After the news broke that Welsh footballer Ched Evans was acquitted of a rape conviction, supporters on social media not only celebrated the outcome of the trial but called for his accuser to be punished.
In 2012 Evans was found guilty of raping a 19-year-old woman who was too intoxicated to give consent, but the ruling was overturned on Friday at Cardiff Crown Court. Evans served two years of his sentence.
His fans quickly took to Twitter to call for the woman to be jailed, despite there being no evidence of the victim having committed perjury. Rob Murphy, a football supporter with over 17,000 followers, tweeted: “Ched Evans has lost 5 years of his career & life based on a lie. Hopefully justice prevails to convict the person who fabricated this story.” Another fan, Ed Elliman, argued that “the girl that lied about Ched Evans raping her should be put on trial, no 1 should be able to ruin a life and get away with it”.
“That lassie that ruined Ched Evans career should be put in prison for the amount a time he spent in there, shocking ruinin a mans life” wrote another fan, to his 20,000 followers. And Frank Major, with a following of 53,000, tweeted before the trial: “if Ched Evans is found not guilty in this appeal then the alleged ‘victim’ needs to be sent to prison… its scandalous IMO”.
It wasn’t only fans but also journalists and public personalities who joined the chorus of people saying that Evans’s accuser lied to the court. Julia Hartley-Brewer of the Daily Telegraph said to her followers that “whoever brought the #ChedEvans rape case to court in the 1st place has a lot of questions to answer. No evidence any crime took place at all”. Online sports StreamPlanet tweeted “So now Ched Evans is found not guilty, will the girl be sentenced? Think of what he’s been through…”, and retweeted supporters’ comments like “she’s the guilty one now”. And Mark Bryceland, an e-sports star from Scotland, said: “sad that Ched Evans had his whole career ruined because of some lying girl, absolutely sickening.”
But Britons concerned that this ruling has energized what they see as endorsement of rape culture have argued that football fans need to learn about how the court system actually works. Bobby Shawarma reminded “people who want to weigh in on the Ched Evans case: please take the time to understand that, legally, ‘not guilty’ does not mean ‘she lied’.”
Due process under English law, whose proceedings have been in operation for over eight hundred years, has long dictated that a guilty verdict can only be reached if the defendant’s crime can be proven ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ – not outright proof, which would be impossible to secure much of the time. In any criminal trial, a jury’s ‘not guilty’ verdict means no more than that the defendant’s guilt cannot be outright assumed with enough weight to be sufficiently certain that the crime was committed. Dr Steve Frank of the National Constitution Center (USA) explains that “the difference between ‘factual guilt’ and ‘legal innocence’” is that “just because you’re found ‘not guilty” doesn’t mean that you’re ‘innocent’.”
The importance of the fallibility and secrecy of the jury room is often misunderstood by members of the public interpreting high profile criminal cases. Mercel Berlins reminded Guardian readers in 2007 “we are not allowed to discover what takes place in a real jury room, so we can’t be sure the factors taken into account are correct in law. There are indications that myths and prejudices play too prominent a part. Some jurors…seemed to pay more attention to their own past experiences than to the evidence; others were unduly troubled by the woman’s failure to report the rape until days afterwards, though there are good psychological reasons for such delay.”
Since nobody is able to know what went on in the jury room, news reports and social media posts highlighting that the jury in the Evans trial took ‘only two hours’ to reach a verdict are hinting with only speculative force that the victim’s case was weak.
Experts instead frequently point out there are so many different ways in which a jury could come to a swift verdict that the length of time alone proves nothing. Douglas Keene told CNN in 2011 that “a quick verdict is usually linked to strongly held beliefs of the jurors” and not merely facts; that juries work more efficiently when they contain “little personality conflict” within them; and that often in a speedy jury “there is a common belief about what the evidence showed”.
Defence lawyers know to address the common beliefs of a jury, and the new evidence on which Evans’s appeal was decided included a heavy emphasis on character testimonials about the victim. The Guardian reports that ‘judges gave the go-ahead for two former sexual partners of the alleged victim to give explicit evidence in court’, after the defence’s case file included testimony from at least 14 men and women who knew the victim. It cannot be ruled out that the jury may have had preconceived notions about promiscuity and consent, which can often be used by lawyers and others in positions of responsibility to provide cover for sexual predators.
Laura Bates wrote in the International Business Times that this case is “a masterclass in why women don’t report rape”, referring to the statistic that only 5.7% of reported rape cases in the UK end with a conviction. Bates explained: “if you knew that lawyers could bring past sexual partners into court to shame you with your most private personal encounters, would you come forward?”
If a sexual assault defendant being found not guilty were somehow proof that the victim had lied, nearly 95% of rape cases that make it to trial would have to be false accusations, since that is the proportion of rape trial defendants who are found not guilty in the UK. In reality, however, false reporting of rape is commonly estimated to be between 2-8%, and Donna Zuckerberg points out that “when you consider that many victims choose not to go to the police at all, the ratio of people who have actually experienced sexual assault to people who have falsely claimed to have experienced sexual assault gets even larger. The number of false rape allegations is not zero, but it’s small.”
The process known as slut shaming is both a common legal tactic in criminal defence teams and, often, a cultural habit that frequently occurs not only in juries but also among judges – as was seen in the cases of the Steubenville rapists and Brock Turner. Another recent example in British football is that of Adam Johnson, who was recently sentenced to 6 years in prison for sexual activity with a child. Johnson’s legal team, and many media commentators, said the victim “knew exactly what she was doing” in an attempt to portray her as a promiscuous liar – despite, just like in Evans’s case, there being no evidence of the victim committing perjury.
Adam Johnson’s former girlfriend, upon hearing the news of Ched Evans being cleared, celebrated on social media by writing “about time!!! Team Ched!”
Some of the legally uninformed support for Evans has caused skeptics to wonder aloud if the victim’s guilt of perjury as presumed by members of the public is not so much about the facts of the case, and more about liking football or hating women. Soul singer Steve Brookstein tweeted prior to the verdict: “seriously hope Ched Evans is found innocent if only to shut up the self hating men and angry radical feminists.”
Image: Along time ago
