SWNS The students accused of raping a woman at a Royal Agricultural University have all been acquitted

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The names of Thady Duff, Leo Mahon, Patrick Foster and James Martin will forever be associated with a crime of appalling cruelty and depravity. Indeed a crime so awful in nature that even the merest hint of suspicion is enough to tarnish an innocent man’s name for life. For rape is a special case. The normal rules of justice do not apply and in the court of public opinion the doctrine of “no smoke without fire” is far more potent than the principle of “innocent until proved guilty”. If our legal system cared about the rights of those wrongly accused, it would keep the identity of rape suspects secret until they are convicted. Even a blanket ban on revealing a suspect’s identity until they are formally charged would have saved Ben Sullivan from premature judgment. He was the president of the Oxford Union arrested on suspicion of rape and attempted rape in 2014. I knew him fairly well when I was at university and it is a mark of how widely the allegations against him spread that although I had long since graduated I was repeatedly asked if they were credible. For the record it is my opinion that he is not the sort of person to commit such a crime.

SWNS Charges of rape and assault by penetration for Mahon (L) and Martin (R) have been dropped

After being arrested in his rooms at Christ Church college at the crack of dawn and following six weeks of investigation, he was cleared of all allegations. But – and remember, he never even came close to a courtroom – the damage had been done. His face appeared on the front page of newspapers and on television news programmes. An outraged mob of Oxford students demanded his resignation. When he refused, they took to social media, started online petitions and protested outside the union buildings. A number of high-profile speakers caved in to the pressure and declined to appear while he remained president. When one student newspaper released clear evidence of his innocence – messages were unearthed in which one of his accusers told him he had done nothing wrong – it cost the editor of the publication her post as she was denounced for “victim blaming”. This despite the fact that legally there was no victim. Observing the hounding of this innocent man it became clear that it is impossible for anybody, once named, ever to be truly acquitted of rape. Ben’s may have been an extreme example of a suspect being presumed guilty but anybody falsely accused, no matter how spurious the evidence, will be subjected to the sly rumours, whispered asides and furtive glances. There will always be a surprising number of people willing to believe that they are really guilty but managed to get away with it. In the internet age such rumours and allegations never go away, they live on in cyberspace to be found with ease by prospective employers, future partners and anybody else who cares to look them up. On social media they are subjected to vitriolic abuse by trolls.

SWNS Thady (L) still faces one charge of possessing extreme pornography but Patrick (R) has been cleared

Keeping the names of rape suspects a secret is not a new idea. In 1976 the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act granted anonymity to both the complainant and defendant. That remained the law until 1988 when the Criminal Law Revision Committee decided that those accused of rape did not merit special treatment. It is surely obvious now, nearly three decades later, that this was the wrong decision. And the ramifications have been exacerbated by the recent poor conduct of police and prosecutors. While every complainant must have their allegations taken seriously – something that has not always been the case – detectives too often seem to think they have an obligation to prove the supposed victim’s story. While nobody wants to see victims refusing to come forward for fear of not being believed, it remains the duty of the police to find the truth, not to blindly support what is told to them by complainants. They have also been guilty of keeping those accused on bail for far longer than necessary. The four students finally cleared this week were not charged by police for 13 months yet it was only on the day that their trial was due to begin that new evidence came to light and led to the prosecution dropping its case.

SWNS The alleged assualt took place at a summer ball at Britain's most elite agricultural college