He was best friends with a gang rapist, attended parties with the gang rapist while he was raping women (who later confessed to his wife what he had done to one of the victims, though he told the story as if it were consensual.) The odds that Kavanaugh was not also a gang rapist are vanishingly small.
No, it’s really not. While we have evidence, as you note, that people misremember details of things they experienced, we don’t have evidence that “memories that far back are more or less worthless.” A victim of a car crash, for example, might forget the color of the car that hit him, or he might even remember a false detail, like, say, blood on the windshield, but he never forgets the fact of the accident or its aftermath (barring some kind of head trauma.) He is forever, for the rest of his life, going to be shaped by his experience.
It’s extraordinarily rare that memories spontaneously resurface, the evidence that people block out unpleasant things (again, barring head trauma) is minimal to nonexistent, and in cases like the McMartin pre-school trial, we are talking about small children coached and manipulated into using their imaginations. In certain therapeutic settings, therapists can successfully implant false memories in the minds of victims, so certainly there is latitude for the abuse of our flawed memory capacities - but this is a rare occurrence. And it in no way discredits Ford or women like her, who have not only a clear recollection of events but a documented history of seeking therapeutic services for the sexual assault.
Proof is a word with many different meanings. Mathematical proof is only one of them. There are several legal definitions, there is the scientific definition of passing empirical predictions. There are probably other meanings as well.
These days even mathematical proofs are so lengthy and convoluted that it can take a lot of careful examination to determine if the logic is absolutely rigorous or not.
It is worth noting that the word “prove” has changed meanings in the last couple centuries. It originally meant test. As I testing the viability of yeast. Or photographs. There is a book written by Gauss around 1800 (in Latin, but the words translate readily) in which the following statement appears: “Lagrange proved this by induction but we give the first demonstration using infinite descent.” This is doubly curious since infinite descent is essentially synonymous with what we call (mathematical) induction.
Speaking of proof and evidence I don’t think a lot of people realize just how high the “beyond the reasonable doubt” standard is when comes to prosecuting crimes.
(I think about this when people say Anthony Fauci should prosecuted for his conduct in handling the Covid 19 epidemic.)
In theory, yes, but in practice, plenty of juries have convicted defendants on really low thresholds. My memory may be off on this one, but I think back to the 1980s or 1990s case where a black Texan man was convicted by a jury and executed all because some old white woman standing a far distance away at night, without her glasses, claimed he was the murderer - the sole witness and no other evidence.
I don’t think anyone knows just how high the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard is. Just try sometime to get anyone in the legal industry to tell you a number for it.
You remember correctly, but unfortunately what you’re remembering is the plot of Twelve Angry Men.
It was some real life case. It was a case mentioned in Newsweek around maybe 1999. Very likely my memory is mixing that with Twelve Angry Men as you said and I have the details wrong, but it was definitely a real-life case in Newsweek, with photo of the black man, lethal injection, his last appeals on the basis of innocence, flimsy evidence, all that. The case was being cited as an example of how low the bar for conviction actually is in real life.
First, I’m going to make it clear I’m posting as a poster and not a moderator.
@Spice_Weasel made an excellent post refuting what you said here, and I’ll add my agreement to her comments.
Further, to deliberately conflate what happened to children in the McMartin preschool case with what a normal young woman of college age or older will “misremember” about a sexual assault that occurs on her person by someone that is known to her – meaning not a stranger – especially if she reports the incident to others close in time to the event, as Christine Blasey Ford did, is misguided and gross.
It’s also wrong. In this I have some direct experience very similar to that suffered by Blasey Ford. You don’t forget. Ever.
I certainly understand about misremembered events and how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be. But don’t bootstrap those comparatively rare instances into something that applies in all cases. If that were true, eyewitness testimony, whether recent or remote in time, would have no place in our system of justice. It is often very reliable, so we continue to use it.
Your posts upset a lot of people on this board. While you may be technically right that memories can certainly be affected by distance in time, I don’t think you can substitute assertions about how those memories may or may not be corrupted for everyone and act like that is sufficient to invalidate Kavanaugh’s behavior or that of other people who do the same disgusting things to others.
You’re leaving a lot of people here with a very bad taste in their mouths. Is that really how you wish to be viewed on this Board?
I suggest that you give others some credit and respect for being able to remember events that were forced onto their bodies. Unless it has happened to you, you really don’t know what you would remember. You have a right to post your very unpopular view. But don’t expect to be appreciated or valued for it.