Consider a man having sex with a young girl. The girl can be anywhere from 12-18 years old. Let’s for simplicity sake presume that the younger the girl, the higher the political cost to punish “early starter.”
If she is 18, then he would have said so. If he appealed the fifth, then the girl must have been 12-17. However, we knew that if he appealed the fifth then she is at most 17. If she were 17, he would have said so. We know she can’t be 18. We know that penalty for fucking 16 years old is stiffer than fucking 17 years old. So if she’s 17 he would have said so. If he remained silent, she must have been 16. And by the same reasoning she must be 5 or a fetus.
Anyway, the point is, even with right to remain silent, most defendants often have intensive to talk if his act may not be as bad as it seems. Now for criminals, not only they have a right to remain silent, but the Jury is often instructed not to speculate on why the defendant are silent. Strange ha?
Not necessarily.
It is not up to the defendant to prove his innocence, it is up to the prosecution to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) that he is guilty. If the prosecution can prove that the accused had sex with the girl, they can certainly prove her age.
If the defendant does not testify, the jury would almost certainly be instructed that his/her silence is not to be held against him/her.
In your example, if the victim of the attack is 18, that alone is still not a reason for the defendant to testify, or to admit to the attack.
Legally speaking, juries are told that they are not allowed to draw any conclusions about a defendant’s decision not to testify. That’s not to say that they don’t do it anyway, but they’re not supposed to.
I took it to mean statutory rape, witch often is consensual,the outcome of witch might rest on if he reasonably expected her to be of age. Say if he picked her up in a bar perhaps.
We don’t have the presumption that anyone taking the 5th is hiding something. This is done because there are many reasons why someone would remain silent even if they did not commit the crime.
Though I’m not sure what would happen with the example in the OP. How is the defendant supposed to plead not guilty to the crime without saying that he thought the girl was over 18? This is assuming that the OP example is crime that requires the defendant to know he was having sex with an underage girl. Otherwise he would just be convicted based on the girl’s age no matter what he says.
And just to be a bit pedantic, the person is not a “criminal” until he’s convicted. I’m sure if you think about it, you can come up with a number of scenarios in which a person who did nothing wrong could be accused of a crime. So it’s not that a “criminal” has a right to remain silent. If the prosecution does not have enough evidence, the accused certainly has neither the motive nor the obligation to provide it for them.
They don’t need the defendant to tell them her age. They can just find that in public records. The point is what age he believed her to be. There are women as old as 20 that look underage. Hollywood uses them all the time.
The paradox relies on the man being significantly more anal retentive than the rest of humanity. I would also note that the “Unexpected Hanging Paradox” is a much better statement of the paradox, so I’m going to talk about it rather than the version that teguh123 used.
Most people would consider “unexpected” to mean “random”. By definition, you can’t predict the outcome of a random function. So while the prisoner would certainly be able to determine by Friday morning that he was going to die at noon, it hasn’t really broken the judge’s word for anyone but pedantic semanticists.
The issue is simpler with the version given in the OP. His lawyer will know the real age of the girl and his lawyer will have a good idea of what age the jury will presume if the number is not made public. If the defendant is young and handsome, they’ll guess the girl is older, if he’s middle-aged and introverted, the jury will probably guess she is younger. Then the lawyer will guess how old he can make the girl seem by introducing suggestive data over the course of the trial. And then he’ll weigh that against being public with the girl’s real age and which path will be the best for his client and decide an answer based on all of that.
Reality is a different game from hypothetical realities. In the real world there’s a lot of randomness and complex equations that go into making a choice.
It’s like the idea of mathematical lines of infinitely small diameter. They don’t exist in the real world, but we can hypothesize about them all we want.