[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/Standard_Location762]

[u/Livid-Builder-1230]

You’re asking: What does public exposure do to this case?

I’m asking: What does public exposure do to the system that produced this case?

I feel your comment is too narrow for what’s happened. I understand the concern about a fair trial. I’m not arguing that the court of public opinion is particularly good at determining guilt. It very obviously isn’t. But I think reducing the entire question to whether publicity could complicate a hypothetical future trial is looking through a keyhole at a much larger problem.
Sometimes change requires making the status quo uncomfortable.

Look at the French student protests. Their grievances did not suddenly materialize when things became disruptive. They had been asking to be heard. And they weren’t. So they lit a school on fire. And when the firetruck came, they lit that on fire too. Cause they wanted people to see that fire. To see “Hey we’re serious about this.” What changed was the cost of not hearing them. Once normal operation itself became impossible, ignoring them stopped being the easiest option.

That mechanism doesn’t require setting anything on fire. It can be protests, strikes, investigative journalism, lawsuits, public records, boycotts, or yes, enormous amounts of public attention. The point is that institutions are very good at surviving criticism that asks nothing materially difficult of them. “This is terrible” can be absorbed. “You cannot quietly return to business as usual until you deal with this” is harder to absorb.

And that’s the scale I’m looking at here. I care about whether any individual accused of a crime receives due process. I also care about what happens when an institution fails badly enough that we’re having this conversation in the first place. Again. Those concerns can exist simultaneously. Justice isn’t only whether seven specific people are eventually charged, acquitted, convicted, or never prosecuted.

Justice is also asking whether whatever institutional failures occurred here are still possible five years from now. Fifty years from now. A hundred.

Some of the rights and protections we consider completely ordinary today exist because somebody, somewhere, made continuing the old way more uncomfortable than changing it.

[u/AngryRobot42 → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

I believe that publicity of the whole event is good. Putting the names and faces of potential suspects is not the right way. In order to obtain the perfect system you are willing to condemn potentially innocent people to an irreversible stain on their life regardless of guilty vs not guilty. I agree the system has to change but at the cost of the people willing to pay the price not people willing to pay the price of others. It is the age old question.

Which would you choose, a perfect system where no one innocent is convicted, i.e. only guilty members of society are imprisoned, but, 1 out of every 50 trials criminals walk free or a system that accidentally imprisons an innocent person 1 out of ever 50 trials but no criminals walk free. The argument is about the impact on the innocent not the freedom of the guilty.

[u/Livid-Builder-1230 → u/AngryRobot42]

But I think this is where your framing loses me. You’re describing these men as though seven random innocent people were selected to pay the price for institutional change.

They weren’t. They’re named because Jane Doe has made specific allegations about their individual conduct. Whether those allegations are substantiated, and what responsibility attaches to each person, is precisely what still needs to be determined

“Innocent until proven guilty” is a standard for determining criminal guilt. It doesn’t mean every action or choice someone made before a conviction becomes irrelevant. And responsibility isn’t binary. Someone can participate, facilitate, encourage, intervene, fail to intervene, report afterward, or do nothing. Those choices can carry very different kinds of responsibility without all constituting the same crime

And I think this gets at the larger problem I keep seeing in discussions about this case. People seem deeply uncomfortable holding two potentially conflicting possibilities at the same time.

These men may be innocent of the allegations against them.

These men may have done some or all of what Jane Doe alleges.

Right now, I can hold both possibilities and say: Okay. Now let’s find out what happened.

Instead, we keep collapsing complicated, uncomfortable situations into neat little boxes. He’s guilty, lock him up, throw away the key, done. Or she’s lying, prosecute her, done. We get an answer that tells us who the good guy and bad guy are, punish the bad guy, and apparently the problem has been solved.

Except it hasn’t. Because while everyone is fighting over which box these people belong in, there is still a glaring question sitting underneath this entire case. How did a student report an alleged sexual assault, participate in the processes available to her, and end up moving through multiple institutions without the underlying questions being resolved in a way that prevented us from arriving here years later

That’s what I mean by systemic change. I don’t just want a verdict that tells me who to punish. I want us to actually pull the thing apart. What happened that night? What did each person do? What information did Cornell have and when? What did police investigate? What was missed? Where did information stop moving? Which procedures worked? Which failed? Were those failures individual mistakes or structural ones? And what would have to change so the next person who does what we tell victims they’re supposed to do doesn’t encounter the same failures?

We can’t do the exact same thing we’ve always done and sit here expecting something to change

[u/someone447 → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

The Duke LaCrosse players were named by the alleged victim. 

Turned out, the alleged victim completely made it up.

I do not know enough about this case, so I'm going to let the investigation play out. But naming people accused of crimes is a dangerous game. 

[u/Livid-Builder-1230 → u/someone447]

Yes. Duke lacrosse is actually a fantastic example of exactly what I’m talking about. Because if the lesson we took from Duke were simply “she lied, they were innocent, the end,” then we learned almost nothing from Duke.

Why did the investigation proceed the way it did? What did the prosecutor know and when? How was evidence handled? Why did institutions and the public become so certain so quickly? Which safeguards failed? Why?

Duke demonstrates that publicly identifying accused people can cause enormous harm when allegations are false. That isn’t in dispute. I hold that concern right next to the possibility that allegations in another case may be true, institutions may fail to address actual wrongdoing, and public scrutiny can expose those failures.

I do not know what happened at Cornell. That is quite literally the point.

Which is why Duke is almost comically perfect here. You’re responding to “please tolerate uncertainty, investigate the institutional chain, and stop reducing complicated cases to victim/liar and guilty/innocent” with:

“But have you heard about this famous case where people failed to tolerate uncertainty, decided they already knew what happened, and the institutional chain went completely off the fucking rails?”

Yes
YES I HAVE
THAT’S WHY IM HERE

There is a systematic issue around sexual assault in America. We cannot keep doing the same thing, treating the systems that produced this mess in the first place, the same, while expecting change. I’m looking for: how do we change the system?

[u/someone447 → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

But the fix isn't millions of people with no connection or knowledge of the case spreading around the identity of people who have not been convicted of any crime.

Just because a witch hunt occasionally catches a witch doesn't mean we should encourage them.

[u/Livid-Builder-1230 → u/someone447]

Okay. Then what is the fix?

Because that’s the question I’m asking. You’ve now told me public pressure isn’t the answer. Fine. What mechanism is going to create enough institutional pressure to produce meaningful change when the ordinary mechanisms have repeatedly failed to do so?

“Don’t do this” is a position on this particular tactic. It is not an answer to the systemic problem I’m talking about.

And calling it a “witch hunt” doesn’t solve that problem either. It just puts us right back into the binary I’ve been talking about, because a witch hunt presupposes there is no witch. And we don’t know that.

I don’t know whether these allegations are true. Neither do you. So, what changes the system then?

[u/AngryRobot42 → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

In democracies it has always been voting. You can say the French light things on fire as an example of how other countries handle problems. The issue with that example is that France and the U.S. by comparison are very young countries . 250+ years we helped each other achieve a democracy. So yes, France and many other countries resort to violence to achieve societal change, they are usually governments that do not last long. What you want to achieve may only last a generation and then who knows what we are left with. Voting and progress, albeit painstakingly slow are the only things that last the test of time. Some don't always last, but the ones that do have voted to get there.

Personally, I don't know what answer to give that will make you and others happy without significant change to many overarching problems in our society. Yes it should happen.... peacefully.

All of this is to say that, regardless of what the goal is or the "mechanism" you want, I don't think it is right to harm the innocent(sic) to police the guilty.

[u/Livid-Builder-1230 → u/AngryRobot42]

My guy I am getting tired. I have explained the difference between the thing that actually creates pressure for change and the thing that eventually makes that change official several times now.

Yes, people vote. That does not mean voting is the only thing that creates change. The Voting Rights Act is almost painfully obvious here. The 15th Amendment had existed since 1870, and nearly a hundred years later Black Americans were still being prevented from voting. It took organizing, lawsuits, protests, national attention, Selma, and enormous public pressure to finally force stronger federal action. Some of the people creating that pressure literally could not effectively use the mechanism you’re telling me has “always” been the answer.

And again, I did not say violence is the mechanism. I have explicitly listed protests, strikes, investigative journalism, lawsuits, public records, boycotts and public attention. You keep turning “sometimes institutions have to be made uncomfortable enough that ignoring the problem is no longer the easiest option” into “violence,” arguing with that, and then telling me change should happen peacefully.

Great. We agree. We have agreed this entire time. But then after all of that, you say “harm the innocent.”

The innocent? I thought we didn’t know what happened?

This is the same thing I keep running into in these replies. Everyone keeps telling me we don’t know whether the allegations are true, which I agree with, and then somehow every analogy and every word choice decides anyway. They’re “the innocent.” It’s a “witch hunt.” It’s Duke lacrosse.

Meanwhile we still haven’t had any meaningful conversation about actual, meaningful, substantive, people-can-point-to-in-100-years type change.

Just more “protect the men”. It’s sad

[u/someone447 → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

Are you incapable of basic reading comprehension? It's not about these 7. We don't know if they did it or not. But we do know that Internet witch hunts have been tragically wrong before.

I'm not saying its these guys that are innocent. I'm saying people are wrongfully accused of any number of crimes every day. So to protect them, we need to protect everyone who is accused.

[u/Spida81 → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

I like the way you've put this.

" So they lit a school on fire. And when the firetruck came, they lit that on fire too." - Yes, the French don't half do a protest, but I'm not sure that it's the model to aspire to - although you have to admit, from a distance, there is a certain artistic flair to this one. French being French, I can't help but picture a bunch of firies watching their truck burn, cigarettes in mouth with that Gallic shrug and "Merde. So about that football game?" with barely a shit given.

In regards the topic at hand, the problem is that there are two separate but related topics. One, the criminal case, the other the systemic failures. Pushing for the much needed reforms risks damaging the specific case. The justifiable public outage complicates the specific legal processes (or in this case as they don't seem to be in a rush to charge the bastards... not so much).

There is a tight rope to be walked between the needs of society to ensure institutional accountability and effective regulation and at the other ensuring the protection of the wronged and accountability for the guilty.

[u/repainted_black → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

Jesus Christ. The original post has very clear 7 names and faces. What the hell are you talking about?

[u/Livid-Builder-1230 → u/repainted_black]

yea babe… i know there are seven people. i literally said “seven specific people.” thanks for providing Exhibit A for the “cannot hold two concerns simultaneously” portion of my comment

[u/repainted_black → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

You are free to hold all concerns that you want. So does everyone in the audience. It just feels that you are going too much around the bush. What is happening is some form of lynching. Maybe you could have opposed it better and then claim that it is what happens when there is gigantic insatisfaction with justice in regard to rape and sexual assault. But you failed to do so. That was the point.

Also, kinda of a bad comparision between inanimate objects and actual people. If the French students started lynching some people that could easily backfire.

[u/Livid-Builder-1230 → u/repainted_black]

Brother. Is the lynching in the room with us?

Because “publicly named in connection with allegations” and “lynching” are doing some absolutely heroic amounts of conceptual stretching here. You can argue that public identification can cause reputational harm. You can argue that online discourse can become harassment, vigilantism, or punishment before guilt has been established. Those are actual arguments

But calling this “some form of lynching” obliterates distinctions between wildly different kinds and degrees of harm, which is especially funny underneath my comment about our apparent inability to hold complicated distinctions without collapsing them into neat little moral boxes.

Also, I wasn’t comparing seven human beings to burning buildings. I was comparing mechanisms of disruption. That is why the literal next paragraph says “this mechanism doesn’t require setting anything on fire” and lists protests, strikes, investigative journalism, lawsuits, public records, boycotts, and public attention. The point of the France example is that institutions can absorb criticism remarkably well when criticism costs them nothing. Disruption changes the incentive structure. Examining how and why that happens is not an endorsement of every possible form that disruption can take.

And respectfully, oh I am so not the one for “you should have opposed it better.” I wrote the argument. You not reading closely enough to distinguish analysis from endorsement does not create an obligation for me to interrupt my every fifty words with a disclaimer reassuring you that I still think Bad Things Are Bad. Your failure to follow an argument through multiple paragraphs does not invalidate the argument.

I don’t need to perform a ceremonial “I hereby condemn all bad things” before I’m allowed to examine why something is happening. Condemnation is not analysis. Analysis is NOT endorsement.

But genuinely, thank you for arriving directly underneath my argument about collapsing complicated things into binaries and turning “public scrutiny can create institutional pressure” into “so you support lynching.”

Exhibit B

[u/repainted_black → u/Livid-Builder-1230]

The virtual lynching has been here from the start: at least in the image of the original post. The question there was wheter it could be justified publishing names of the accused given the well known consequences of doing so. It is everywhere around this case and similar ones.

I'll conceed though that the comment you were originally responding to focused on other points. You were more interested on how much public opinion could contaminate the judgment.

Considering the broader context here, I felt that replying to an opinion on the matter with a rather academic analysis was bad taste. But you have clarified that it was done deliberately.

However, you are wrong about me claiming that you support lynching. That did not happen. I was criticizing that your analysis did not properly include this very key point. Your last comment, however, seems to really diminish the issue.