The innocence project is awesome! The only reason that a lot of people who are exonerated are POC is because of the systemic racism in the judicial system and society as a whole.
The majority of false accusations and convictions for rape certainly trend along racial lines, just like false accusations and convictions for murder. That is a racial problem, which only exists because of the inherent racism in the judicial system that goes right along with the sexism that dismisses claims of rape when reported or when they have enough evidence to go to trial but the prosecutor declines because they know getting a jury to convict is hard when so many people blame women for being victims of rape.
Thank you for providing real examples of people whose lives were inconvenienced due to false accusations. It is important to keep in mind that false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations, but most accusations are ignored and are never investigated or acted upon by being painted as false. That is what ‘believe women’ is about, not dismissing out of hand and instead actually looking into it.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 4 days ago
“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.
The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.
In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Do you get this worked up about false accusations of other crimes, or just when women report rape?
People only seem to come out of the woodwork to pine about how commonly false rape accusations are ruining lives.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.