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contestgamer on 10 September 2017
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Ka-pi96 said:
contestgamer said:

Yeah that sucks. But being the victim of crime is worse than being falsely accused. So we recalibrate the justice system to show empathy foremost to potential victims of crime and second to potential criminals of crime. If you're falsely accused you need to prove it, and if you prove it the false accusor will receive serious consequences. It's the same as the current system, we're just moving the burder off crime victims and shifting them on to (mostly) criminals.

Being falsely accused is being a victim of crime though.

And how exactly do you prove your innocence? For example when I (jokingly) accused you of stealing a watch, how would you prove you didn't? There's only 3 ways I can think of to do that. Prove that nothing was stolen in the first place or that it was someone else that stole it. But why on earth should you do either of those things? The police are the ones getting paid to investigate that kind of stuff, it shouldn't be up to you to do it (not as if you could from a jail cell anyways). And the 3rd way? Constantly recording everything you do to prove that you didn't do anything illegal. Why should people have to do that?

Not to mention that your way would hurt minority groups the hardest too. How many times do you think muslims are accused of being terrorists without proof? How do they prove they're not? And why should they have to constantly prove they're not terrorists just because they're muslim?


You make valid points and no system is perfect. I think you could protect against the type of abuse you mentioned in the following way: in the case of majority accusers (along race or gender - so in the US that would be white and male, male being a numerical minority but a majority in terms of influence and power) we maintain the existing justice system that requires the burden of proof to be placed on the accuser. For minority accusers we would have the alternative system that shifts the burden of proof on to the accused. I realize that right wing heads will explode, but this kind of system would lead to the least amount of abuse and would result, in comparison to our existing justice system, to justice that represents fairness most closely.