D.J. Webb
I don’t have time for a long blog today. But I note with respect to the Ched Evans case that people are being condemned for unmasking the name of the accuser (aka the “victim”, if any real rape took place – a significant “if” if you read the details of this case), and apparently “forcing” her to move house several times.
Then there was the Mark Pritchard case. A Conservative MP accused of rape has called for “anonymity” to be granted to the accused.
I think libertarians will broadly agree that neither the accuser nor the accused should have anonymity. If a woman has been raped, she should be prepared to go public with the accusation and have her identity known. The idea that a woman can have a man imprisoned on an entirely marginal case of “rape” (date rape, footballer rape of someone who has gone to a hotel for the purpose of sex, etc), and then can be protected by the police from having to shoulder the consequences of that, including any social opprobrium that attaches to her for fabricating an allegation, is abhorrent. There should be no anonymous accusations.
By the same token, there is a public interest in knowing if someone has been accused, even if he is subsequently found not guilty. As people can (theoretically) only be found guilty of a charge proven beyond reasonable doubt, the law operates, or should operate, in such a way that many guilty men are found innocent. This is how it should be. But then someone who has had repeated accusations of a certain type raised against him, even if he has been found innocent of them all, may still find that social opinion against him responds negatively. Why should it be otherwise? Social opinion does not operate on a “beyond reasonable doubt” basis.
I believe that court cases should nearly all be open to the public. There may be an exception for genuine cases of national security. But in the main, we should all be able to troop along and listen to the progress of rape cases in court. There should be no anonymity. Justice should be public justice.
I will add that this business of granting anonymity to children who commit very serious offences ought to stop too. A 14- or 15-year-old who commits rape or murder is not behaving as a child. Real children don’t commit adult crimes. Family courts should also be open to the public. We read all of the time of children being taken away from a family by order of court, and that the smirking judge has facilitated this by an order of anonymity. We need to know what the state is doing to people.
In a free society, the courts of justice are an arm of the people as a whole, and not of the state bureaucracy. Open the justice system to the public in nearly every case.
