Never Censored

From zee article:

The Legislature took on a somber tone Wednesday as lawmakers honored the family of a man who died in prison, only to have DNA testing show years later that he did not commit the rape he was convicted of. Tim Cole and his relatives for years claimed he was innocent in the rape of a Texas Tech University student in 1985. But until DNA from the crime scene was tested last year, no one else believed them.

Rape sucks, but one person's word against another should be avoided at all costs. Two reasons:

1. The accuser's word always outweighs the defendant's by default. See also: Duke lacrosse thing. Despite multiple people and substantial evidence to contrary, people still sided with the accuser by default.

2. The human mind is more likely to make mistakes in picking out the actual rapist out of fear of not picking one at all. It's kind of like how when a kid shoots up a school, the everyone frantically searches for a causal reason or something to blame-- even if it's incorrect, because not having a "root cause" is considerably scarier for everyone than blaming an arbitrary thing. I think the same thing frequently happens in rape: out of fear of not finding the attacker, the mind is more okay with finding the wrong one than finding none at all.

Think about it: if you're a rape victim, you really want to find the bastard and make him pay. The problem is that walking away empty-handed is, to make an understatement, less appealing than finding the guy that really did it. I mean, who wants to look over one's shoulder every night worried that "he's still out there?" As a result, I'd argue that it's more likely for a victim to make an honest mistake during a line-up by merely picking someone who looks close enough for their brain to be certain (for its own sake) that that's the person— even though it's not. Combined with the overall unreliability of eyewitness testimony, as a whole, and I'm sure this poor guy isn't the only one to have been wrongly convicted.

That said, it probably would have helped not to have been black in Lubbock, Texas in 1985. :P