I agree with most of what other posters have said, though I know of nobody who has looked upon the verdict with glee; quite the opposite. And whatever the male equivalent of a slut is, Ched Evans was it. He and all the parties involved behaved in a manner which rightly disgusts all normal decent people. However, he was not being tried for being a stupid badly-behaved character with low morals. He was being tried for rape.
In rape trials, defence lawyers are banned from cross-examining an alleged victim about their sexual behaviour or history to ‘protect them from humiliating treatment’. Leaving aside the fact that the inability to cross-examine an accuser can prevent a fair trial, there can be exceptional reasons to ditch that rule in the interests of a fair trial.
The Court of Appeal said the Evans case was one of those very rare exceptions. It said that two other men who had sex with the woman had described their encounters with her in highly specific terms that were virtually indistinguishable from Mr Evans's own account of what had happened. One of the encounters occurred days before the alleged rape - and the other in the days that followed. On each occasion the woman had been drinking heavily and the sex occurred in a very specific way - including the words she used to encourage her partner. Each time she woke up saying she had no memory of what had happened.
Lady Justice Hallett, one of the country's top judges, said that these events were so similar to what Mr Evans had described that a jury had to hear about them before deciding whether the woman had been incapable of giving her consent. It was this specific question of consent that Mr Evans' trial was centred around. He insisted the woman had been in a state to consent. She said she could not even remember meeting him that night. It was this point on which the trial hinged.
The jury, including seven women, heard all the evidence in detail for two weeks and then found him not guilty in less than three hours, including a break for lunch. The evidence was undeniable, and the correct verdict was reached.
All this isn’t good enough for the social justice lynch mob fanatics. To them, Evans is still a guilty rapist, and the verdict doesn’t mean he is innocent. They conveniently forget that the reverse could also be true: that the guilty verdict didn’t necessarily mean he was guilty. Worse than that, when he was wrongly found guilty in the first trial, after enduring a prison sentence he should not have served, they wanted to impose punishment beyond that required by the law.
Those people who felt strongly that he should not, for example, be employed again as a footballer (remember Oldham) are confusing the question of practice with the appropriate provisions of a criminal sanction. The court does not impose unemployment as a punishment. Part of a law-based society is that you respect the decision of the law rather than fall back on informal justice imposed and handed out by, shall we say, members of the community who feel strongly about certain matters.
But even worse than that, after the trial Supt Jo Williams of North Wales Police said: “We are aware that once again the victim has been named on social media. We would remind people that it is a criminal offence under Section 5 of the Sexual Offences Amendments Act to do so, and that the victim has the right to life long anonymity. An investigation is ongoing into the naming."
But the court has determined that a sexual offence did not take place. So why is Supt Williams referring to a 'victim'? If no offence took place, how can there be a victim? Is Supt Willliams' unfortunate choice of words indicative of the (literal) prejudice of the police, who it seems pushed the woman to make accusations she did not want to make?
It’s true that a false rape accusation need not be malicious: a woman can be persuaded to genuinely believe she was raped even when nothing of the sort happened at all. But this young woman did not accuse Evans of rape. Why? Perhaps because she genuinely could not remember, just as she claimed to remember nothing of her other sexual encounters? Or because she knew he never raped her?
It was the police and the CPS, following a feminist-driven politically correct agenda to increase the number of rape convictions, who charged him, and she went along with it. That is tantamount to falsely accusing him herself, as a result of which, a man has spent two years in prison and lost a lucrative career. One hopes she will reflect on this, but as a member of generation snowflake all she is doing is whining at the behaviour of the Internet users who have found her out. I strongly disapprove of such behaviour (and it came from the social justice fanatics - again, remember Oldham - as well as from Ched Evans supporters), but it must be pointed out that the law of which Supt. Williams speaks is there to protect genuine victims, not false accusers.
For those who want further reading and background information, I recommend the following:
This says it better than I can:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... y-sin.html
Oldham:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/30727729
On the CPS:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... RRINS.html
And this:
http://herbertpurdy.com/?p=2295
On CPS statistics:
http://mra-uk.co.uk/?p=551
The CPS again... and again...
https://j4mb.wordpress.com/?s=CPS
The Mark Pearson case:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... claim.html
On Ched Evans (from November 2014):
http://mra-uk.co.uk/?p=183
On the different penalties for male and female offenders:
http://mra-uk.co.uk/?p=667
Safety Wardens:
https://j4mb.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/s ... ens-contd/
Wrongly accused:
http://www.cotwa.info/
Not unusual:
https://j4mb.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/a ... ce-system/