UPDATED: Mistrial is declared in sexual-assault trial of entertainer Bill Cosby

[Igel]

21. Maybe.

It may just be a way to accept what's considered an unjust verdict. The assumption is still that the plaintiff is correct and the defendant guilty under the law, and a reasonable jury, composed of right-thinking people like yourself, would agree with you. A lot of people heard a woman or group of women say he raped them; that was it, he was guilty, what need is there for a trial?

It may be that some jurors looked at the evidence, the law, and said that under the law he's not guilty. Maybe they didn't believe her narrative of what happened--it's imprecise, and could easily have been put together after the fact. Perhaps they thought there was enough doubt that "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" wasn't applicable and so they had to find him not guilty.

We can't tell. We didn't watch all the testimony. It may be a celebrity effect; it might be that under the law it's reasonable to say he's guilty.


It always pays to remember what memory is like, how flexible it is. The two examples I like to keep in mind are matters of public record. One is the school scandal from the '90s, where a lot of teachers and administrators lost their careers and reputations because the kids accused them of sexual abuse. Except that after the trials, after their reputations and careers were ruined, close examination of the evidence showed that the defense lawyers had messed up. Looking at the layout of the building, looking at schedules and who was on the premises at specific times, the kids' narratives couldn't have been correct. Carefully comparing the "counseling" with the kids' testimony, and correlating it with how the kids' narratives changed over time, it became obvious the kids had the idea planted and then built memories around the ideas. Once the ideas were planted, listening to others' stories gave kids more confidence that theirs were correct and provided additional details they could incorporate into their stories. The defense attorney had just assumed that memories were memories. You might forget something, but you certainly couldn't confidently remember something that didn't happen and was unlike anything that ever happened to you. (Yeah. Like alien abduction.)

In like fashion, there was a bishop or cardinal that was briefly caught up in the Catholic "pedophilia" scandal. He'd been based in Los Angeles for a number of years and was popular and well liked, but was later transferred to someplace ... maybe in the mid-West. Anyway, a woman in LA said he'd assaulted her sexually several times in his office well over a decade before. She described the office, the events, and fortunately for the truth gave specific dates. The assumption was jumped to that he'd been transferred because higher-ups knew. The poor woman had very concrete, very specific information, and the accusations made national front page news. Until a few days later when the story quietly vanished, because for some of the dates she'd been so certain about the man was at a conference in another state and his picture was on the front page of the local newspaper at the time. That led support to his claims that for other dates she said when his planner said he was out of town that he really was out of town, but, you know, that didn't actually make the accusation and the news story go away. What made it vanish overnight was when it came out that she'd been mentally ill and received treatment. A few people said that made it more important to believe her, we can't "blame the victim," but the story was dead--the alleged perpetrator may not get any respect, but she was just a bad witness. Then there was all the evidence saying the presumed bad guy couldn't have done it.... Otherwise her memories were precise, specific, and wholly fictional. In her case, she heard about all the other assault cases and built her memories only after hearing others'.