I said something terrible had happened and that I needed to call my mum. It was an insult to the trauma I had been through.”. My worry is that it’s about jury attitudes, and the interplay between jury attitudes and the availability of the not-proven verdict. The defence counsel built up a picture, one where I had drunk too much and it was my fault I was raped.”. The nights immediately after I was raped were lonely, but this was nothing I felt in comparison to the isolation I felt when my case was over – at the very point everyone else expected me to be OK. “They thought I could press play again on my life, that I’d continue where I’d left off, but I was no longer the same person whose life had been put on pause. When the police and the fiscal fully explained the meaning of not proven, we were shocked and disappointed, and extremely angry, to discover it was a full acquittal. You are acquitted, you can’t be tried again, though there’s obviously exceptions to double jeopardy – people can be tried again if there’s new evidence, for example – but those exceptions apply in exactly the same way whether the first verdict was not guilty or not proven. The other says "inconclusive evidence" and fails to exonerate or even stigmatizes. She said: “Months went by before I realised there was nothing I could do to change what happened, but perhaps I could stop him doing it to someone else.”, “This was the point when I felt my hope, and belief in a process I relied on so heavily, began to fade. © Dods Group PLCdocument.write(" "+new Date().getFullYear()); In context: Freedom of information reform, The European Union and Public Affairs Directory, Sketch: If the Queen won’t do it, it’ll just have to be Matt Hancock, Chief Nursing Officer for England's Summit. I suffered an injury to my tongue during the rape which required surgery, but my surgeon wasn’t cited to give evidence. The problem is the interpretation put on it by some. A verdict of guilty in a criminal case is generally followed by a judgment of conviction rendered by judge, which in turn be followed by sentencing. Double jeopardy attaches to not proven verdict in Scotland. : Evans, Colin, 1948- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Not_proven&oldid=1015304989, Articles containing Scottish Gaelic-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from January 2012, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. that on average it might be factually more complicated to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the more severe cases. [14], Proponents of reform argue that the "not proven" verdict is widely regarded as an acquittal used when the judge or jury does not have enough evidence to convict but is not sufficiently convinced of the accused person's innocence to bring in a "not guilty" verdict. The consensus appears to be that the not proven verdict is available where there is insufficient evidence to convict but suspicion still attaches to the accused. I remember sitting on my own in a room in Livingston High Court in tears as the jury were addressed. She hadn’t been told to expect the decision that day and she was out for a walk when she answered. This might have many different reasons, e.g. But some want to use it to keep us permanently divided. I’d waited two years for this and there I was, completely powerless.”. One reason for this is the rule that in such cases the evidence for the prosecution must be corroborated in order to permit a conviction. 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