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Beyond (a) reasonable doubt is a legal standard of proof required to validate a criminal conviction in most adversarial legal systems. [1] It is a higher standard of proof than the standard of balance of probabilities (US English: preponderance of the evidence) commonly used in civil cases because the stakes are much higher in a criminal case: a person found guilty can be deprived of liberty ...
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution requires enough evidence to justify a rational trier of fact to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If the judge rules that such burden has been met, then it is up to the jury itself to decide if they are, in fact, convinced of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. [57]
Whereas it can be understood as an equivalent to "beyond reasonable doubt", in another sense, moral certainty refers to a firm conviction which does not correlate but rather opposes evidentiary certainty: [5] i.e. one may have a firm subjective gut feeling of guilt – a feeling of moral certainty – without the evidence necessarily justifying ...
If reasonable doubt remains, the accused must be acquitted. The opposite system is a presumption of guilt . In many countries and under many legal systems, including common law and civil law systems (not to be confused with the other kind of civil law , which deals with non-criminal legal issues), the presumption of innocence is a legal right ...
In a legal dispute, one party is initially presumed to be correct and gets the benefit of the doubt, while the other side bears the burden of proof. When a party bearing the burden of proof meets their burden, the burden of proof switches to the other side. Burdens may be of different kinds for each party, in different phases of litigation.
The burden of proof then falls on the prosecution to produce evidence to support their position. In such a case, a legal burden will always rest on the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant was not acting in self-defence. A legal burden is determined by substantive law, rests upon one party and never shifts. [5]
Blackstone's principle influenced the nineteenth-century development of "beyond a reasonable doubt" as the burden of proof in criminal law. [22] Many commentators suggest that Blackstone's ratio determines the confidence interval of the burden of proof; for example Jack B. Weinstein wrote: [23]
Reasonable doubt is described as the highest standard of proof used in court and means that a juror can find the defendant guilty of the crime to a moral certainty. Even when circumstantial evidence is not sufficient to convict or acquit, it can contribute to other decisions made about the case.