Reply #223: I don't think she should be punished...

[jberryhill]

...she does not seem entirely mentally stable.

She was also not "automatically" discredited.

It's just really tough for a violent crime to happen in a house with 40-odd people in it, all of whom are accused of guilt, and not have one of them come forward with the "truth" of who did it in order to save his own hide.

You can bet that each of them who consulted an attorney, had that attorney say, "Look, if you didn't do it, then you should identify who did." Because that is precisely what an attorney would have told each and every one of them. That was just one of a steady stream of "huh?" observations about this case.

A typical case involves whether there was, or was not, consent. A lot of the time, the fact of physical contact is not disputed, which is why, as was repeatedly said in this case "most cases do not involved DNA evidence". That's because DNA evidence is irrelevant to whether there was consent. When you have a he-said/she-said situation like that, then yes, people are going to take one side or the other, and I can see where that is intimidating and/or involves poor assessments of credibility.

But here, there was a denial of any physical contact, and the evidence bore that out. There was no "there" there.