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Last week York University PhD candidate Mustafa Ururyar was convicted of sexually assaulting grad student Mandi Gray. My curiosity piqued by reports of comments made during trial by Justice Marvin Zuker, I read the 179-page judgment.

The specifics of the incident — an evening of social drinking, a quarrel en route to Ururyar’s home, his break-up of their two-week casual “relationship,” followed by sex he says was consensual, she says wasn’t — can be found in the transcript. There were no witnesses and no injuries. This left us with a he-said, she-said story in a judge-alone trial.

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In the end, Zuker found that Gray was “the credible witness” and there was “no uncertainty in this court. Ms Gray was raped by the accused.” In Zuker’s opinion, then, the defence failed to raise a “reasonable doubt,” which in criminal law, as he notes, “is not a far-fetched or frivolous doubt. It is not a doubt based on sympathy or prejudice. It is a doubt based on reason and common sense. It is a doubt that logically arises from the evidence, or the lack of evidence.”