The whole process would be a lot simpler if we could only put people in prison based on someone concluding based on a three-page internet article that &quot;it&#x27;s clear [the defendant] was acting improperly and abusing his position of power.&quot;<p>One of the paradoxical consequences of the Internet age is that people are so exposed to written communication that they forget the inherently probabilistic nature of truth-finding.[1] &quot;Instead, Sanchez drove Lindsay down a dirt road into the pitch-black desert, where he raped her as she cried.&quot; Easy to state with clarity and certainty in a newspaper article--very difficult to establish with clarity and certainty in real life with conflicting personal accounts.[2]<p>Litigation is like asking two people who just went through an acrimonious break-up &quot;whose fault was it?&quot; There is never the kind of clear answer you can put into a long-form article that rings of clarity and definiteness with every punctuation mark. There is only ugly, fuzzy, confusing probabilistic truth.<p>[1] I imagine this certainty that narrative == objective truth was less common before mass-market narrative, when people had to learn about events through word of mouth.<p>[2] In this case that narrative was <i>probably</i> true. But that&#x27;s all you can conclude from the jury verdict.