyone. How many tens of thousands of calls are the cop going to get?