Is it about justice at all when the rules of evidence get changed to say 'no evidence is needed' ???
-Carol Haynes
Aargh. That's not what was said at all. The only one in the whole story who said "no evidence" was the stupid reporter who was trying to be sensational.
What they were saying was that the amount of circumstantial evidence they'd gathered ought to be sufficient. I agree to an extent: if the defendant can't say "actually, these circumstances aren't because I was doing X; I was really doing Y", then it the circumstances
might be sufficiently damning.
Take as an example - I think you have slandered me and I get a lawyer to take you to court to claim damages. How would you defend yourself if the judge says I win my case unless you can prove that you have never said anything bad about me ?-Carol Haynes
Slander laws work counterintuitively, and are a bad example.
The burden of proof is on the party bringing suit: in a criminal trial that's the State; in a civil case such as slander, it's the plaintiff. In your hypothetical slander case, when you claim "Chris said that I wear army boots!", you must prove that my claim is false -- that you do not wear army boots. So here you must prove a negative, which is logically difficult, and this is why we don't see very many such cases.
BTW, Do you wear army boots?
If he decides that a list alone is valid proof, then a list is no longer circumstantial evidence. It will be considered valid proof of distribution. -app103
Aargh yet again.
I think that we're better off sticking to technical discussions, because it's clear that the understanding of law here is simple, and we're not all familiar with concepts like an affirmative defense (
http://en.wikipedia..../Affirmative_defense).
It may be that the circumstantial evidence would be sufficient to convict (note that I say circumstantial, not "an absence of any evidence", contra Carol). Even so, it may be that an explanation of the circumstances (e.g., my ISP cuts off P2P traffic anyway, so I couldn't be sharing) constitutes a valid affirmative defense, so the defendant is found innocent anyway.
This whole argument is really the result of shoddy reporting. The so-called journalist (or his editor) made incorrect, sensationalist claims in the headline. This get everyone riled up, and since the article doesn't say anything about what the law says is a valid defense, we really don't know anything more than we did before reading the crappy article.
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