It most certainly is not the same. A jury is not asked to find a defendant “innocent,” they are asked to find him “not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” They may well think him guilty, but have enough of a small, lingering doubt about the case that they cannot convict. **
This is the case in the US as well (SDMB litigators, correct me if I’m wrong, since I don’t deal with this area of the law with any frequency).
If OJ had been found guilty, then the only issue in the civil trial would be the amount of damages; OJ would be collaterally estopped from re-contesting the factual question of whether he killed his wife. This is because the standard of proof for criminal conviction is so much higher than that for civil matters – if he killed his wife beyond a reasonable doubt, then he certainly killed her by a preponderance of the evidence.
However, OJ cannot use his acquittal as collateral estoppel on that same factual question for precisely the same standard of proof disparity. It’s entirely possible that the criminal jury thought him more likely guilty than not guilty (e.g., the preponderance standard), but had enough lingering doubts that they could not convict on the reasonable doubt standard. Thus, the acquittal cannot definitivley answer the question “is it more likely than not that OJ killed his wife,” and thus cannot be used in the civil trial.
clairobscur: again, thank you for your kind explanation and correction of my errors. You’re right that I’ve probably been influenced by reading a lot of older literature. I assumed, given the context, that what was said was a common kind of argot. I was wrong. It does make me wonder, then, why the girls were so angry. OTHO as I remember as a kid, you are not insulted by the word per se but mainly by the way it is used. A lot of insults are not insulting purely in the semantics, but in the societal perception.
With respect to the legal point, Dewey has explained most of it from the U.S. law point of view. With respect to Dutch law, mostly the civil case will be started but will wait for the criminal case to be finished or at least have reached an interim verdict. If the facts in the criminal case have been proven, the judge in the civil case has to take that as a certainty. The thing why I was surprised to see this case as a criminal case is that it is clearly not something to start criminal proceeding about (in fact, over here it probably would not even have started), but you can have a legit case for trying to increase the civil liability of a principal of a school on the basis of what kind of security measures he should have taken. Criminal responsibility has different standards than civil liability.
All in all, I’ve learned much more of this thread than I expected when I opened it.
Still smarting Milly my dear? You want to engage in your childish little sniping, well you almost amuse me Milly, almost. Very well, I had forgotten but away we go.
I lived and worked in Paris for a few years, and while I always found the word “nègre” to be pejorative, I also on occasion found “Noir” to be as well.
It seemed to me that (as I said above), certain people found it to be offensive, while others did not. This included blacks and whites alike (though I should add that most people who took offense were in fact white).
So I wonder, have you any insight into this rather trivial cultural/linguistic discrepancy? (And further, why is it that in English we capitalize “Negro” and not “black,” while in French it is the opposite?)
It’s possible to use any word pejoratively. Take any term - German, Chinese, homosexual - and just say it with more than one tone of voice.
I have even heard nigger used non-pejoratively by an Arab whose English - and in particular sense of usage - wasn’t that good. He asked quite innocently of someone “he is a nigger?”
I laughed and said, yes, he’s black, but that’s really not the appropriate term to use.
If someone find “black” to be offensive, I’m not sure what word could be used instead, since we don’t have the equivalent of the PC “african-american”…
However, the words “africains” (black people in france being most often recent immigrants or children of immigrants) and “antillais” (refering to people from the french indies, who are of mixed ancestry hence usually don’t look like africans) are quite commonly used too.
Also, a lot of young people now tend to use “black” (yes…the english word) instead of “noir”.
I believe will have to agree to disagree. I stand by my “innocent until proven guilty”. Whatever the jurees could have thought, if they didn’t find you guilty, you are (or at least should be) considered innocent for all ends and purposes. At least from the point of view of the state apparatus (including the courts) if not by random individuals, who, of course will believe whatever they want to…
