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The research is impressive in its scope, its ambition and its scale, but I would question how accurately it reveals how jurors think. For as intricate as the role play might be, in this experiment it is clear to all at the outset that nobody has in fact been raped, and therefore nobody finds their freedom at stake. The 'jurors' will therefore have been in a crucially different state of mind than their real-world counterparts. Simply put, they bear no real burden of responsibility.

I have heard anecdotally from jurors who have told me that they have put aside ingrained myth beliefs (in one case a white juror in a predominantly white jury in a case where the defendant was a young black man arrested with two mobile phones and a bag of pills, later charged with intent to supply) resulting in a unanimous acquittal. The myth beliefs were set aside because, and only because, the alleged crime and the defendant were both real. The consequences of the jury's work was also therefore real.

I would also be interested to learn the precise nature of the rape myths being considered here. The only example cited is that of a woman who invites a man home for a cup of coffee after a night out not meaning that she wants to have sex with him. While I would agree entirely that an invitation for coffee is emphatically not the provision of consent to sex and can never be accepted as being so, should we not be honest enough to recognise that asking somebody back for a coffee is in fact a euphemism for sex that is well known and well used by many men and women, and has been for decades?

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