Guilty until proven innocent - update

Just been looking at some of the feedback to my earlier post.

Yorkshire Lass In London has put in a much better post about this which you can view if you go here. Mine was just one of my usual rage-filled rants but this is much more objective and has some really good feedback as well - not that the feedback I received wasn't good, far from it.

I was going to talk about a bad police experience that I had when I was 19 but on reflection it seemed a bit too much of a 'me, me, me' rant.

So instead I'll talk about this. It seems that if you're under 18 you can be protected from having accusations made public about you. Why stop at adulthood? In our legal system you are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty but if the accused can be named whilst the 'victim' can be kept anonymous and free to make as many wild accusations as they like, then they are blatently being judged outside of court.

From what little I know about the Damilola case there doesn't seem to be anything conclusive saying that he didn't just slip in the torrential rain and fall onto a broken bottle.

He could have died in a tragic accident but when a child dies it would seem that there has to be a monster out there somewhere.

It's the same sort of thing with cot death. There is often no medical evidence that can explain how a baby died suddenly but naturally the authorities pursue the carers regardless. Whatever happened to 'Beyond reasonable doubt'? All those women that were wrongly convicted shouldn't have had to prove that they didn't kill their children as there was no medical evidence that suggested that they did. As a result our legal system says they were all innocent as you cannot prove guilt.

In a nutshell, we often have to prove that we didn't do something despite our legal system dictating that it should be for the prosecution to prove that we did.

I don't blame jurys for this as they don't know any better, how could they? The judge should offer better instruction to them throughout the trial and before they leave to deliberate their verdict. The judge should also emphasise that it is only the evidence submitted in the court room that counts towards the verdict, not anything they get from the media or elsewhere and that it is for the jury to determine whether this evidence is in fact proof of guilt.

Do I have an overly simplified view of our legal system? If so do let me know...