Who spoke these words?

We chose to set up our system to be stacked in favor of the defendant in all cases, so, in areas where most of the defendants are male, and most of the accusers are female, it’s a structural bias in favor of males. Even if we were to get rid of sexism, it would still be very hard to win these cases. I think this is what we have to live with on the criminal side, because we’ve made the calculation that this is the right balance of values.

Jeff Sessions? Catherine Lhamon? Catherine McKinnon? Nope. The words were uttered by Harvard Lawprof Jeannie Suk Gerson, and appear in an article in the Television section by “gender issues” editor Susan Chira.

Good to know that the system is stacked in favor of the defendant in all cases, which explains the 97% win rate. Except it’s in favor of the prosecution. Either whoever did the stacking really blew it, or this is as stupid as it gets. Guess which one it is?

Because there are often no witnesses in such cases, jurors may have to decide whether a crime was, in fact, committed. Since defense lawyers will always try to attack the credibility of the accuser, and since inconsistencies in memory are common, Professor Gersen said it was often easy to convince at least one juror that there is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

See? It’s often easy. That’s why the prosecution almost never wins at trial. Except it almost always does. But as long as the article, and the “legal experts” upon whom this hysterical ninny relies, pretends that defendants are getting away with murder, then what must be done to fix the non-existent problem?

Professor Schneider proposed some possible remedies. When jurors are questioned during voir dire, and when judges give their instructions to the jury members before they deliberate, jurors could be educated about how rape and sexual assault victims often behave; the vagaries of memory that Mr. Hopper described; and the fact that it’s not unusual for a woman to continue contact with someone who assaulted her, particularly when the man could influence her career.

In the Cosby case, Professor Schneider said, the judge could have allowed testimony from more of the dozens of women who came forward, some after decades of silence, to accuse Mr. Cosby of drugging and assaulting them. (The judge in the Cosby trial allowed one other woman to testify.) While judges need to be vigilant about not trying defendants for crimes other than those at issue in a particular case, such strikingly similar accusations and circumstances could be relevant and therefore could be heard by a jury, she said.

Instruct the jurors on female excuses, so that good testimony proves they’re telling the truth, and bad testimony also proves they’re telling the truth. But then smear the defendant with propensity evidence, but “be vigilant”? How exactly does that work?  And still, that’s not enough to absolutely guarantee conviction.

The question is how to balance the presumption of innocence with justice for women who have been assaulted. Professor Gersen said she understood the limitations of civil remedies: A woman might not get meaningful compensation if her attacker did not have money, or juries might presume that accusers were motivated by financial gain. “There is no happy solution here,” she said.

After reading Suk’s New Yorker post, I found myself in a quandary. Jeannie Suk Gerson had written some decent posts, castigating the oversensitivity of women on campus, and I was reluctant to take this one outlier, dubiously entitled “The Legal Meaning of the Cosby Mistrial,” and rip it to shreds. But it was one godawful post.

But the legal meaning of the Cosby mistrial is both less and more than that. Standards that enable criminal conviction and punishment for a specific act differ markedly from the ones that lead to personal beliefs that someone must be guilty of wrongdoing. In the midst of fifty-two hours of deliberation, the jury requested clarification of what proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” meant. The judge explained that a reasonable doubt is a real doubt that causes a juror to hesitate. In other words, if a juror were mostly or nearly convinced that a defendant was guilty, but still had some doubts that seem reasonable, the appropriate vote would be for acquittal. Apparently, some of the jurors did have such doubts, while others did not.

While her recharacterizing, reducing and dumbing down the “beyond a reasonable doubt” charge is, well, absurd, the last sentence makes her bias palpable. Neither she, nor you, nor I, have the slightest clue why the jury hung. Maybe it was 11-1 for acquittal. Maybe for conviction. Maybe because of reasonable doubt, or maybe for some more concrete reason. Jeannie wasn’t in the jury room, so how does a Harvard lawprof write a post as if she knows? It’s not just nuts, but dangerously disingenuous.

But Jeannie Suk’s bias isn’t done yet:

Hard as it is to stomach today, embracing that calculus means that we should even want ten rapists (not to mention terrorists and murderers) to go free in order to protect the one falsely accused. Unfortunately, Cosby is one of those to escape criminal punishment. And, to put a fine point on the over-all gendered impact of requiring proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the inevitable effect of the heavy tilt toward defendants is that in sexual-assault trials, which involve mostly male defendants and mostly female accusers, men are favored over women.

The jury hung, but Suk convicts.

This structural bias in favor of criminal defendants does not create anything like an even playing field between accused and accuser—and it is not supposed to do so. But when the testimony of a female complaining witness is the centerpiece of a sexual-assault trial, as was true of the calm testimony of Constand at Cosby’s trial, we fear a repeat of our sexist legal history of putting the victim on trial, of pointing to her sexual past or reputation, to insinuate her dishonesty.

The victim isn’t on trial. The accuser is. A Harvard lawprof must know this, so for her to describe the defendant exercising his Sixth Amendment right to defend as “our sexist legal history of putting the victim on trial” can’t be seen as anything other than an intentional lie.

Add this flagrant falsehood to the legal ignorance of a New York Times “gender issues” reporter and what do you get?

“Yes, lying happens,” [Laura Beth Nielsen] said. “But the presumption is that she is always lying. But why do we think people would lie to be in the position this woman is in right now?”

The presumption is that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty. The standard of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt. If the proof comes from the testimony of the accuser, then it is subject to the crucible of cross-examination. This is the basis upon which all criminal cases are tried, and result overwhelmingly in conviction, and it’s no different when the accuser has a vagina.

Why? Because Nikki Yovino didn’t want the guy she was hot for to know that she did a couple of Sacred Heart football players. Because Manos Ikonomidis was murdered because an unnamed woman didn’t want her boyfriend to know she had a threesome. Because rape, especially now when it’s been reduced to a meaningless word, is the easiest excuse for women who don’t want to take responsibility for their conduct. Plus, they can enjoy the vast benefits of victimhood and be adored by their friends and allies for their faux-trauma.

Chira closes with a quote from Cathy Young, which was likely part of a much deeper dispute with Suk’s premise that the unconvicted Cosby was definitely guilty and the jury hung only because the deck is so utterly stacked in favor of the defendant.

“To send a message that it’s completely hopeless,” she said, “that you’re not going to get justice if you go to the police, that’s doing a disservice to women.”

There you go, balance from the New York Times and Susan Chira. May God have mercy on her soul.