Field Notes

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Evidence patterns in rape and unlawful-threat cases

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Christian Dahlman and Andreas Korths-Aspegren compared Swedish judgments in rape and unlawful-threat cases where the prosecution relied on a complainant account plus testimony about the complainant’s later statements or emotional state. The local PDF preserves the 2018 Svensk Juristtidning article.

In the selected material, that pattern was followed by conviction in 90 percent of the rape cases and 18 percent of the unlawful-threat cases. The authors treated the discrepancy as difficult to justify and considered a lower operative threshold in rape cases as one possible explanation.

In later Svensk Juristtidning exchanges, Linnea Wegerstad challenged the sampling, the comparability of the selected situations, and the causal interpretation, arguing that a bivariate comparison cannot rule out confounding. Dahlman defended the statistical robustness of the descriptive gap, including with disputed boundary cases excluded; statistical significance answers the chance objection, not the confounding one. The exchange was polemical in both directions. The finding is therefore a contested signal of offence-specific evaluation, not proof that Swedish courts generally lower the formal proof standard.

It is used cautiously in Rättssäkerhet in Swedish criminal cases.

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