AUSTRALIA
SBS
Source: AAP
25 MAY 2016
Judges in child sex abuse trials could be making wrong assumptions about how prejudiced juries are, a new report has found.
Results from the largest ever study of how juries behave in abuse trials were launched on Wednesday in Sydney.
The findings reveal jurors don’t always engage in prejudicial reasoning in child sex abuse trials where there are multiple complainants, or where there’s evidence of a defendant’s “bad character”.
Current laws are based on judges’ assumptions that special care needs to be taken in child sex abuse cases to ensure a defendant gets a fair trial.
This means joint trials – where an alleged pedophile has to defend against a number of complainants – or evidence of a defendant’s bad character are sometimes not allowed.
At the launch of the study – Jury Reasoning in Joint and Separate Trials of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse: An Empirical Study – abuse royal commission chair Peter McClellan said such judicial assumptions have been largely untested.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.